Job 20:3

When I hear censure which insults me,

   My spirit of understanding impels me to reply.

Once again, I feel Zophar is being led by his sin nature. We all do that sometimes. We respond without taking the pause to ask God for guidance, and we get it wrong. Maturity is learning from your past mistakes and wanting to do better by responding after this pause.

‘Censure’ was also ‘rebuke’, ‘check’, ‘reproof’, and ‘reproach’. ‘Insult’ was also ‘dishonors’, ‘reproaches’, and ‘shames’.

‘My spirit of understanding’ was also ‘spirit from my mind’, ‘impulse from my mind’, ‘my understanding’, and ‘a spirit beyond my understanding’. The spirit beyond his understanding makes this potentially scary. ‘Impels’ was also ‘lets’, ‘bids’, ‘makes’, ‘causes’, ‘inspires’ and one changed the phrase to ‘answers me’.

In everyday English, I would think this was ‘When I am rebuked in an insulting way, my understanding forces me to respond.’ I think this is the way sin nature works. Whenever confronted with a possible wrong, the sin nature wants to escalate the situation by a negative response. ‘Eye for eye’ and ‘tooth for tooth’ comes to mind.

Christ of course calls us to turn the other cheek or to offer our cloak as well. I think of this as deescalation or trying to help someone in such need that they are willing to steal. Those acting from evil will hit you again and take all you have, but the expectation is they are going to hell anyways. Not that we should use that as an excuse to behave badly when we are called to love our enemy.

We looked at Romans 11 this week in Bible study and found a group called to be our enemy on earth, but essentially a coinheritor of eternity in heaven. It left us all in a quandary for not being able to grasp the full meaning of Paul’s words. We are not meant to understand it all, but we are called to serve Christ by serving all others while here on earth. It’s hard to love Zophar as he rants to Job in this speech, but we must find a way.

Written 1/12/26, Posted 2/24/26, Job 461/~1070