Job 6 :14

He who pleads for kindness from his fellow man,

   Has forsaken the reverence due the Almighty.

This verse really resonated with me. God calls us to put out trust in Him and not in other people; not even in another Christian or our family or anyone short of the divine. I have friends I ask to help me sometimes, but I never fully expect them to. They almost always do, but I put my faith in God.

The thrust of the sources I used had the first stitch as basically “Your friends should help you when you need it.” The expectation is that Job is chastising his friends for not helping him. But the path I followed and the insight from my favorite source turns this from a chastising to a lesson. I will run through the smaller choices, but this bit overrides the rest.

In place of “fellowman”, options included “friend” and nothing else. I much prefer fellow man for either outcome, but it did come from my favorite source. “Kindness” was suggested as “devotion”, “pity”, and “loyalty”. Within my basic struggle with everyone’s selfish desire for loyalty from others, “loyalty” without action provides nothing and does not fit from fellow man as it would with friend. Devotion is similar to loyalty. “Pity” here is “appropriate”, but I think it is just a feeling and needs an action to make it suitable for use. Kindness fits both fellow man and is action. “He who pleads” was “those who withhold”, “a despairing man should have”, “should be shown to him who is afflicted”, “owed to one who fails”, and “owe’s the blighted man”. The difference in message limits the outcome to “he who pleads”, but the term for “plead” must be similar to the one for “afflicted/fails/blighted/despairing”.

Each other source used “fear” over “reverence”, but not only does this usage fall to my preference for “reverence”, I did not align with the aspect of “forsaking a fear” being an option. The details of the second stitch are strikingly similar considering the difference in the first. The only differences are really using “Shaddi” for “Almighty” and repeating the subject again from the first stitch (he).

My source had a long explanation for why his interpretation was different and reached to depths I cannot follow. However, I am confident God did not intend this to be a chastisement, but an affirmation that we cannot trust man, but can trust God. Once again, I believed I have found something I would not have found studying this in any other manner. I enjoy days like these that I feel I hear the Word of God spoken to me. It is not something different from the rest of the Bible, but it fits so well into the picture of how Christ calls us to follow Him.