Commentary - Job 42:7-9

Bird's-eye view

After the Lord has finished His interrogation of Job out of the whirlwind, and after Job has responded with humble repentance, the camera turns, as it were, to the three friends. This passage is the formal verdict at the end of the long and painful trial. Yahweh Himself, the judge of all the earth, delivers the sentence, and it is a stunning reversal of what everyone, especially the friends, would have expected. The central issue of the entire book comes to a head here: what does it mean to speak rightly of God, particularly in the furnace of affliction? God declares that the friends, with all their tidy theological syllogisms, have failed the test spectacularly. Their folly is exposed, and God's anger burns against them. The resolution is not a simple apology; it is covenantal and liturgical. It requires a costly sacrifice and, most pointedly, the mediation of the very man they had condemned. Job is appointed as their priest, their intercessor, and they must submit to this arrangement to be restored. Their obedience in this demonstrates that they have finally learned their lesson: God's economy is not a neat system of karmic retribution but a world of mystery, sovereignty, and grace, where the way up is down, and the righteous sufferer becomes the instrument of salvation for the self-righteous.

This section is therefore the theological climax of the prose sections of the book. It vindicates Job, not in his every utterance, but in his fundamental orientation of wrestling honestly with God. It condemns the friends, not for their belief in divine justice, but for their wooden, graceless, and presumptuous application of it. And it points forward beautifully to the gospel, where another righteous sufferer, Jesus Christ, becomes the priest and sacrifice for all who have spoken wrongly of God.

Outline

Context In Job

These verses immediately follow the dramatic climax of the book: God's appearance in the whirlwind (chapters 38-41) and Job's subsequent repentance (42:1-6). For forty chapters, we have listened to a series of cyclical and increasingly heated debates between Job and his three friends, Eliphaz, Bildad, and Zophar. The friends have consistently argued from a rigid premise of retributive justice: because Job is suffering immensely, he must have sinned immensely. They have urged him to confess his hidden wickedness to find relief. Job, while not claiming sinless perfection, has maintained his fundamental integrity and has cried out to God for a hearing, for a divine arbiter to plead his case. After God's speeches, which did not answer Job's specific questions but rather overwhelmed him with the majesty and mystery of divine wisdom, Job has abandoned his lawsuit. He has moved from intellectual knowledge to personal encounter, and this has silenced him. Now, with Job rightly oriented to his Creator, God turns His attention to the counselors. Their case has been heard, and now it is time for the Judge to rule on their counsel. This is the resolution of the central human conflict of the book.

Key Issues

The Folly of Wooden Orthodoxy

The central charge against Eliphaz, Bildad, and Zophar is that they "have not spoken of Me what is right." This is a thunderclap. These men said many things that were, in isolation, doctrinally correct. They affirmed God's justice, His power, His hatred of sin. You could slice up their speeches and find many statements that would pass muster in a systematic theology exam. So what was the problem? Their problem was that they were right woodenly. They took a true principle, that God punishes sin, and applied it with all the nuance of a sledgehammer. They presumed to know the secret counsel of God based on Job's outward circumstances.

Their theology was tidy, predictable, and ultimately godless, because it left no room for the actual God, the one who rides on the whirlwind and does whatever He pleases. They were defending a system, a theological machine, not the living God. They thought they were God's defense attorneys, but God did not need their defense. He calls it folly. Folly in Scripture is not mere ignorance; it is a moral and spiritual failure. It is the attempt to fit the infinite God into the small box of our finite understanding and then to use that box to beat other people over the head. Their orthodoxy, detached from humility, compassion, and a sense of mystery, became a weapon against a righteous man and an offense to a sovereign God.

Verse by Verse Commentary

7 Now it happened after Yahweh had spoken these words to Job, that Yahweh said to Eliphaz the Temanite, “My anger burns against you and against your two friends because you have not spoken of Me what is right as My servant Job has.

