03/18/2022 – Day 019 – Job – Chapters 5 & 6 / “With friends like these, who needs enemies?”
Let’s look at Matthew Henry’s commentary on this reading:
Verse 6:24: “Job’s not asking their help did not excuse them from offering it when he needed it and it was in the power of their hands to give it. It often happens that from man, even when we expect little, we have less, but from God, even when we expect much, we have more.” Ephesians 3:20
And then, 6: 26, 27): ” A little charity would have served to excuse them, and to put a better construction upon them. Shall a man’s spiritual state be judged of by some rash and hasty words, which a surprising trouble extorts from him? It it kind, is it just, to criticise in such a case? They took advantage of his weakness and teh helpless condition he was in: You overwhelm the fatherless, a proverbial expression, denoting that which is most barbarous and inhuman. They made pretence of kindness: ‘ You dig a pit for your friend; not only you are unkind to me, who am your friend, but, under colour of friendship, you ensnare me.’ When they came to see and sit with him he thought he might speak his mind freely to them. But his freedom of speech, which their professions of concern for him made him use, had exposed him to their censures, and so they might be said to dig a pit for him.”
Soli Deo Gloria!