“Now when Job’s three friends heard of all this evil that was come upon him, they came every one from his own place; Eliphaz the Temanite, and Bildad the Shuhite, and Zophar the Naamathite: for they had made an appointment together to come to mourn with him and to comfort him.” – Job 2:11.
True friendship is essential. It is the union of hearts in the bonds of goodness and love. However, there are many who are called friends and are enemies in disguise. Then, there are pretended friends who flutter around you when you are prosperous and leave when you face poverty. The third type of friends are those who are deficient in tenderness of feelings and gentleness of spirit and cannot administer to a wounded soul.
Job’s friends seem to fall in this category. They appear to be dogmatists. A dogmatist is a person who strongly asserts their belief and opinions as if they were true and refuses to accept the views of others.
Eliphaz was a religious dogmatist whose dogmatism rests upon some mysterious experience. He says much truth, and often eloquently, but remained hard and cruel. He feels he must be heard because of his remarkable experience. Bildad is a religious dogmatist of the superficial kind. His dogmatism is based on tradition. He quotes proverbial wisdom and pious phrases. These do not shed any light on Job’s problems. Zophar is a religious dogmatist who assumes to know all. He seems to know God’s will in any given case and His thoughts about it. This type of dogmatism is the most irreverent and least open to reason.
Their speech was of great intelligence and religious knowledge. They had high moral excellences. However, their minds bore the idea that there must have been some extreme cause for Job’s calamity. They thought that Job had some moral problem or some secret sin that he was concealing. They all reasoned as if the righteous was supposed to have uninterrupted blessings and that God’s providence would preserve them from calamities. This was the error of Job’s friends; and this error in judgement led to unhappy results. It injured Job and displeased God. Their purpose and mission were to mourn and comfort Job in his affliction, but it did not end that way.
John 13:1 tells us “Now before the feast of the Passover, when Jesus knew that his hour had come that he should depart out of this world unto the Father, having loved his own which were in the world, he loved them unto the end. He came to mourn and comfort and He did.”