NOTES for Job 27:1-23

Continuing his speech, Job turns to the second theme beloved by his friends - the fate of the wicked (vv. 8-23). And again he gives the kind of speech his friends expect to hear from him. Any one of them could have supported such a speech, and so could any religious person in general. But in speaking about the fate awaiting the wicked, Job rather transparently hints at his friends (vv. 5-7). He declares that he is not going to lie in order to please his friends, who express generally accepted opinions, or anyone else who shares those opinions (vv. 2-4). Apparently, Job understands that righteousness is impossible if there is even a drop of insincerity in one's relationship with God. And in the speeches of Job's friends there was plenty of such insincerity. After all, in essence, they did not even try to understand Job truly, fearing that such understanding would blow up their inner world and destroy their well-ordered religious life.

It is no accident that, beginning his speech about the fate of the wicked, Job first mentions hypocrites (v. 8). Of course, the hypocrisy of Job's friends was a hypocrisy of a special kind. They were not practicing hypocrisy deliberately in search of personal gain. But in spiritual life there are no trifles and no middle ground. Relationships with God can be either completely sincere, excluding every kind of deceit, or nonexistent. One drop of insincerity here could spoil everything.

Of course, Job's friends may well not have known some of what Job had begun to suspect, and their failure to understand in this case may have been quite conscientious. But the unwillingness to understand itself could hardly be considered conscientious: the attempts to write everything off by saying that Job was not in his right mind, that he himself did not understand what he was saying. Here there was already spiritual cowardice and an unwillingness to part with a convenient and familiar religious worldview. But God does not need religion; He needs the human heart, which a person would give to Him freely. The danger of insincerity lies not only in the fact that it is, in essence, nothing other than an attempt to deceive God, but in the fact that it completely destroys all of a person's relationships with God. And then a person remains with his religion, but without the God who could save him.

Job’s speech is called exalted; the unknown ancient narrator steps aside from the detached account and directly gives an assessment that reveals where his sympathy lies. We see that Job too is capable of being an accuser, and his friends should have taken into account that the words they spoke were cast to the wind. The arguments they offered were neither new nor unexpected for Job; he himself could say everything he heard from them. Job’s answer to his friends resembles their speeches in many ways, but words that appear similar sound different in a different context.

It is one thing when words about the inevitable punishment of the wicked are spoken by well-fed and prosperous people confident of their own decency and blamelessness—though it is unclear on what grounds. But a very different impression is made when someone who is suffering calamity speaks about the justice of retribution for evil. He is ready to accept punishment if it is just, but his speeches clearly reveal not a desire to evade payment, but confidence in his own innocence.

Not everyone has the moral right to repeat words that seem identical when spoken by others.

Job does not want to lie. He will not bear false witness about himself, calling himself a sinner while being sure of his righteousness. He is more ready to admit that God, for now, is depriving him of His judgment. He does not reject God, does not reject His righteousness, and does not doubt that God's judgment will still put everything in its place. But right now that judgment is absent, and Job speaks directly about what he sees and how he sees it. He does not want to lie to himself and to others for "pious" reasons. More than that, he regards such a lie as a very serious sin. A sin of which, among others, he accuses his friends. And of course the point here is not the words they said. One cannot pick fault with their words; they are so correct and self-evident that, in essence, they need not have been said at all.

The issue is why and for what purpose all these correct general words are being spoken. That is where the lie begins. Insincerity, when words that are perfectly correct in themselves are spoken not in defense of what they say, but in defense of one's own, at the least ambiguous, position. And sometimes a plainly deceitful one: the longer the conversation continues, the more the situation begins to lean precisely in that direction.

When general correct words hide from those who say them both the person and the real situation in which that person has found himself, this is, at minimum, a serious spiritual mistake. But when those saying them begin to suspect what is going on and understand the true motives for their insistence on correct words, it is no longer a mistake but a more or less conscious lie. And if the liars do not want to admit their lie even to themselves, so much the worse for them: unwillingness to see one's lie does not make a conscious sin into a mistake.

And here a question arises: what is such a person to do on the day of God's judgment? Then one will have to meet God face to face. What then? Will God really forgive deceit and falsehood merely because they were covered with pious words? The questions asked required a direct and honest answer. And a no less honest look at themselves.