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Context No. 517 of 4322 · Job

Context · Reflection

Job 20:1-16: in context

1Then Zophar the Naamathite answered, 2“Therefore my thoughts answer me, even by reason of my haste that is in me. 3I have heard the reproof which puts me to shame. The spirit of my understanding answers me. 4Don’t you know this from old time, since man was placed on earth, 5that the triumphing of the wicked is short, the joy of the godless but for a moment? 6Though his height mount up to the heavens, and his head reach to the clouds, 7yet he will perish forever like his own dung. Those who have seen him will say, ‘Where is he?’ 8He will fly away as a dream, and will not be found. Yes, he will be chased away like a vision of the night. 9The eye which saw him will see him no more, neither will his place see him any more. 10His children will seek the favor of the poor. His hands will give back his wealth. 11His bones are full of his youth, but youth will lie down with him in the dust. 12“Though wickedness is sweet in his mouth, though he hide it under his tongue, 13though he spare it, and will not let it go, but keep it still within his mouth, 14yet his food in his bowels is turned. It is cobra venom within him. 15He has swallowed down riches, and he will vomit them up again. God will cast them out of his belly. 16He will suck cobra venom. The viper’s tongue will kill him.

This is a speech by Zophar, one of Job's friends, and it comes with a warning label, because these friends are largely wrong about Job; they keep insisting his suffering must be punishment for hidden sin, which it is not. So Zophar is not to be trusted as a diagnosis of Job. But he does describe something real about the mechanics of sin, and it is worth taking on its own. The triumph of the wicked, he says, is short; the joy of the godless lasts only a moment. Though he mount up to the heavens, he will perish; those who saw him will ask, where is he? And then Zophar reaches for a vivid image of how sin works from the inside.

Though wickedness is sweet in his mouth, Zophar says, though he hides it under his tongue and savors it and will not let it go, yet in his stomach it turns; it becomes the venom of a cobra within him. He has swallowed down riches, and he will vomit them up again. That is a precise picture of how a cherished sin behaves. On the tongue it is sweet; that is exactly why we hide it there and roll it around and refuse to spit it out. But swallowed, taken in and kept, it turns to poison in the gut. The sweetness is real and it is brief; the poison is real and it lasts. The very thing savored so carefully in the mouth becomes what sickens and kills from within.

That is an honest description of the sins I am most reluctant to give up, the ones I keep tucked under my tongue precisely because they taste good. Zophar, for all that he misjudges Job, has this part right: the pleasure is genuine but it is only in the mouth, and what feels sweet going down turns to venom once it settles in. When I am savoring some sweet, secret sin, unwilling to let it go because of how good it tastes, can I remember that it does not stay in the mouth, and that what I am refusing to spit out is already turning to poison inside me?

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