The Three Amigo's
When my children were younger, we enjoyed the classics, both on screen and as prescribed readers during homeschooling. Among our favourites were stories where unlikely friendships were formed, like Charlotte the barn spider and Wilbur, the pig, Baloo the bear and Mowgli the boy raised by wolves, and Pooh and Piglet. These childhood tales are often repeated in real life where equally unlikely friendships have fascinated the world; like the friendship between Mark Twain and Helen Keller; Marilyn Monroe and Ella Fitzgerald, and the two literature giants Lewis and Tolkien, both professors at Cambridge.
As you can recollect, this week, we read two proverbs mentioning friendships. First, we were reminded that a friend loves at all times and a brother is born for a time of adversity, and then we were reminded that while unreliable friends will lead to our ruin, there is a friend who sticks closer than a brother.
Friendships are compared to lifts because of their ability to take you up or down. While we certainly have examples of both types of friends in the Bible, the three friends of Job and Daniel make an interesting comparison. While these two men lived hundreds of years apart, they had surprisingly much in common.
o Both went through severe trials and faced various challenges.
o Both were found blameless in the midst of severe testing.
o Both were blessed by the presence of God.
o Both can be considered giants of the faith.
o Both had three significant friends, and it is with this last point that the comparison ends.
Job’s friends were supposed to support him. Initially, they did, sitting down on the ground with Job for seven days and seven nights, not saying a word to him. [1] If only they remained quiet, but soon they began to weary him down with long miserable discourses, offering simplistic answers to the topic of suffering. Their advice is a mixture of truth and falsehood, and thus God tells Eliphaz at the end, ‘I am angry with you and your two friends because you have not spoken the truth about me, as my servant Job has. [2] No wonder Job calls them, ‘miserable comforters.’
In contrast, Daniel’s three friends were very different. As high-profile prisoners of King Nebuchadnezzar, they were handpicked to be educated in the King’s Palace in all the ways of Babylon. This education certainly included magic and fortunetelling. Yet, they united in their obedience to God first and put it into practice by abstaining from all delicacies that might have led them to sin. United and strengthened in this resolve, they supported each other through tests and trials that characterized living in Babylon. What a precious friendship they put on display throughout their lifetime!
GRACE CHALLENGE FOR THE WEEK: We desire friends who will stick with us during good and bad times, for we not only want a buddy’s shoulder to cry on when we are disappointed but also someone we can celebrate with when we are happy. Instead of weighing our friends, let us look into our own hearts today and ask ourselves – “What kind of friend am I?”
