NOTES for Job 11:1-20
As he joins the debate with Job, his third friend, Zophar, immediately begins to reproach him. He calls Job's demands for a fair trial empty talk. In Zophar's view, what has happened is an even greater act of God's mercy, because he thinks Job deserves far worse. In demanding justice and an explanation for his suffering, Job is demanding the impossible—a personal relationship with God, which Zophar regards as an inadmissible encroachment on the Creator's majesty. Indeed, why should the Almighty stoop to a human being? Why should he give an account of his actions?
The author then places on Zophar's lips words about God's unfathomable majesty, surpassing all understanding. Very correct words... Zophar says that Job cannot ‘find God by searching’; literally, these words mean ‘track God down’. The negative answer is obvious; in the period when the book was written, Ecclesiastes had posed and answered this question. But Zophar does not hear what Job is saying: Job is not trying to find God; he is calling to him and asking for an answer. This is one of the book's central problems. An ordinary suffering person longs for God to reveal himself and his will. This need of Job's goes radically beyond the bounds of the Old Covenant, in which Revelation was the lot of a chosen few, judges and prophets. God's commandment is accessible and close to human beings, Deuteronomy says. In the Old Covenant, the commandment serves as a kind of mediator between God and humanity; the apostle Paul will later discuss this in detail in his Letter to the Romans. But by judging a person according to the Almighty's statutes, the commandment distances them from God. This is what Job cannot bear; his friends, by contrast, are very comfortable with that distance. They are so vehemently outraged that Job seeks God's answer to him personally, so unanimous in considering it blasphemy, that they thereby reveal how wrong they are.
Zophar, Eliphaz and Bildad think that if Job is suffering, he must be guilty; they need no other logic. For the author of the book, however, what matters is that Job is ready to receive both good and misfortune from God—but only directly from God. What matters to Job above all is that God is a person, in whose likeness the human being is made. For his friends, by contrast, what matters in Old Testament Revelation is that God is infinitely great, exalted and distant from them. If he draws near, it may disrupt their entire spiritual way of life. Several centuries later, just such ‘friends of Job’ will say to Jesus of Nazareth: ‘Why does he blaspheme like this? Who can forgive sins but God alone?’ (Mark 2:7). And those who need God, as Job does, will say of Jesus: ‘He was the true Light, which enlightens every person coming into the world’ (John 1:9).