Reverend Jonathan Waits
How Not to Comfort the Hurting (Job 3-37)
June 8, 2025
Have you ever been sure you were right…until you learned you weren’t? Join me for a quick trip down memory lane, if you would. It’s a bright and sunny Saturday morning. And it’s already hot. The boys were all still little which meant they were still all getting up really, really early. They were all still getting up really early no matter what time they had gone to bed the night before…and this particular night before had been late. There wasn’t much else going on this particular day. Instead, it was one of those days when it had already felt like a long day by 9:30. In order to give everyone a much needed change of scenery, we decided to go to the local pool. But because we had something going on later in the day, combined with the fact that it was swelteringly hot, we decided to make it a fairly brief trip. What makes that significant here is that it meant we weren’t going to let the boys take nearly as many pool toys as we normally did…much to their significant and expressed disappointment.
As we were finally ready to start loading the car, I sent Noah to the garage to get the few toys we had told them they could take. No sooner had I given him this task, though, than he started to tell me something. Now, for a bit of context, I’ve never been terribly patient with kids arguing with me or talking back. In fact, that’s probably too generous of a description of how I handle those kinds of situations. At the first sign of what I perceive to be arguing, my instinct is to shut down the conversation. Firmly. Sometimes very firmly.
Well, on this particular morning, I was already tired which tends to make me even less patient than usual. As Noah started to say something to me rather than just going to do what I had asked him to do, I assumed the worst—namely, that he was arguing with me about it—and shut him down before he got much more than a word out. “Just go to the garage and get the stuff!” I finally hollered at him. I knew the stuff we needed was in the garage, and I just wasn’t interested in anything else he had to say on the matter, much less a request to bring some of the stuff that was locked in the back of the van we weren’t taking and about which he was clearly trying to tell me something.
Credit to his courage, Noah was not going to be deterred from his insistence on telling me something. He kept at it until I finally and exasperatedly snapped, “What?!?” “Dad, the stuff you want me to get is in the old van,” he finally got out. I stopped in my tracks. “It’s what?” I said. “It’s in the old van. That’s what I’ve been trying to tell you.” Still grumbling under my breath, I went and got the other set of keys, went to unlock the van, and, sure enough, there it was, right where he had only somewhat impatiently been trying to tell me it was the whole time. I had been absolutely certain I was right…until I learned I wasn’t.
Well, this morning, we are in the second part of our series, Grace in Hard Times. Over the course of this three-week journey, we are making a run through the book of Job to glean some of the wealth of wisdom there on how to respond to the hard times we encounter in this life. The fact is: we are surrounded by awful circumstances everywhere we go. There are natural disasters, acts of war, acts of violence, broken relationships, battles with disease, financial hardships, and so on and so forth. Evil is everywhere we look. Now, if we lived in a godless world without any real purpose for it beyond what we construct for ourselves, this wouldn’t be such a huge deal. It would be unfortunate, to be sure, but it wouldn’t be anything more than a symptom of how the world is; of how the world always will be until our sun explodes and the universe collapses back into a giant black hole. But the very fact that the presence of evil has been such a pernicious problem for so many throughout the whole history of humanity suggests rather powerfully that such is not the true state of the world.
As followers of Jesus, we believe in a God who is good, just, loving, and holy. Given how we just described the world to be, however, reconciling the existence of such a God with the state of the world as it is presents us with a big challenge, particularly at an emotional level. Now, we can certainly turn to Scripture for help in all this, and we can indeed find a great deal of help there. But one of the most helpful forms of help comes when we are given the freedom to be honest about our emotional struggles with the problem of evil even once we have mostly wrapped our minds around it at a philosophical level. Well, of all the places in the Scriptures that give us such freedom, one of the most poignant and powerful treatments comes in the story of a man named Job.