The scene shifts, but the speaker remains the same. Yahweh, who has just finished humbling Job, now turns to Eliphaz, the eldest and likely the ringleader of the trio. The address is formal and severe. My anger burns against you. This is not mild displeasure. This is the holy wrath of God against those who have misrepresented Him. And why? Because in all their long-winded orations, they failed the fundamental test: they did not speak what was right or true about God. The word for "right" here means something that is firm, reliable, correct. Their theology was rickety. It was a flimsy caricature. And then comes the shocking commendation: as My servant Job has. Did Job not say some wild things? Did he not curse the day of his birth and accuse God of injustice? Yes. But in the midst of his raw, agonized, and sometimes mistaken complaints, Job was fundamentally oriented toward God. He was arguing with God, to God. He never spoke about God in the third person as a neat and tidy theological problem to be solved. He knew God was a person to be engaged, wrestled with, and ultimately trusted. The friends spoke about a tidy God; Job spoke to the untamable God. God prefers the honest cry of a sufferer to the bloodless platitudes of the comfortable.

8 So now, take for yourselves seven bulls and seven rams, and go to My servant Job, and offer up a burnt offering for yourselves, and My servant Job will pray for you. For I will accept him so that I may not do with you according to your folly, because you have not spoken of Me what is right, as My servant Job has.”

God's judgment is immediately followed by a prescription for grace. The way back is not through more arguments, but through sacrifice and mediation. Take for yourselves seven bulls and seven rams. This is a massive, expensive offering, the kind a king might make (cf. Num 23:1; 1 Chron 15:26). Their sin was great, and the required atonement reflects that. This is a public acknowledgment of their grievous error. Then, the most humbling instruction: go to My servant Job. They are not to go to a priest or directly to an altar on their own. They must go to the man they slandered and submit to his spiritual authority in this matter. Job, the accused heretic, is now their appointed mediator. They are to present the sacrifice, but it is Job's prayer that will be the effective instrument. My servant Job will pray for you. For I will accept him. The Hebrew is literally "I will lift up his face." God will show favor to Job, and through Job, to them. This is a stunning picture of substitution and mediation. They are saved from the consequences of their folly through the gracious acceptance of another. God repeats the charge at the end of the verse, underscoring the gravity of their sin and the necessity of this prescribed remedy.

9 So Eliphaz the Temanite and Bildad the Shuhite and Zophar the Naamathite went and did as Yahweh told them; and Yahweh accepted Job.

Here we see true repentance. There is no more argument, no self-justification, no attempt to bargain with God. They simply obey. The text is beautifully concise. They went, and they did. Their actions speak louder than all their previous words combined. They swallow their pride, gather their expensive animals, and present themselves to Job, the man they had systematically dismantled. They place themselves under his spiritual care, and he, in a beautiful act of forgiveness, prays for them. The final clause is the seal on the whole transaction: and Yahweh accepted Job. Again, the Hebrew says the Lord "lifted up Job's face." In accepting Job's prayer on their behalf, God both vindicates Job publicly and extends mercy to his foolish friends. The broken relationships are restored, not through human negotiation, but through a divinely mandated process of sacrifice, intercession, and humble obedience.

Application

This passage is a bucket of ice water for anyone who loves their theological system more than they love God and their neighbor. It is a severe warning against what we might call "soundbite theology." The friends had all the right answers, but they had the wrong heart. They used truth as a weapon, not as a balm. We must ask ourselves if our grasp of doctrine makes us more compassionate toward the suffering or more eager to correct them. Does our theology lead us to our knees in humble mystery, or does it puff us up with the sense that we have God all figured out?

Second, we see the beautiful shape of the gospel. The friends are guilty. They stand under the burning anger of God. They cannot save themselves through their own works or their own intellect. They are commanded to bring a sacrifice, a bloody substitute, and to rely entirely on the mediation of an accepted representative. They are saved by grace, through the intercession of another. This is what God does for us in Christ. We have all spoken wrongly of God. Our hearts are full of folly. But God has provided the sacrifice, His own Son, and He has appointed a mediator, Jesus Christ the righteous. We do not come to God on the basis of our theological precision; we come to God through the one whose face He has accepted, our elder brother, Jesus. We must, like the friends, abandon our self-justification, obey the command, and trust the mediator.

Finally, there is a lesson here for those who suffer. Job, in his vindication, is not called to gloat but to serve. He is called to forgive and pray for those who tormented him. This is the hard path of Christian maturity. When we have been wronged, our restoration is not complete until we are able to become instruments of grace in the lives of those who wronged us. Job's restoration began when he prayed for his friends (v. 10). Our freedom is often found not in receiving an apology, but in giving the gift of intercession.