Job 17:4-9

These verses support the petition in Job 17:3. If God will not undertake for Job none else will, for the hearts of his friends have been blinded. This thought of the perverse obstinacy and cruelty of his friends leads Job again to a gloomy survey of his whole condition (cf. Job 16:22 to Job 17:2). He is become a public contempt to mankind and brought to the lowest ebb of mortal weakness and humiliation (Job 17:6). Such moral perversions on the earth astonish the righteous and rouse them to indignation against the wicked in their prosperity (Job 17:8). Yet they will not permit themselves to be misled by such things to err from the paths of rectitude. Full of moral terror as these perversions are the righteous will in spite of them cleave to his righteousness. He will feel that he is in possession of the only true good, and even because of them and though he sees the world under the rule of God given over to wrong, he will wax stronger and stronger in well doing (Job 17:9) an astonishing passage.