JOB'S COMFORTERS

“You are worthless physicians, all of you!” (13:4)

Job called them “worthless physicians.” Today we call such people “Job’s comforters”—a scathing little phrase which by dint of its sheer utility has found a ready niche in our vocabulary. Job’s comforters are those who think that the way to minister to others in need is by straightening them out. Job’s comforters may be full of boundless reserves of patience and sincerity and hard work and cheerfulness and self-sacrifice, and over all of these virtues they may put on something they take great relish in thinking of as “love.” Yet somehow the result of all their effort, for those unfortunate enough to be on the receiving end, is that a bad situation is made worse. Job’s comforters succeed only in twisting the knife in the wound, and if you try to tell them that this is what they are doing to you, they will tactfully remind you that you are the one with the problem.

Job’s unmitigated scorn for his friends’ virtuous posturing is nowhere more evident than in this chapter. Much more on the offense than the defense here, he openly denounces his friends as liars (v. 4), blabbermouths (v. 5), heretics (v. 7), and hypocrites (v. 9). These men are representatives of all the twisted and damaging “ministry” that is carried on in the name of the Lord, yet apart from love, apart from the Holy Spirit. Their basic problem, Job suggests, is that they have no real fear of God (v. 11), no overwhelming sense of the majesty of His reality, and so their theology is reduced to “proverbs of ashes” (v. 12). Three chapters later Job is still blasting them: “Miserable comforters are you all! Will your long-winded speeches never end?” (16:2-3). It would be easy to see Job as needlessly fanning the flames when he taunts, “Come on, all of you, try again! I will not find a wise man among you” (17:10). Yet in passages like these it is not so much that Job is being deliberately inflammatory, as that he is challenging his friends to bare their true souls and to speak their minds as plainly as he is doing. This takes tremendous courage, and it also demonstrates yet another aspect of Job’s faith: his faith in people. If Job eggs people on, it is ultimately because he trusts the quality of the human soul and the resilience of relationships. He believes in people enough to probe and to test them—ironically, just as God is doing with him. As the Lord bets His own honor on Job’s faithfulness, so Job is not afraid to put the quality of his human friendships on the line. If his friends fail their test, it is the sort of failure that eventually opens the way for healing and reconciliation, and so Job’s trust proves well-founded in the end.

The bravery of such a stance is not to be underestimated. What strength of character Job must have had—this sick, tortured, exhausted man—to keep sticking to his guns even when it meant alienating the only people who were in a position to comfort him, the ones whose presence (cold as it might have been) was nonetheless the only human companionship he had. How much easier it would have been for Job simply to have tagged along with his friends, nodding agreeably to everything they said, going to any lengths just to hang on to their friendship. Is this not precisely the strategy adopted by many sufferers? Suffering attracts sympathy, and it is only human nature to try to exploit and manipulate this sympathy, to milk the attention of others for all it is worth. But not so with Job. Far from using his suffering to evoke pity, he actually rejected pity in favor of probing the motives behind it. “Any port in a storm” was not his motto. The only port he sought was that of God, and his refusal to kowtow to the shallow counsel of his friends was in effect a refusal to have his storm calmed by anyone but the Lord.

Job was wise to the fact that sympathizers can be just as manipulative as the sufferers to whom they minister, attaching subtle but powerful strings to their proffers of help. In this case the strings were theological, for as long as Job’s theology failed to line up with that of his friends’, their hearts would remain fundamentally closed to him. How many Christians are like this, making soundness of doctrine their yardstick for measuring out mercy? Does our compassion suddenly run dry once others make it crystal-clear that they do not buy our brand of theology? Do we realize that if God had followed this policy in regard to the human race, there would be no gospel?


Mason, M. (2002). The Gospel According to Job: An Honest Look at Pain and Doubt from the Life of One Who Lost Everything. Crossway.