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Job’s three friends could not speak anything because they had no knowledge, no understanding, concerning the purpose of what had happened to Job. The scene here indicates that Job and his friends were ignorant concerning that most painful and most terrifying occurrence, and were puzzled in their godliness, unable to discern what the reason was, what the purpose was, and what the result would be. Actually, Job’s experience was a step taken by God in His divine economy to carry out the consuming and stripping of the contented Job in order to usher Job into a deeper seeking after God, that he might gain God instead of His blessings and his attainments in his perfection and integrity. God’s stripping and consuming were exercised over Job to tear Job down that God might have a base and a way to rebuild him with God Himself that he might become a God-man, the same as God in His life and nature but not in His Godhead, in order to express God.
The divine revelation in the Bible is progressive. Up to Job’s time the progression of the divine revelation had reached only the level of Abraham’s time, that is, that sinners need God’s redemption with the shedding of the blood of the burnt offering (Job 1:5; 42:8). The divine truths regarding such matters as regeneration (John 3:6; 1 Pet. 1:23), renewing (2 Cor. 4:16; Eph. 4:23), transformation (Rom. 12:2; 2 Cor. 3:18), conformation (Rom. 8:29), and glorification (Rom. 8:23, 30; Phil. 3:21) were not explicitly revealed to man in God’s Old Testament economy. God could not speak such things to Job and his friends because they were in a primitive stage of the divine revelation (cf. John 3:7-12; 16:12-13). These things were not revealed in completion until the apostle Paul’s time. Paul received a full and explicit revelation of things concerning which Job and his friends had no understanding (Eph. 3:3-6, 9-11; Col. 1:25-27). Without the Epistles of Paul it would be difficult to understand the book of Job, because the conclusion of Job does not give us an explicit view concerning the purpose of God’s dealing with His people. However, in the view of the New Testament it is very clear that God’s purpose in dealing with His holy people is that they would be emptied of everything and receive only God as their gain (Phil. 3:8; cf. Psa. 73:25-26). The desire of God’s heart is that we would gain Him in full as life, as the life supply, and as everything to our being.