Last week as we started this conversation, we took a look at the beginning of Job’s story. Remember it? Job was living about as high up on the hog as you can get. He was rich, he had a great family, he was a great guy, he was godly man, he was good parent, and he was probably good-looking too if for no other reason than the fact that when you have that many things going for you everybody thinks you’re good-looking even if you aren’t much more than a pig with lipstick. Anyway, Job was living this idyllic life to its fullest when one day there was a gathering before God’s throne. We don’t really know anything about this gathering except that it appears to have been a regular thing, and that at this particular gathering, Satan was present. After revealing that he had been essentially kicking around lately, God offers him a little bait in the form of Job. God holds Job up as an example of His best and brightest. Satan immediately takes the bait and claims that Job is only such an incredible specimen of humanity because of how good God had been to him. Take away all the blessings—both material and physical—and he’ll fall away just like everybody else. God gives Satan license to do his worst short killing Job, and he goes right to work. Job ends up penniless and mourning the death of all ten of his children while scraping himself with a broken piece of pottery to bring some relief to the enormously painful sores covering his own body. In other words, Job experienced a flood of pretty much every kind of evil we can imagine that by all accounts was totally undeserved.
The question we then wrestled with was simple: What do we do with this? Well, there are lots of answers to that question, but the one the writer of Job leads us to consider is that we have to keep the bigger picture in mind. When hard times hit, don’t lose sight of the big picture. There’s more going on in this world than we can either see or understand on our own.
But while that works in a big-picture sort of way, can we just be honest? We still struggle with it. Knowing the truth doesn’t mean we don’t still run up against hard questions. This is particularly true if we are the ones facing the hard times. When we are in a place of suffering, even if we understand the whole big picture thing, our natural reaction is still to cry out to God from the depths of our misery. Why, God? Where are you, God? When will this end, God? Even if we are only watching from the outside, though, there is still a struggle because what do you say to someone in such a place? If it’s happening to them, it could happen to you too!
Thankfully, Job again offers us a great deal of help here. Starting in chapter 3 and running almost the entire rest of the story, we are treated to a conversation between Job and some of his friends in which they wrestle together with why this has happened and where God is in all of it. From this conversation, we see two things clearly: Job is really honest about his feelings and bold—uncomfortably bold—in expressing them to God; and his friends give us a really good lesson on how not to comfort the hurting. In the end, we learn something really important both about expressing ourselves from the midst of our anguish as well as how to talk to someone in such a place. If you have your copy of the Scriptures handy, join me once again in Job. We’ll get started right where we left off last time.
When Job’s friends hear about all that has happened to him, they come and do the best thing for him they can do: they sit quietly and give him the gift of presence. From Job 2:11: “Now when Job’s three friends—Eliphaz the Temanite, Bildad the Shuhite, and Zophar the Naamathite—heard about all this adversity that had happened to him, each of them came from his home. They met together to go and sympathize with him and comfort him. When they looked from a distance, they could barely recognize him. They wept aloud, and each man tore his robe and threw dust into the air and on his head. Then they sat on the ground with him seven days and nights, but no one spoke a word to him because they saw that his suffering was very intense.”
As far as ministering to the hurting goes, they are off on the right track. When we are hurting, sometimes the thing we need most is simply to know that we are not walking our particular road alone. Sometimes we just need someone to be with us and cry with us. This was the assurance Job’s friends gave him in this first week. They all sat in silence and cried together over the awful things that had happened to Job. They wisely waited for Job to speak before saying anything. And eventually, Job did speak. From the depths of his anguish, he began pouring out his heart to God. Look forward with me to Job 3.
“After this, Job began to speak and cursed the day he was born. He said [fun fact: this and not, “Jesus wept,” is the shortest verse in the Bible]: May the day I was born perish, and the night that said, ‘A boy is conceived.’ If only that day had turned to darkness! May God above not care about it, or light shine on it. May darkness and gloom reclaim it, and a cloud settle over it. May what darkens the day terrify it. If only darkness had taken that night away! May it not appear among the days of the year or be listed in the calendar. Yes, may that night be barren; may no joyful shout be heard in it. Let those who curse days condemn it, those who are ready to rouse Leviathan. May its morning stars grow dark. May it wait for daylight but have none; may it not see the breaking of dawn. For that night did not shut the doors of my mother’s womb, and hide sorrow from my eyes.”
