NOTES for Job 42:5-6
Readers often feel that Job's repentance was forced. God revealed Himself and His power, and in the face of such an unmistakable demonstration, Job supposedly had nowhere to turn. Yet this was clearly more than a display of power alone. God really did speak to Job in human terms, as Job had wanted. It is another matter that the conversation took a turn he had not expected. God did not try to dissuade Job of his righteousness or confront him with sins for which He might reproach him. Nor did He answer the question about the suffering of innocent people, of the righteous.
He simply appeared before Job. Using the animals He had created as examples, He showed him what power that disregards human beings is like. And He made Job understand that He is God, who knows what He is doing and who remembers human beings. Of course, God gives Job no details, much less any guarantees. Except for one: He remembers humankind and knows how to deal with the evil in which the world lies. And even if everything seems utterly dark and hopeless to someone living in this world, God has His own plan, which includes, among other things, freeing the world from evil.
Of course, had Job's friends said these words to him, he would not have believed them. After all, they had indeed been saying something similar.
But what mattered was precisely the encounter, the face-to-face meeting with God that Job had so longed for and awaited. Among other things, it opened up spiritual horizons for Job that he had neither known nor seen before. It turned out that his entire former life, even his righteousness, had been a merely human affair, never going beyond the bounds of the traditional religiosity of which Job himself was a thoroughly sincere and convinced representative.
God opened up a different prospect for Job and showed him another life—a life where there is no religion, but there is the living God, and where righteousness is not a meticulous, almost accountant-like tally of merits and sins, but the experience of encountering this living and utterly real God, and therefore of encountering a new and equally real life: the life of God's great world, which will one day unfold in all the fullness of God's Kingdom.
Job can now bear witness to this new reality revealed to him and communicate with God from within it and through it. That is why God entrusts him with prayer for his friends, who as yet know nothing, or almost nothing, of all this—and therefore do not speak or bear witness about God as truly as Job, who has become a living witness to the living God.