Job 15:35

Eliphaz gives a terrible picture of the hollow prosperity, the real wretchedness, and the certain destruction of the godless. Since God was not feared, vanity is the mark stamped on everything. A man's life does not consist in the abundance of his possessions. Those who set their mind on them must learn how empty they all are in the day of trial… It is only to conceive misery, bring forth vanity, and frame deception.

But now Eliphaz goes on to warn Job about what the wicked can expect to reap as the reward for their wickedness… At any rate, all that the wicked conceive is trouble, and this ends in futility (v.35). This is what he considered Job's end would be!

The second round of discussion now opens with the appeal of Eliphaz. He lets out more openly the growing sense in his soul that Job must lack integrity. As before, there is weighty truth in what he presses, and he presses it with great force. But applying it to the sufferer had no ground, and so it was unjust in the highest degree.

From God's viewpoint this too is true, but would Eliphaz have appreciated it if Job called him "abominable and filthy"? So Eliphaz was using a general truth to convict Job of worse guilt than was true of him.

These sentences make it clear that Eliphaz belonged to the kind of people who argue mainly from their own experience. His motto was, "As I have seen." Now, what we have seen may be true enough, as far as it goes for us. But it is a complete mistake to build a general rule on one person's experience. Thousands still make that mistake.

Their error was by no means a rare one. It is found most of all among the righteous, who know God but have never been thoroughly broken down about themselves. You still find such people among His own on the earth… But here was where they went astray. They assumed that the world as it now looks is an adequate expression of His judgment of men's ways. This assumption runs through the speeches of the three friends. At first they express it calmly, but at last it ripens into severity.

No one denies for a moment that the others were believers. But "out of the abundance of the heart the mouth speaks." Why is it that they never once touch on that blessed One who was to make good and show the superiority of grace over all evil?… Their conclusion was that his evil was finding him out, that judgment was pursuing the hypocrite. Sadly, not one man among them knew what it is to overcome evil with good… But grace overcomes evil with good. Why did they not?