Wow, right? He goes on like this for several more verses. He comes back to these themes several more times throughout the book. Can you feel a bit of what Job is feeling here? He genuinely wants to die and get all of this suffering over with. In fact, more than that, he’s wishing he had never been born. That would have avoided the whole mess in the first place. Now, maybe you’re like me and haven’t ever been in quite that much pain, but perhaps you can at least imagine feeling the same way. Either way, though, consider for just a moment the sheer weight of Job’s words. “I wish I had never been born.” That’s powerful. It’s a powerful declaration to God that we think He got it wrong. Had He gotten it right and not created us, we wouldn’t be suffering so badly right now. Now, no one really understands the full implications of such a complaint as George Bailey learns in It’s a Wonderful Life, but still, there are times in life when we are tempted to make it our cry. Job did.
And yet, through his experience of suffering, Job never sins. Such a complaint is not condemned as sinful even tacitly by the context. Friends, as long as we don’t forget who God is and who we are in light of that, we can cry out to Him in utter honesty from the depths of our pain and anguish and have no fear that we are crossing some line with God over which He will smite us. We can do that because God uniquely understands what we are feeling. After enduring a brutal scourging from the Roman guards, carrying the rough, heavy crossbeam from Jerusalem to the hill of Calvary, and being nailed to the cross, Jesus Himself—God in human flesh—cried out in echo of the words of His ancestor, David, that aren’t so different from Job’s here: “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” Such is the glory of the God we serve that He not only tolerates such heartfelt cries, but that He understands them intimately.
Well, after Job finally opens his mouth for the first time, his friends feel like it is now okay to open their own mouths to speak what they see as truth into Job’s situation. Have you ever heard the wise saying that it is better to remain silent and be thought a fool than it is to open your mouth and remove any doubt? Yeah, these guys offer a masterclass in why that’s the case. Starting gently and then getting more and more aggressive and hostile from there, Job’s friends reveal that they all hold a retributive understanding of the presence of evil in the world. They believe God is totally just and totally sovereign. Thus, if something bad is happening to you, God has caused it to happen. And if God has caused it to happen, then He had a good reason for it, namely that you did something wrong.
Eliphaz the Temanite gets the ball rolling in chapter 4, and he starts things off pretty gently. Look at this with me. “Then Eliphaz the Temanite replied: Should anyone try to speak with you when you are exhausted? Yet who can keep from speaking? Indeed, you have instructed many and have strengthened weak hands. Your words have steadied the one who was stumbling and braced the knees that were buckling. But now that this has happened to you, you have become exhausted. It strikes you, and you are dismayed. Isn’t your piety your confidence, and the integrity of your life your hope? Consider: Who has perished when he was innocent? Where have the honest been destroyed? In my experience, those who plow injustice and those who sow trouble reap the same. They perish at a single blast from God and come to an end by the breath of his nostrils.
Jumping down to Job 5:8, Eliphaz adds this: “However, if I were you, I would appeal to God and would present my case to him.” Then down to Job 5:18: “For he wounds but he also bandages; he strikes, but his hands also heal.” In other words, “Job, you have been a really great guy and have helped a lot of people hold up under hard times. It’s pretty sad, though, that as soon as the tables of life have turned on you, you fall apart. Where’s the great faith in God you’ve demonstrated throughout your life? And anyway, you know God only allows bad things to happen to bad people, so just repent of whatever it is you have done, and He’ll make you straight again.”
