Job 15:2

The second round of discussion opens with the appeal of Eliphaz. He now shows less restraint about his growing sense that Job must lack integrity. As before, what he presses is weighty truth, and he presses it with great force. But applying it to the sufferer had no basis, and so it was unjust in the highest degree.

Job 15 gives the second speech of Eliphaz, and we can detect a harsher tone in it. The friends had come to comfort, but their efforts soon turned into argument. Their tempers rose and bitterness spoiled their spirits, as each man argued to prove his own point of view. How often through the centuries has this tragedy spoiled the testimony of God-fearing people, ending in quarrels and division, right down to our own day.

Is it wisdom, he asks, for a man who claims to be wise to pour out empty words like a blast of the east wind — a dry, withering thing? Job had indeed opened himself to the charge of casting off fear by his wild language, which was the opposite of prayer or devotion. His own words, says Eliphaz, confirm what the friends suspect and charge — wickedness and godlessness. But when he accuses Job of being crafty, he charges what is untrue. The poor sufferer had poured out his misery without a thought for the consequences. Whatever he is, Job is no hypocrite.

This reply of Eliphaz lacks the self-restraint he had shown in his first speech. At first he had at least spoken with some consideration for Job. Now he flatly accuses him of gross sin and hypocrisy. He says in effect: if Job thought himself wise, why did he speak with empty knowledge, his words like the east wind? Eliphaz does not answer what Job has said. He only accuses him of useless talk and speeches that can do no good (vv.2-3). He says, "You cast off fear, and restrain prayer before God." But Job's words showed very definite fear and he had actually prayed to God in the presence of his friends. What was Eliphaz talking about?

Their error was not at all a rare one. It is found above all among righteous people who know God but have never been fully broken down about themselves. You still find such people among His own on the earth... here was where they went astray. They assumed that the way the world looks now is a fair measure of how God judges the ways of men. This assumption runs through the speeches of all three friends. At first they state it fairly calmly, but in the end it ripens into severity.

They take his poor, rash, desperate speeches, forced out of him by his sufferings, and treat them as the carefully weighed statements of a man setting out some philosophy. Why could they not make allowance for the pain that wrings these "windy words" out of him?