Job 22:18

Like the grass that grows up only to be cut down and withered, they perished before their time. A flood swept away their seemingly solid foundations... These men before the flood are samples of the ungodly in every age. They had defied the God who had given His blessings to them: "Depart from us!" and what can the Almighty do to them?

They did not want God. They did not like God, and even though they heard of God, they would not accept His warnings, spoken by Enoch's and Noah's lips.

We are not told in Genesis that they spoke so boldly and sinfully. But we are told by Job. You rarely get the only statement of the truth, or the whole history of a man or of men and their ways, in one book of Scripture. Its unity is clear in the many writers, all moved by God. We get the motives that moved the men of the world told to us by Job — namely, dislike of God — while Paul tells us that Noah was "moved by fear" of Him (Hebrews 11:7). Job shows God's dealings with men in the words, "Yet he filled their houses with good things — but the counsel of the wicked is far from me."

It was no use for Eliphaz to throw Job's own saying back at him here, as he did at the start of his speech. (Compare Job 21:14-16.) Job was as sincere in his hatred of the sentiment as Eliphaz, who had no real ground for reflecting on Job this way. It was the bitter fruit of his hard, narrow, and misleading theory about present affliction.

Eliphaz turns away in horror from such godlessness, and we may believe he is sincere: "the counsel of the wicked is far from me." He is quoting the very words of Job (Job 21:16). Why will he not allow his former friend the same hatred of evil as himself? Instead, it would almost seem that he is expressing his disgust with Job, linking him with those who defy God.

He admits that the Almighty had filled the houses of the wicked with good things, though they had said to God, "Depart from us." But he thought the wicked would be cut down before their time, as Job was being cut down. So he sidesteps what is plain: many wicked men live out their lives in pleasure without any trouble at all. He says "the counsel of the wicked is far from me." But the counsel of the wicked was just as far from Job as from Eliphaz. Eliphaz wanted this statement to set himself in contrast to Job.

Eliphaz drops his original mildness and deals unfairly with Job's reasoning. He argues falsely himself, turning special instances of God's judgment on the wicked into a sample of His ordinary dealings, and ignoring the righteous.