Job 6:17 What time they wax warm, they vanish: when it is hot, they are consumed out of their place.
When I was a kid, I used to go to a little country store across the highway from the Bill Rice Ranch. It was called Layne’s Country Store. The shack is well over a hundred years old now. There used to be an old gas pump out front, and I recall there being a wood-burning stove inside. Then there were guys in the spit and whittle club. They would sit around, spit, whittle, and solve the world’s problems.
When I was a kid, we used to go there and buy popsicles in the summer. There is nothing better than a popsicle on a hot day, and there is nothing that melts more quickly than a popsicle on a hot day. They just become liquid instantly. Sometimes friends can be like that. They can just melt. You might call them fair-weather friends. When you are popular and things are going well, they are your friend. When things turn, they do as well.
Job was a man who owned much and lost everything. His wife, who had been through trouble also, said, “Just curse God and die.” That is just what the devil said Job would do, but he never actually did it. Job had three friends, and to their credit, when they heard of his calamity, the family, wealth, and health he had lost, they came and sat with him without saying anything. That is a good start.
What follows is their assumption that Job had done some specific evil and therefore was suffering God’s judgment. In verse 17 Job says, “What time they wax warm, they vanish: when it is hot, they are consumed out of their place.” They just melt away. Job later says, “How forcible are right words! but what doth your arguing reprove?” They were saying good things, but they didn’t have the whole picture.
If you want the whole picture, you look at the first and last chapter of Job. God said of Job, “Have you considered my servant Job? He is a good man.” As far as Job and his friends were concerned, they didn’t even know that the devil was in this story. Job knew about his felt innocence and about God, but he didn’t even know that the devil was involved. So, consequently, when his friends tried to be a help to Job, they were trying to be a help with what they knew, which was not all the facts.
Now, you want to be a good friend and have good friends. A good friend connects the truth about God with the truth about you. Job’s friends said many true things about God, but they didn’t know what was going on, so they weren’t able to connect the truth about Job with the truth they knew about God.
Being truthful is not a matter of being hard or easy; it is a matter of being truthful. Sometimes we have no sympathy for people and think, “Your problems are all your fault.” Other times we feel their pain, but we don’t ever confront them with the things that have caused the problems in the first place, things that they have done.
Proverbs says, “A word fitly spoken is like apples of gold in pictures of silver.” It is a beautiful thing. So if I want to be the kind of friend I should be, I need to say the right thing to the right person in the right way at the right time. All four of those things are important, and all four of those things are easy to lose sight of.
So, if you have a friend that is in need or perhaps you are a friend in need, remember, help comes from a fitly spoken word. It is the right thing at the right time to the right person in the right way. In short, it means that a good friend connects the truth about God with the truth about others.