Subject: Friendship - Job 6-7

Job 6:14-17 (NIV 1984)

“A despairing man should have the devotion of his friends, even though he forsakes the fear of the Almighty. But my brothers are as undependable as intermittent streams, as the streams that overflow when darkened by thawing ice and swollen with melting snow, but that cease to flow in the dry season, and in the heat vanish from their channels.

Subject:  Friendship

Job is in a bad spot.  Not only has the cursing blows of Satan's evilness destroyed his family and property, it has touched his body.     But, in the above statement the loss of property, the loss of family, nor the loss of health are his subject.   In these verses Job has a larger compliant.   He already feels that God has forsaken him (Job 6:1-13).  In that section he states, "the arrows of the Almighty are in me."    Job is in a very weak state of faith and belief.   So, what is his concern that now torments him?  His "friends."    In a blistering statement, Job tells his friends that they should not criticize him in this moment of weakness.  They should, rather, come along side and give him support  and allow him to hold to his faith.  He states, "even though he forsakes the fear of the Almighty," he would want the friends to continue to show him kindness and love.   But, they are more like the stream that is weak one time and overflowing the next.   Job is simply saying, "Please do not forsake me in this moment of weakness and despair."  Yet, that is what most of us do to others during their time of struggle.  We, like Job's friends, try to find the "spiritual" reason for their struggle, rather than just being there as a friend to help them walk through the fire.    God will, in the end of this book, condemn these "friends" of Jobs because they failed to give Job good counsel (Job 42:7).   Perhaps if they has simply been kind to Job and shut their mouths, God would have rewarded them rather than rebuke them.

I love what the "Understanding the Bible Commentary" says about these two verses:

(UBC OT) Job turns now to castigate his friends for their failure of true friendship. In a rather shocking statement, he claims that true friends would remain loyal even if their companion went so far as to forsake the fear of the Almighty. It is Job’s fear of God (1:9) that has been at issue in the test of suffering, and now Job hints that his will to fear may be eroding. Intense suffering often diminishes our ability to understand and believe. When the pursuit of survival exhausts our energies, we have little left to sustain our faith. This is when we most need believing friends who resist the temptation to criticize our struggling faith, and instead come alongside us to give testimony of the continuing faithfulness of God that we have such difficulty seeing through our pain. This is precisely what Job’s friends fail to do. They are so focused on what they consider to be Job’s failure, that