The Physics of a Godless World Text: Job 20:4-11
Introduction: The Retribution Blender
We come now to the second speech of Zophar, and if you have been paying attention, you will notice a certain pattern with Job’s friends. They are like a stuck record, playing the same scratchy tune over and over, only louder each time. Their central thesis is simple: God is just, therefore the righteous prosper and the wicked suffer. Since Job is suffering spectacularly, he must be spectacularly wicked. Q.E.D. This is what we might call the retribution principle, and while it contains a profound truth, in the hands of these men it becomes a blunt instrument, a theological club with which they beat their afflicted friend.
Zophar is perhaps the most doctrinaire of the three. He is a man who has his systematic theology all tidied up in a neat little box, and he is incensed that Job’s messy reality refuses to fit inside it. He is not listening to Job; he is reloading. He hears Job’s claims of innocence not as the cries of a tormented saint, but as the insolent challenges of a hardened sinner. And so he unleashes a torrent of what we might call the established physics of a Godless world. He is describing, with poetic and brutal accuracy, what happens to the wicked. The problem is not that what Zophar says is untrue. The problem is that he is aiming this cannon at the wrong target.
This is a critical lesson for all of us. It is possible to speak true things in a damnable way. It is possible to wield the sword of the Spirit not to defend the afflicted, but to run them through. Zophar’s speech is a textbook example of truth divorced from love, of doctrine detached from pastoral wisdom. He is describing a reality that is absolutely true in the grand scheme of things, but he is misapplying it with a cruel and self-righteous certainty. He is so confident in his theological grid that he makes himself an accuser of the brethren, doing the devil’s work for him. Let us therefore approach this text with a dual caution: to receive the truth of God’s justice that it contains, and to recoil from the arrogant spirit in which it is delivered.
The Text
Do you know this from of old,
From the establishment of man on earth,
That the shouts of joy of the wicked are short,
And the gladness of the godless momentary?
Though his loftiness goes up to the heavens,
And his head touches the clouds,
He perishes forever like his refuse;
Those who have seen him will say, ‘Where is he?’
He flies away like a dream, and they cannot find him;
Even like a vision of the night he is chased away.
The eye which saw him sees him no longer,
And his place no longer beholds him.
His sons seek the favor of the poor,
And his hands give back his wealth.
His bones are full of his youthful vigor,
But it lies down with him in the dust.
(Job 20:4-11 LSB)
An Ancient and Unbending Law (vv. 4-5)
Zophar begins by appealing to an ancient, self-evident truth, as though he were reminding Job of basic arithmetic.
"Do you know this from of old, From the establishment of man on earth, That the shouts of joy of the wicked are short, And the gladness of the godless momentary?" (Job 20:4-5)
Zophar’s tone here is dripping with condescension. "Surely you know this, Job. This isn't advanced theology; this is kindergarten. This principle is woven into the fabric of creation, established since man was placed on the earth." He is arguing from tradition and universal experience. And the principle itself is sound. The laughter of the wicked is a flash in the pan. Their joy is built on a foundation of sand, and the tide of God’s judgment is always coming in.
The Bible affirms this everywhere. The fool says in his heart, "There is no God," and then proceeds to live a life of corrupt and abominable deeds (Psalm 14:1). But this life is a frantic dance on the edge of a volcano. It is a party on the deck of the Titanic. The "shouts of joy" are loud precisely because they are trying to drown out the groaning of the floorboards and the quiet whisper of conscience that tells them their foundation is rotten. The gladness of the godless is "momentary" because it is parasitic. It feeds on the good things of God’s creation, food, drink, wealth, sex, power, while denying the Giver. Such joy cannot last because it has no substance. It is a sugar high, destined for a crash.
The Higher the Rise, the Harder the Fall (vv. 6-9)
Zophar then paints a vivid picture of the wicked man’s apparent success, only to emphasize the totality of his collapse.
"Though his loftiness goes up to the heavens, And his head touches the clouds, He perishes forever like his refuse; Those who have seen him will say, ‘Where is he?’ He flies away like a dream, and they cannot find him; Even like a vision of the night he is chased away. The eye which saw him sees him no longer, And his place no longer beholds him." (Job 20:6-9 LSB)
This is a brilliant poetic description of hubris and nemesis. The wicked man builds his tower of Babel, his monument to self. His ego is so inflated that his head is in the clouds. He sees himself as a master of the universe, untouchable, a self-made god. He is the titan of industry, the political strongman, the cultural icon. He is impressive. He is formidable. And he is a vapor.
