Nancy Guthrie’s What Grieving People Wish You Knew, written after two of her children died, is very helpful.
– at the end we find that it is rather mixed, but Job is more right than wrong, and his three friends more wrong than right.
- Make contact.
- they travel considerable distances to reach him, when others had deserted him – Job 19:14. Note Prov.18:24.
- Aim to offer sympathy and comfort.
- Job 4-31 records a painful debate about God and suffering, and whether Job deserved what he got. They did not start out as ‘Job’s comforters’; they intended to comfort Job. But Prov.17:14.
- Show sympathy and comfort.
- 2:12. They did not recognise him. They are not having coffee together; they are sitting with him in a rubbish dump. Rom.12:15. Calvin: ‘it was a good affection they had.’
- a glimmer of Christ in the Garden of Gethsemane
- Sometimes silence is better than words.
- 2:13. Nancy Guthrie: ‘A person who is sad doesn’t necessarily need to be cheered up but needs time, space, and permission to simply be sad for a while.’ Speak the name of the deceased, and it is fine to say: “I do not know what to say.’
- seven days was the period of mourning in extreme situations – Lam.2:10; Ezek.3:15. Job thinks they would have been better off just being there and saying nothing – 13:5. Helmut Thielicke, who lived through the Confessing Church’s resistance to Hitler, once said that the greatest defect in American Christians was their inadequate view of suffering.