Day Fourteen
Movement V — The Honest Floor
Springs
Job has argued with his friends for thirty-five chapters. God has answered out of the whirlwind. The great questions have been raised and mostly not answered, and Job has laid his hand on his mouth.
And then the book of Job — the deepest treatment of suffering in the canon, the one that goes further into the dark than anything else in Scripture — ends its account of comfort like this:
Then came there unto him all his brethren, and all his sisters… and did eat bread with him in his house: and they bemoaned him, and comforted him over all the evil that the LORD had brought upon him: every man also gave him a piece of money, and every one a ring of gold. Job 42:11, KJV
Relatives. A table. Bread. Money. A gold ring.
After the whirlwind, that is what comfort looked like when it finally arrived.
Today’s morsel
“By the coming of Titus.”
Say it, then say the name of somebody who came.
Wells
The verb in Job 42:11 is nacham — the same root as Lamech’s hope in Genesis 5, the same root as God’s command in Isaiah 40, the same root as the rod and staff in Psalm 23:4. The great word of this study, and here it is doing its work through siblings who showed up with food.
Note who is not credited with comforting him. The three friends also came. They sat with him seven days in silence, which was the best thing they did, and then they opened their mouths for thirty chapters of theology, most of it correct in isolation and wrong in application.
The family did not explain anything. They ate with him and gave him things. Scripture assigns them the verb.
Nevertheless God, that comforteth those that are cast down, comforted us by the coming of Titus. 2 Corinthians 7:6, KJV
Read the grammar closely, because both halves are load-bearing. God is the subject. God is the one who comforts. And the means by which he did it was that a particular man walked through a particular door on a particular day.
Paul does not say God comforted him and also Titus arrived. He says God comforted him by the coming of Titus. The mediation is not a lesser grade of the thing. It is the thing.
Yesterday said some nights do not resolve. Today says something that cuts the other way and is easier to miss: a great deal of comfort arrives, gets set on the counter, and goes unrecognised because we were waiting for it to feel like something else.
If you are holding out for the felt consolation — the interior lift, the sense of presence — and meanwhile the neighbour has mowed your yard and your sister has driven four hours and somebody keeps texting on Tuesdays, you are declining a delivery. That is paraklēsis. Somebody called alongside. It has a face and a casserole dish and it is the ordinary way this works.
Which quietly sets up the last movement. If comfort arrives with a face, then somebody has to be the face.
There is an interlude that belongs beside this day, on the warm and ordinary things themselves — the meal, the coat, the fire, the hand. It sits outside the twenty-one and can be read now or later: The cake baked on coals.
Aquifer
An antiquity marker hiding in the gift. The piece of money is a qesitah, an archaic unit that appears only three times in the Old Testament: here, in Genesis 33:19 where Jacob buys a field, and in Joshua 24:32 where that same field is recalled. It is not the currency of the later monarchy. Whatever one concludes about the date of the book of Job, the narrator is using patriarchal-era money.
“Those that are cast down.” The Greek tapeinos means low, lowly, of no elevation — the same adjective used of the humble whom God exalts. It is not primarily an emotional word; it is a word about position. God comforts the people who are down there. Paul includes himself in that group without embarrassment, which is worth noticing in a letter defending his apostleship.
Read 2 Corinthians 7:5–7 whole. Paul says his flesh had no rest, that he was troubled on every side, with fighting without and fears within — and then nevertheless. The comfort did not cancel the conditions of verse 5. It arrived into them. Titus did not fix the fightings or the fears; he showed up, and he brought good news about the Corinthians, and that was enough to be called the comfort of God.