Zophar’s language is absolute. "He perishes forever." This is not a temporary setback. It is annihilation. And the comparison is intentionally vile: "like his refuse." The Hebrew word here is the word for dung or excrement. All his loftiness, all his cloud-touching glory, is reduced to filth to be shoveled away and forgotten. His legacy is that of waste. This is God’s final verdict on all humanistic ambition that does not begin and end with Him.
The subsequent verses emphasize his complete erasure from memory. He becomes a "Where is he?" His disappearance is so sudden and total that it is like waking from a dream. You know you saw something, but the details are gone, and the substance was never there. He is a "vision of the night," chased away by the morning light of God’s reality. The place he occupied, the seat of his power, the boardroom, the palace, no longer even recognizes him. The world moves on without a ripple. This is the ultimate terror for the narcissist: not just to be defeated, but to be forgotten. To have been, and then to have not been, as though he were a mere phantom.
Generational Consequences (vv. 10-11)
The consequences of this man's wickedness do not die with him. Zophar traces the fallout into the next generation and into the man's own body.
"His sons seek the favor of the poor, And his hands give back his wealth. His bones are full of his youthful vigor, But it lies down with him in the dust." (Job 20:10-11 LSB)
Here we see the principle of generational judgment. The wealth the wicked man accumulated, likely through oppression and exploitation, is dissipated by his children. "His sons seek the favor of the poor." This is a stunning reversal. The sons of the great oppressor are now reduced to begging from the very class of people their father crushed. They are forced into restitution. "His hands give back his wealth." The ill-gotten gains are vomited up. God’s economic laws have a way of balancing the books, even if it takes a generation.
This is a direct contradiction of the godly man’s legacy, who "leaves an inheritance to his children’s children" (Proverbs 13:22). The wealth of the sinner is laid up for the just. Zophar is telling Job, "Look at your own children, dead. Look at your own wealth, gone. The pattern fits." It is a cruel, but logical, application of his rigid system.
Finally, he turns to the man’s own end. "His bones are full of his youthful vigor, But it lies down with him in the dust." This is a picture of a man cut off in his prime. All his strength, his vitality, his ambition, comes to nothing. It is buried with him. The sins of his youth, the secret corruptions that fueled his rise, are now the very things that poison his bones and drag him down to the grave. His life was a monument to his own strength, and in the end, that strength is just so much dust. It cannot save him from the final reckoning.
Conclusion: Right Doctrine, Wrong Address
So what are we to do with this? Zophar is not wrong in his theology of divine justice. The wicked do, in fact, perish. Their joy is fleeting. Their empires crumble. God does bring them down to the dust. Psalm 37 tells us to "fret not thyself because of evildoers," for they will soon be cut down like the grass. This is a foundational truth of a world governed by a holy God. Without it, there is no justice, and history is just a tale told by an idiot.
The fatal error is in the application. Zophar, Eliphaz, and Bildad are what you get when you have a coroner’s understanding of medicine. They can accurately describe what a dead man looks like, but they have no category for a sick man who is going to be healed. They have no room for the mystery of God’s providence, no understanding of the testing of the saints, and no concept of a suffering that is not punitive but purgative.
They see Job’s boils and scraped potsherds, and they check their theological flowchart. "Catastrophic suffering? Check. Loss of wealth and children? Check. Therefore, secret, catastrophic sin. Check." They cannot imagine another possibility. They cannot imagine a God who would allow his righteous servant to suffer for a higher purpose, for a deeper knowledge of Himself, and for the shaming of the accuser, Satan.
And this is where we must see the gospel. Job is a type of Christ. He is the righteous sufferer, accused by men and seemingly abandoned by God. His friends, representing the law and a rigid, graceless theology, condemn him. They tell him his suffering is deserved. And in one sense, they are right about all of us. We are all sinners, and the wages of sin is death. If we got what Zophar’s system demanded, we would all perish forever like our own refuse.
But Christ enters this economy of justice and shatters it with grace. He takes the curse. He becomes the one whose loftiness goes to the heavens on a cross, only to be brought down into the dust of a tomb. He is the one who perishes, seemingly forever. He is the one whose followers are scattered. But because He was truly innocent, the dust could not hold Him. He is the one who rose again, vindicated by God, and it is His wealth, His righteousness, that is now given to His children. Zophar saw the physics of sin and death, but he could not see the calculus of the cross. He understood the fall, but he had no grammar for resurrection. Let us learn from him what God does to the wicked, but let us never, ever apply that truth without the humble, broken, and contrite heart that comes from knowing that we have only escaped that same fate by the sheer, unmerited grace of God in Jesus Christ.