Job 15:10

He goes on to imply that he and his friends were wiser than Job. He tells Job, "Both the gray-haired and the aged are among us, older than your father" (v.10). He had appealed to tradition before. Now he says that tradition, and the men who started it, were both on the side of these three!

Then he charges Job with the grossest claim to superior wisdom, without the least ground for it. Eliphaz has grave doubts about this claim, and challenges Job to prove it is real. He also pleads for himself and his friends: they have been treated as nothing, though they did not deserve it, instead of receiving the honour due to age and experience.

In verse 10, he claimed that the view he and his friends argued for had the approval and support of very old and respected men. No doubt it was so. Job's three friends were putting forward the common idea of their day. It was based perhaps on God's rescue of Noah and his family when the flood came. Then the godly were favoured and the wicked destroyed, and so, they felt, it must always be.

Eliphaz was a man who stood strongly for the great value of experience. No one denies the honour due to elders, at least no person with any sense of what is right. But Eliphaz used it in a wrong way, and told Job, "Why, you are going against everything held by the best men who have ever lived. Are you the first man? Are you as old as the hills? You talk as if you knew better than all these excellent men, older than your father. And you set yourself up in this way."

The authority of many "fathers" carries much more weight and respectability than the experience of one person. It would show much more modesty to be guided by the voice of many wise and learned men than by the light of one's own experience. But the fact is that neither experience nor tradition will do. The first may be true as far as it goes. Yet you can hardly find two men whose experience matches exactly. As for the second, it is a mass of confusion. One father differs from another, and nothing can be more slippery or uncertain than the voice of tradition.

But God put Elihu forward to bring to nothing the pride of age and experience, observation and tradition. For there you have what belonged to each of those friends. They were old men, and they were proud of their place... And one of the wonderful ways of God is this: no tradition can ever meet present circumstances. The same facts may even occur. But they appear in a different light, and the circumstances change them a great deal. All of that has to be taken into account.

In his effort to comfort Job, Eliphaz presented his own observation as a conclusive witness that he was right (ch. 4:8). Bildad, following Eliphaz, appealed to the tradition handed down from older men as a reliable witness. Then Zophar practically told Job that he was right because his own intuition told him so! All this was empty. Elihu alone insisted that mankind is totally ignorant of God unless God reveals Himself. Now God can speak!