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.