Job 15:4

Will a wise man answer with windy knowledge, and fill his belly with the east wind? Will he argue with talk that does no good, with words that bring no profit? Yes, you cancel the fear of God, and lessen devotion before God.

Job, he thought, was casting off fear. Another version puts it as making "piety of none effect," and so restraining prayer. In his view piety paid: it brought a person the favour of God, shown in earthly prosperity. If it did not, where then was the practical gain of piety? So Job's terrible sufferings could have only one explanation, he thought — even though Job kept insisting on his integrity.

Now it is no longer insinuation; he ventures to pronounce on Job. "You cast off fear, and restrain prayer before God." How did he know this? He had come too hastily to the inference; and it was false. Job had in no way restrained prayer before God, as we may find not only from his character but from his answers soon.

Job's wild language did lay him open to the charge of casting off fear. Such talk is the opposite of prayer or devotion. His own words, says Eliphaz, confirm what the friends suspected and charged him with — wickedness and godlessness. But when he accuses Job of being crafty, he charges what is untrue. The poor sufferer had poured out his misery with no thought for the consequences. Whatever he is, Job is no hypocrite.

So we see that Eliphaz accuses Job of a moral folly that forgets the presence and light of God. Job, he says, used proud words to blind others to what God was judging beneath the fair appearance of his life. He charges Job's language with worse than bluster. He sees in it something designed to turn souls away from the fear of God. So Job, in his opinion, was self-condemned. Eliphaz thought that denying God's punishment of sin here and now would shake confidence in His ways and encourage every kind of lawlessness.

"You cast off fear, and restrain prayer before God" (Job 15:4). Eliphaz's doctrine was true, though his application was false. God usually punishes the sins we leave undone by letting us fall into the sins we commit. Leave a duty, and you may be left to commit a crime. Turn your ear from the truth, and you take the quickest road to being given over to believe fables (2 Tim. 4:4). Cast off prayer, and it is a wonder if you are not soon cast into some foul sin.

Eliphaz says, "Yes, you cast off fear, and restrain prayer before God." This is still a sore temptation of Satan. When the soul is passing through darkness, it often seems as if it could not pray — so different from what it was. "There now," says Satan, "is not that proof that you are nothing but a wicked person. Surely you must be a hypocrite."

There cannot be a more instructive lesson to us on the danger of judging by appearances. It is beyond question a main point in this marvellous book. A surface survey is never the way to form a righteous judgment, as the Lord Himself warned in His day. If it was wrong then in them, it is much more blameworthy in us.