The book of Job is a guide on how to engage God in the face of mouth-stopping pain. It is also a guide for how not to engage people who are journeying through horrendous suffering. Job’s friends came from all around to walk with him and help him, instead they added to his sorrow.
Dr. Bob Kellermen provides a helpful synopsis of how Job experienced his comforters and how not to engage suffering companions.
How does Job view their counsel? He longs for the devotion of his friends (6:14), which they aren’t. He calls them undependable brothers (6:15), which they are.
They can’t handle Job’s doubts, treating the words of a despairing man as wind (6:26). He feels they say, “Forget it! Smile!” His dread remains. “If I say, ‘I will forget my complaint, I will change my expression, and smile,’ I still dread all my sufferings, for I know you will not hold me innocent” (Job 9:27-28).
He experiences their total lack of empathy. “Men at ease have contempt for misfortunate” (Job 12:5).
Miserable comforters (Job 16:2) they are. Rather than communicating that “it’s normal to hurt,” they increase Job’s hurt. Having no compassionate discernment, they claim that his wounds are self-inflicted. “How we will hound him, since the root of the trouble lies in him” (Job 19:28).
They crush Job’s spirit through their long-winded speeches, argumentative nature, lack of empathy and encouragement, failure to bring relief and comfort, and their closed-minded, arrogant, superior, hostile attitudes based upon wrong motives and a condemning spirit (Job 17:1-5).
Of them, Job concludes, “These men turn night into day; in the face of darkness they say, ‘Light is near’” (Job 17:12).
They are like the counselor who says, “Don’t talk about your problems, don’t think about your suffering, and don’t remember your past hurts!” They have no dark-night-of-the-soul vision, no 20/20 spiritual vision, and no long-distance vision; so they call the darkness light. Job, however, has long-distance vision. His heart yearns for God and he knows that he will see God (Job 19:25-27).
Job feels no rapport with them.
“They torment me, crush me with words. I sense their reproach as they shame me. They exalt themselves. I feel so alone when I am with them. So alienated and forgotten. Here’s how my ‘spiritual friends’ make me feel: alienated, estranged, forgotten, offensive, loathsome. All my ‘friends’ detest me; they have turned against me, having no pity on me” (author’s paraphrase of Job 19).
They are unwise. They offer nonsense answers because they’re not paying attention to life, not learning life’s lessons.
“You have not wisely paid attention to how things work in the real world. Your academic knowledge, your theologizing, is out to lunch. How can you console or comfort me with your vain nonsense, since your answers are falsehood? You are wrong about life, about me, and about God!” (author’s paraphrase of Job 21).
They are “sin-spotters.” They know confrontation only. Thus, they become co-conspirators with Satan the accuser who condemns men and curses God.
By observing what Job’s friends did, we learn exactly what to avoid with ours.