What Do I Do When Everyone Is Against Me?
Have you ever felt like everyone is against you? Friends, family, and co-workers seem to all be conspiring against you—leaving you feeling hopeless and discouraged. This was certainly an emotion Job experienced.
Job 18-21
Today's Scripture Passage
A Few Thoughts to Consider
Have you ever felt like everyone is against you?
Friends, family, and co-workers seem to all be conspiring against you—leaving you feeling hopeless and discouraged. This was certainly an emotion Job experienced. In Job 18-21, a heated exchange continues between Job and his friends, particularly Bildad and Zophar. Bildad accuses Job of being wicked and describes the terrifying fate of the ungodly, implying that Job’s suffering is due to sin.
Job, in turn, laments his friends’ lack of compassion and defends his innocence, expressing his despair and frustration with their accusations. The desperation of Job’s plight is found in Job 19:2-6 when he cries out to his friends:
2 How long will you torment me
and crush me with words?
3 You have humiliated me ten times now,
and you mistreat me without shame.
4 Even if it is true that I have sinned,
my mistake concerns only me.
5 If you really want to appear superior to me
and would use my disgrace as evidence against me,
6 then understand that it is God who has wronged me
and caught me in his net.
The imagery of being ensnared in a net conveys his feelings of entrapment and helplessness, suggesting that his suffering is both deliberate and inescapable. “In Job’s mind God is at war with him,”[1] and his friends have abandoned him. They are acting “as though they were God.”[2] They should be there to comfort him, but all they do is torment him with accusations.
Job is so low that he says in verses 14-17, 14 “My relatives stop coming by, and my close friends have forgotten me. 15 My house guests and female servants regard me as a stranger; I am a foreigner in their sight. 16 I call for my servant, but he does not answer, even if I beg him with my own mouth. 17 My breath is offensive to my wife, and my own family finds me repulsive.”
He then turns to his friends and says, 21 “Have mercy on me, my friends, have mercy, for God’s hand has struck me. 22 Why do you persecute me as God does? Will you never get enough of my flesh?”
