With Friends Like These, Who Needs Enemies?

“Remember, I pray thee, who ever perished being innocent? or where were the righteous cut off?  Even as I have seen, they that plow iniquity, and sow wickedness, reap the same.  By the blast of God they perish, and by the breath of His nostrils are they consumed.”  Job 4:7-9

Continuing with the account of ancient Job, God had allowed Satan to destroy all that Job possessed, his children, and then attacked Job physically with sore boils all over his body.  Satan had charged that Job would curse God if these things happened to him.  When three of Jobs friends heard of his terrible dilemma, they came to visit and sat quietly for one week (Chapters 1 & 2).  Job then finally spoke, cursed the day of his birth, questioned why he had ever been born, and mournfully complained of his situation (Chapter 3).  In Chapter 4, one of his visitors, Eliphaz, spoke up to, I would like to say, console him, but I think he rather had had enough of Job’s wallowing in his “woe is me” rhetoric and decided to go about the chore of telling Job what he surmised was the cause of his misery.

Eliphaz asked Job for permission to speak, but I think he would have spoken regardless of Job’s answer.  He first spoke of Job’s positive attributes.  Job passed along intellectual and spiritual knowledge to others, helped other people in their hardships, and a good counselor to those who suffered mentally and emotionally.  I suppose that Job also tried to encourage those whose faith was weak and admonished those who were caught in sin’s trap.  In other words, Eliphaz was backing up what God had said about Job–God fearing, perfect, and upright.  I wonder, after hearing all these nice words, if Job wondered where Eliphaz was going with this.  He was perhaps thinking, “OK, Eliphaz, tell me what you really think”.

Beginning to get down to the “nitty-gritty”, Eliphaz, in a round-about way, after hearing Job’s continuous complaints, was really asking, “Where’s your faith, man?”  Was all of Job’s prior acts of righteousness just that, an act?  Was he just trying to earn God’s favor?  It was almost as if Eliphaz was asking the same question that Satan did, “Does Job fear God for nothing?”  If Job had truly been sincere in his pursuit of God and been the righteous man that he purported to be, wouldn’t God have kept him from all of this trouble and despair?  The criticisms of Job had begun.  It was going to be a long night for the man in misery.

One main factor to keep in mind concerning these conversations between Job and his visitors was what I call the “do good doctrine”.  These men, as the Jews who came many years after them, believed that if a person lived righteously, then things would always go their way and they would be, as the saying goes, “healthy, wealthy, and wise”.  However, if a person lived an evil life, then he or she could expect nothing but suffering.  Many people still believe that today, but those of us who know the Lord, know that God bestows His grace on whomsoever He will and that even righteous people suffer because we live in a sin-cursed world.  Jesus said in Matthew 5:45 that God “makes His sun to rise on the evil and on the good and sends rain on the just and on the unjust”.  Thus, Eliphaz, Bildad, and Zophar were speaking from an erroneous doctrine, basing their entire charges against Job on a false belief and not on fact.  I would guess that Eliphaz had never suffered to any great degree.

Eliphaz had witnessed harm that came to others who were evildoers, thus he assumed that Job had also “ploughed iniquity and sowed wickedness” (verse 8) otherwise he would not be suffering like he was.  Eliphaz’ motto was likely, “Don’t do the crime if you can’t do the time” or words to that effect.  It is true that unrepentant sinners will experience the wrath of God, but Eliphaz’s judgment of Job as a hypocrite who outwardly showed piousness but at the same time inwardly was harboring a resentment and a distrust of God was the same judgment that Satan had issued against Job.

Eliphaz then told of a vision that he had while sleeping.  We don’t know if the vision was before or after he came to see Job.  In the vision, Eliphaz opened his eyes and a ghostlike figure passed in front of him, making him fearful, then stood still, and asked him a rhetorical question having to do with the impossibility of a mortal man or woman to be more just and pure than his or her Creator.  This, of course, was a reference to Eliphaz’s belief that Job was assuming himself to be too righteous for God to punish.  The spirit in Eliphaz’s vision went on to say that men and women whom God created are not much better than the dust from which they came, or they are like a moth–here today, gone tomorrow.  What wisdom that men have cannot stop them from dying.  Matthew Henry described the brevity of life as “birth and death are but the sunrise and sunset of the same day”.  Thus Eliphaz was reminding Job that he was no one special.  Some comforter he was, and he wasn’t finished.

Nest week:  Eliphaz Continues His Judgmental Analysis