As we remember Jesus’ death on Good Friday and celebrate the Risen Christ on Easter Sunday, let us remember the sufferers in the midst of our churches. There will be people that need us to tenderly speak to them and build them up with words of gospel hope. They may come hopeless, even feeling as if God is against them. Let us give them words of life, “For I know that my Redeemer lives, and at the last he will stand upon the earth…I shall see God” (Job 19:25-26).   

Soon believers all around the world will celebrate Good Friday and Easter Sunday. Some will go to church because they are expected to do so by family. Others will go because they know the joy of gathering together on the Lord’s Day to worship Him. Still others will show up broken and tormented by trials that have torn them asunder. They may even be wondering if God “counts [them] as his adversary” (Job 19:11). The church needs to come around them and tenderly speak words of hope. Job 19 gives us a window into how the righteous suffer, and ultimately a window into our Savior’s suffering, as well as a glimpse of the sufferer’s only hope.

Job’s suffering was considerable, but perhaps it was the words of his friends that broke him and tormented him the most (Job 19:2). Instead of comforting Job they magnified themselves against him and wrongly pointed to his disgrace as evidence of some secret sin. But Job was suffering because of his godliness (1:8). Job found his friends to be “miserable comforters” (16:2). They had failed to approach him in tenderness and build him up. God’s people are to speak in ways that are only “good for building up, as fits the occasion, that it may give grace to those who hear” (Eph. 4:29). In this way we reflect the tenderness and grace of Jesus who invites “all who labor and are heavy laden” to “come to Me” (Matt. 11:28).

When the Lord spoke with Satan, the adversary claimed that Job feared God because the Lord had “put a hedge around him and his house and all that he has, on every side” (Job 1:10). Ironically, Job says that “He has walled up my way, so that I cannot pass” (19:8). He concludes that God has “kindled his wrath against me and counts me as his adversary” (19:11). But nothing could be further from the truth. His adversary is Satan, not God (1:11; 2:5).

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