Job 15:9

As wrong as Eliphaz's rebuke is, he adds still another charge. He tells him he is filled with pride. Whatever Job knows, they know also.

Job had asked his friends almost the same question that Eliphaz asks in verse 9. He had said, "What you know, I also know; I am not inferior to you" (ch. 13:2), but Eliphaz accused him of claiming to be superior to them. Eliphaz should have rebuked Zophar for assuming that he knew the secrets of wisdom and that Job did not. Instead, his own arguments only showed how one-sided he was.

Eliphaz now attacked Job in strong terms, and somewhat unfairly, as we see in verse 6. To him, Job's arguments were crafty and condemned Job himself. He met them by a series of six questions, recorded in verses 7-9, all of them having the sting of sarcasm in them.

If we turn to Job 15, which contains his second speech, we again find him saying, "What I have seen I will declare" (verse 17). So it is clear that his argument depends mainly on his own powers of observation. He trusted those powers to tell him what Job's disasters meant.

"No eye has seen": human observation could find nothing here. It was this to which Eliphaz appealed in reproving Job (Job 4:8); but he was wrong. "Nor ear heard." The ear had never received this from all the combined wisdom of ages past. That was the tradition Bildad appealed to when he judged Job (Job 8:8-10). He was just as wrong. "Nor the heart of man imagined." No man's intuition could have imagined any wisdom like God's. Yet Zophar (Job 11:6) treated his own intuition as the final word.

Here was where they went astray. They assumed that the present state of the world fully expresses His judgment of people's ways. We find this assumption running through the speeches of the three friends. At first they say it calmly enough, but in the end it hardens into harshness... Here was a soul suffering a succession of troubles beyond all example. Who could point out the man subjected to such dealings since the world began?

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 quick look at the surface is never the way to form a righteous judgment... Here we find an entire book devoted to guarding us from such a snare.

Why do they never once speak of that blessed One who was to make good and show that grace is above all evil? Why was it that they could not rise above the fear of evil underneath?... 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.