So the book of Job begins by describing a very wealthy and prominent man who is also completely faithful to the Lord. In the course of the rest of that first chapter and the next, he loses it all. His wealth is either forcefully taken from him or destroyed in turn. Even his children are ripped from him in a tragic catastrophe. You know how the story goes from there, his wife tells him to, "curse God and die." Then he even loses his health to a terrible plague of painful itching oozing boils. So he sits down there, in his sackcloth, to scrape himself with broken shards of pottery to find what little possible relief he can. There he is in my mind, sitting and scraping himself. I can almost hear the scratch of baked clay on his broken skin sometimes as I imagine it. It is into this scene that three of his friends come.
You would think that they would be full of consolation and comfort toward their grieving and stricken friend. The opposite is however the case. They are critical of him and call him to repentance for the imagined sins that he is hiding -- otherwise he wouldn't have been punished so terribly.
Well the story goes on and on, and eventually he receives all his wealth back and has more children, but none of that happens until Job 42:10. "and the Lord turned the captivity of Job, when he prayed for his friends"
They needed forgiveness and he needed healing. Both needs are met, when he invests himself compassionately in their cause the way he wished they would have done. There is full healing in full forgiveness.
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