Zophar is rather angry at the insult he perceives. Unfortunately, the real insult sails right over his head. As with his two friends, he is angry only that Job rejects their simplistic logic.
Zophar’s emphasis is that the wicked are typically struck down in judgment at the pinnacle of their power. Were this not rich in imagery, we could have skipped a lot of this blather and jumped to the end of the book. What he says reflects the truth as far as it goes.
As with the others, Zophar dispenses parabolic truth from a literal mind. Truly, it matters not what any human achieves unjustly, God can bring them down with the merest twitch of His thoughts. That’s not to say it always happens that way, nor that it has anything to do with Job. Zophar goes on at length about recompense and balancing the scales with ill-gotten gains returned to the victims who lost them. He characterizes all the evil things such men might do, things he surely knows Job has not done.
With such resounding poetic justice we agree, but not if Zophar takes it all literally. Sometimes it happens as he describes, but by no means consistently. That is, God has inscrutable plans that may call for some wicked men to live long and prosper in their sin. Thus, Zophar misses the point of such pious chatter on account of his literal mind, but even worse, it has no bearing on the case at hand.