So, here we have Job in the midst of more misery than he can handle, and now his friends start piling on by arguing that it’s really all his fault. With friends like these, who needs enemies? Job rightly defends his integrity, but then Bildad adds insult to injury in chapter 8. “How long will you go on saying these things? Your words are a blast of wind. Does God pervert justice? Does the Almighty pervert what is right? Since your children sinned against him, he gave them over to their rebellion [in other words, the tragic death of your ten children was really their fault too]. But if you earnestly seek God and ask the Almighty for mercy, if you are pure and upright, then he will move even now on your behalf and restore the home where your righteousness dwells.”
In chapter 11, after yet another round of self-defense and crying out to God from Job, Zophar keeps up the pressure on him: “Should this abundance of words go unanswered and such a talker be acquitted? Should your babbling put others to silence, so that you can keep on ridiculing with no one to humiliate you? You have said, ‘My teaching is sound, and I am pure in your sight.’ But if only God would speak and open his lips against you! He would show you the secrets of wisdom, for true wisdom has two sides. Know then that God has chosen to overlook some of your iniquity.” As the ESV somewhat more uncomfortably puts it: “Know then that God exacts of you less than your guilt deserves.” Believe it or not, things get worse from here.
And when Job finally confounds their argument that suffering only happens to the wicked, proving incorrigible in his defense of his righteousness before God, another character appears in the story. Elihu, son of Barachel the Buzite, a young guy, finally has his self-righteousness meter reach the breaking point and offers his two cents…well, more like his two C-notes…on the matter. He starts by blasting Eliphaz, Bildad, and Zophar for their inability to out-argue Job (even suggesting that the reason for this is their age), goes on to turn his guns on Job, promising new arguments that he can’t defeat, and then fires away at him using the same arguments the other guys were using: God is absolutely just and wouldn’t afflict the righteous with suffering. Thus, Job needs to repent and get right with Him in order to make all this suffering go away.
All this time, Job is getting more and more depressed. He feels like God has left him behind. He agrees with his friends that God is just and that the wicked are going to receive their due, but he just can’t wrap his mind around how a God of justice could allow someone like him to suffer like this all the while some wicked folks seem to receive nothing but blessing. Ever been there? And while he doesn’t come right out and say it, by the time he offers his final and most thorough defense of his righteousness, he’s starting to wonder a bit about the character of the God he has so faithfully served. Flip all the way back to Job 31 with me and look at this.
“I have made a covenant with my eyes. How then could I look at a young woman? For what portion would I have from God above, or what inheritance from the Almighty on high? Doesn’t disaster come to the unjust and misfortune to evildoers? Does he not see my ways and number all my steps? If I have walked in falsehood or my foot has rushed to deceit, let God weigh me on accurate scales, and he will recognize my integrity. If my step has turned from the way, my heart has followed my eyes, or impurity has stained my hands, let someone else eat what I have sown, and let my crops be uprooted. If my heart has gone astray over a woman or I have lurked at my neighbor’s door, let my own wife grind grain for another man, and let other men sleep with her. . . If I have refused the wishes of the poor or let the widow’s eyes go blind, if I have eaten my few crumbs alone without letting the fatherless eat any of it—for from my youth, I raised him as his father, and since the day I was born I guide the widow—if I have seen anyone dying for lack of clothing or needy person without a cloak, if he did not bless me while warming himself with the fleece from my sheep, if I ever cast my vote against a fatherless child when I saw that I had support in the city gate, then let my shoulder blade fall from my back, and my arm be pulled from its socket. For disaster from God terrifies me, and because of his majesty I could not do these things.” He goes on like this, proclaiming that if he has done any of these wrong things, he’ll gladly face the consequences. The implication here, though, is that as far as he knows, he hasn’t. He’s clean. He’s righteous. So why is he suffering? Where is God?
