1: Zophar from Naamath again took his turn:
2: "I can't believe what I'm hearing! You've put my teeth on edge, my stomach in a knot.
3: How dare you insult my intelligence like this! Well, here's a piece of my mind!
4: "Don't you even know the basics, how things have been since the earliest days, when Adam and Eve were first placed on earth?
5: The good times of the wicked are short-lived; godless joy is only momentary.
6: The evil might become world famous, strutting at the head of the celebrity parade,
7: But still end up in a pile of dung. Acquaintances look at them with disgust and say, "What's that?'
8: They fly off like a dream that can't be remembered, like a shadowy illusion that vanishes in the light.
9: Though once notorious public figures, now they're nobodies, unnoticed, whether they come or go.
10: Their children will go begging on skid row, and they'll have to give back their ill-gotten gain.
11: Right in the prime of life, and youthful and vigorous, they'll die.
12: "They savor evil as a delicacy, roll it around on their tongues,
13: Prolong the flavor, a dalliance in decadence--real gourmets of evil!
14: But then they get stomach cramps, a bad case of food poisoning.
15: They gag on all that rich food; God makes them vomit it up.
16: They gorge on evil, make a diet of that poison--a deadly diet--and it kills them.
17: No quiet picnics for them beside gentle streams with fresh-baked bread and cheese, and tall, cool drinks.
18: They spit out their food half-chewed, unable to relax and enjoy anything they've worked for.
19: And why? Because they exploited the poor, took what never belonged to them.
20: "Such God--denying people are never content with what they have or who they are; their greed drives them relentlessly.
21: They plunder everything but they can't hold on to any of it.
22: Just when they think they have it all, disaster strikes; they're served up a plate full of misery.
23: When they've filled their bellies with that, God gives them a taste of his anger, and they get to chew on that for a while.
24: As they run for their lives from one disaster, they run smack into another.
25: They're knocked around from pillar to post, beaten to within an inch of their lives. They're trapped in a house of horrors,
26: and see their loot disappear down a black hole. Their lives are a total loss--not a penny to their name, not so much as a bean.
27: God will strip them of their sin-soaked clothes and hang their dirty laundry out for all to see.
28: Life is a complete wipeout for them, nothing surviving God's wrath.
29: There! That's God's blueprint for the wicked--what they have to look forward to." Job's Response Why Do the Wicked Have It So Good?