Sunday Sermonette: Cold Comfort

I don't publish comments that are ridiculous. It's that simple. I'm trying to keep the discourse here at least reasonably reality based.

Now we hear from the three comforters. In the play J.B., MacLeish makes Eliphaz a psychiatrist, Zophar a priest, and Bildad a communist. In other words he translates the comforters into contemporary discourse, but just as in the original, their attempts at comforting Job are pretty much gibberish and no help at all. Here in the original Eliphaz basically says that all people are miserable sinners, no-one is innocent, Job must have done something to earn his fate. Obviously this makes Eliphaz popular with Christians. In J.B., Eliphaz the psychiatrist essentially says that guilt is an illusion. Either way, it's no help.

4 Then Eliphaz the Temanite replied:

² “If someone ventures a word with you, will you be impatient?
    But who can keep from speaking?
³ Think how you have instructed many,
    how you have strengthened feeble hands.
⁴ Your words have supported those who stumbled;
    you have strengthened faltering knees.
⁵ But now trouble comes to you, and you are discouraged;
    it strikes you, and you are dismayed.
⁶ Should not your piety be your confidence
    and your blameless ways your hope?

⁷ “Consider now: Who, being innocent, has ever perished?
    Where were the upright ever destroyed?
⁸ As I have observed, those who plow evil
    and those who sow trouble reap it.
⁹ At the breath of God they perish;
    at the blast of his anger they are no more.
¹⁰ The lions may roar and growl,
    yet the teeth of the great lions are broken.
¹¹ The lion perishes for lack of prey,
    and the cubs of the lioness are scattered.

¹² “A word was secretly brought to me,
    my ears caught a whisper of it.
¹³ Amid disquieting dreams in the night,
    when deep sleep falls on people,
¹⁴ fear and trembling seized me
    and made all my bones shake.
¹⁵ A spirit glided past my face,
    and the hair on my body stood on end.
¹⁶ It stopped,
    but I could not tell what it was.
A form stood before my eyes,
    and I heard a hushed voice:
¹⁷ ‘Can a mortal be more righteous than God?
    Can even a strong man be more pure than his Maker?
¹⁸ If God places no trust in his servants,
    if he charges his angels with error,
¹⁹ how much more those who live in houses of clay,
    whose foundations are in the dust,
    who are crushed more readily than a moth!
²⁰ Between dawn and dusk they are broken to pieces;
    unnoticed, they perish forever.
²¹ Are not the cords of their tent pulled up,
    so that they die without wisdom?’