You know, of all the things we can learn from Job, one of the most important is that drawing a line between choices we have made and bad things that happen to us—or anybody else for that matter—is a tenuous endeavor that must be undertaken with a great deal of humility. Now, yes, sometimes we can draw a line. If you have an affair and your marriage falls apart, there’s a line there. If you’re either really hard on your kids or else pretty absent in their lives, and they don’t have a very good relationship with you when they grow up, there’s probably a line there. But sometimes there isn’t a line. You work really hard for a company and then lose your job anyway. You take pretty good care of your body and then get really sick. You’re a really good friend and get stabbed in the back. There’s no line there. But here’s the thing: most of us assume we know how God works; how the world works. We’re absolutely certain we’re right about it too…right up until we have an unpleasant run-in with the walls of reality and discover we aren’t right at all. This was certainly the assumption Job’s friends all made. It was even the assumption Job flirted with near the end of the conversation. Friends, that’s pride, and there’s no relief in pride.
When we are in the midst of a hard place, pride is the last thing we can afford. Job’s first three frenemies grew more and more prideful in their attacks and rebuttals on Job and offered less and less of worth to him. As Job flirted more and more with pride he grew more and more despondent in his misery. When Elihu finally broke into the conversation he dripped with pride like he’d just stepped out of a pride shower. He went on and on blasting everybody for their ignorance and unrighteousness all the while boasting of his singular grasp of true wisdom until God Himself finally interrupted him and just put everybody in their place—more on that next time. All the while, Job never received one stitch of anything even remotely resembling relief.
Listen, when we’re in the midst of a painful situation, the one thing we want more than anything else is to get out of it. We want to fix it, to make it go away. And if that doesn’t happen immediately, we start searching. We go digging for what could possibly be the root of the pain so we can cut it off there. But here’s the thing: our search is guided by our assumptions about the world and how it works. We make those assumptions on a normal day. When things get tough, we lean into them with all our weight, hoping they’ll hold us. Like Job’s friends, we pridefully assume we know how the world works, how God works, and look for relief along those lines when we are hurting. Yet as long as we assume on our own knowledge, our own wisdom, our own experience with the world, real relief will prove elusive. There’s no relief in pride.
In light of this, we now understand better how to comfort the hurting and how to find comfort ourselves when we are the ones hurting. When others are hurting, we give them the assurance that they are not alone…and then make sure they aren’t alone. We don’t come with words or arguments, but rather with presence. We sit with them before the Lord and cry out to Him together. In our own lives, we make our prayer something like this: “Father, I don’t understand what’s happening, and I don’t like it. I want relief from this pain now. But in the meantime, I trust that your character has not changed, and that when the time is right, you will restore me. While I wait for that day, give me the grace to hold up under this pressure by leaning hard into you. I take comfort in the fact that you understand my pain better and cry with me harder than anyone else. I pray that my experience will be able to serve as a signpost to point others toward the incredible worth of a relationship with you. In Jesus’ name and by the Spirit’s power I lay myself before you. Amen.”
Now, will that make it all go away? No, it almost assuredly will not. But it will put you in the arms of the God whose Spirit can lift up the broken and the hurting even in the midst of their pain. An attitude like that will lead others to the same place. And with such an approach of humility, the relief you need—and God knows that better than you—won’t be far behind. There’s no relief in pride, but humility brings hope.
So, when you are in the midst of a painful season, express your heart to God. Don’t hold back. Let Him see and hear the utter depths of your frustration, your pain, your anguish. Give it all to Him. Run in His direction, and throw the whole mess right at His feet. Just don’t forget who He is and who you are. There’s no relief in pride. When you keep that in mind, you’ll always be on firm ground; the firm ground of grace. And, when we cry out to God like that, sometimes He responds. He’s always there, but sometimes He shows up in a way we don’t expect. Sometimes He gives us the real answer we need. Sometimes He gives us a peek behind the curtain. If you’ll come back for one last stop on our journey next week, we’re going to see together how God did just that with Job. You won’t want to miss seeing how the stories end. And if you noticed the plural there, it was on purpose. I’ve told you two stories on this journey. We’ll see how both of them end next time.