In Job chapter 42, Job again responds to God. He is humble, accepting that he cannot understand God nor His ways. He repents for speaking about what he doesn’t understand. He responds just as God wanted him to, in humility.

Job’s friends first made their appearance in Job 2. They “made an appointment together to come show him sympathy and comfort him” (Job 2:11b). The first thing they did was an outward display of sharing his pain (wept, tore their robes, sprinkled dust on their heads). Then they just sat with him. In silence. For seven days.

If you look at the earlier chapters of Job, you see their advice. Much of it sounds good. Much of it would likely be great advice in a different situation. Their focus was on what Job had done wrong to incur God’s wrath. They couldn’t see any alternative to Job’s suffering. Yet they gave up their silence and tried. They did their best, but it turns out, they were wrong. And God wasn’t about to let them get away with it.

We’ve all been there….sitting (in person, via text, on social media, over the phone, etc.) with a suffering friend not knowing what to say. Eventually, the silence drives us to speak. Our desire to help is strong and pushes us to try to solve the problem, to figure out the “why” so they can fix it, or at least understand it. Our hearts are in the right place. I think Job’s friend’s hearts were in the right place, too. They wanted to help.

God says that His anger burns against them and that they haven’t spoken of Him what is right. I don’t want to be in that place with God. While He does offer them a way out – a way to repent – it is humbling, and likely even humiliating. They thought they were offering good advice to their friend and now they have to humble themselves and ask him to pray for their misspeaking.

What can we learn from this exchange? First, reaching out to a friend who is suffering is good. Sitting in silence is good, too. But what I take away from this is that we need to seek God before we respond on His behalf. Before we tell someone what God would have them do, we should ask God. That can be in prayer or in reading His Word. Someone once said that God will never contradict His Word, so whatever you “hear” him saying, cross-check it in the Bible.

I think Job chose life. Even though he didn’t do anything really big to sin, God called him out on his attitude and words. He didn’t bear poisonous and bitter fruit and he didn’t hold on to his stubborn heart. He humbled himself.