059. Prayer Of Job After He Had Been Visited By His Friends.

Prayer Of Job After He Had Been Visited By His Friends. The Prayer as recorded.—Job 13:20-27.

Job, as usual in cases of affliction, had many so called sympathizers; three are mentioned particularly as conversing with him and treating his sufferings and his character with contempt. In the daguerreotypes of Job’s friends are features familiar to all the children of suffering and affliction; and there are few who are not painfully acquainted with Zophar, Eliphaz, and Bildad. In obedience to the command “to weep with those that weep,” there are many, very many, of the good and kind who would and do change the sentence into talking with those that weep; not that words of sympathy and kindly advice should remain unuttered, but that they should be “words fitly spoken, like apples of gold in pictures of silver,” that they should be forcible and right. We can imagine how, under his deep and heavy affliction, and after the conversation of his friends, Job was led to inquire so particularly into the cause of his trials, and we can almost excuse the passionate strain in which he speaks; he regards himself as a mark for the arrows of the Almighty; to use his own words: “Thou writest bitter things against me.” He desires to clear away the clouds and darkness hanging round these trials, and know of God a reason for them. He says, in bitterness but in dependence, “My friends scorn me, but my eye poureth out tears unto God.” He asks for the love of God in his heart, for fear seems to have taken possession of it. It is right for us to wait patiently God’s time, and though in deep sorrow we see nothing but the frown of Providence, the knowledge that there is behind it a smile, will be sweet to our souls; and though heavy and severe be our trials, we may, by patience, be led with Job to exclaim: “Though he slay me, yet will I trust in him.”