Zophar's Conviction

The friends of Job are horrible listeners. They blindly follow only what they assume to be true about justice. God punishes the wicked, all suffering is in response to wickedness, therefore repent and seek God's mercy. These simple ideas and conclusions are coming apart as Job continues to defend himself in the face of their attacks. 

Zophar only speaks twice in this book and he's learned nothing through these events. He uses his second speech to reiterate his assumptions of the destiny of the wicked. They will suffer and they will fail. 

Job 20:27–29 (ESV) The heavens will reveal his iniquity, and the earth will rise up against him. 28 The possessions of his house will be carried away, dragged off in the day of God’s wrath. 29 This is the wicked man’s portion from God, the heritage decreed for him by God.”

What makes Job hard to read in this middle section is that much of what the friends say is true about the common fate of men who rebel against God. But Job is the enigma. He's different. He's got a reputation that preceded him and brought him great nobility in his time. His suffering is now a tool of his horrible friends for their bloviations instead of exploring that God might be doing something deeper. And indeed God is. 

What is God doing in Job?

God is using Job's story to point to Christ - the truly innocent sufferer. 

God is also showing the world that suffering and injustice are complicated issues that men cannot fully fathom. There's something behind the scenes going on in the heavenly realms that we don't know. 

God is also exposing the bent toward moralism in men's hearts. That age-old idea that if we do good, we should expect good, if we do bad, we should expect bad. But that's just not what we have in Job. 

Moreover, it's not what we have in Jesus. Jesus did everything the Father told Him to do and He suffered greatly and died. Paul the Apostle surrendered his life to the cause of the Gospel and he suffered terribly and was beheaded by the wicked emperor Nero. And then there's that great chapter in Hebrews. We call it the "hall of faith" where Moses, David, and Abraham are extolled for their great faith and great results, but look at the last part of Hebrews 11:

Hebrews 11:36–38 (ESV) Others suffered mocking and flogging, and even chains and imprisonment. 37 They were stoned, they were sawn in two, they were killed with the sword. They went about in skins of sheep and goats, destitute, afflicted, mistreated— 38 of whom the world was not worthy—wandering about in deserts and mountains, and in dens and caves of the earth.

You see, if we don't have the story of Job we don't have our hearts prepared for what happens later in the narrative to some of God's best servants. More importantly, we don't have our hearts prepared for what happens to God's Son. Justice from Earth's perspective may cause us to miss the cross. This is where Zophar's conviction ends up costing him the ability to experience God's message through Job. There will be innocents who suffer because they are made for a different world. 

And when we suffer, we must remind ourselves of the same truth. There's a bigger story at work, the story of Jesus and the Cross and the elimination of our love for this present age so that we long for the age to come.