Releasing Bitterness
In the heat of conflict, it’s all too easy to allow words and actions to be influenced by bitterness towards those who have hurt us…particularly when we know we are right.
Hurt when you’re already hurting
Job had lost everything. His family, his livestock and livelihood, all of it destroyed seemingly, as Job went on to exclaim, without just cause.
Job’s friends found him literally amongst the ashes of his life, aching from wounds that afflicted him…
“Wailing loudly, they tore their robes and threw dust into the air over their heads to show their grief.” Job 2:12
Moved by compassion they sat with him in the ashes, silently, for seven days.
Job himself broke the silence, voicing his great lament, pleading for God to answer his anguish. At this, however, the three friends take offence at what they see as a slight on the nature of God, and rebuke him – gently at first, but with increasing fury as Job, frustratingly, continues to assert that he is righteous before God.
The conflict was not born of bitterness, but the epic argument grows heated. Job sarcastically dismisses these ‘comforters’, while his friends insist that, in the end, Job must deserve all that has befallen him.
Reeling from the death of his children, the loss of everything in his life, covered head to toe in painful sores, Job also had to contend with those to whom he had been close saying to him “You deserve this pain.”
Cut them off…or lift them up?
Modern Western culture tells us to rid ourselves of “toxic relationships”, and it is easy to imagine that Job would want little to do with his friends following this exchange.
It is God who brings the conflict to an end, exposing that every one of them, including Job, are ignorant of much that they have been arguing, but Job is ultimately justified by the Lord.
An understandable response would have been for Job, even silently, to gloat over his opponents and hold himself above them in his justification, but God compels Job to a different attitude by charging him to lift up his friends in prayer.
“My servant Job will pray for you, and I will accept his prayer on your behalf. I will not treat you as you deserve, for you have not spoken accurately about me, as my servant Job has”Job 42:8
God charges Job, as He does all of us, to relinquish the hold of bitterness in our dealings with those that have hurt us. As our saviour Jesus has himself justified us, he does so that we might in turn lift up others to him in need of the same mercy he has shown us.
