Job 24:11

"Which make oil within their walls." They are employed to produce abundance for others — they make the oil, but they never have a drop of it for themselves — "and tread their wine-presses and suffer thirst." There is no wine for them.

Cruel men would employ them to press out oil and to tread winepresses, yet would not pay them even enough to quench their thirst. Some were groaning in the pangs of death and the souls of the wounded were crying out. "Yet," Job says, "God does not charge them (the oppressors) with wrong" (v.12).

The poor are robbed of their very clothes. They work hungry among the sheaves. At the oil press and in the grape harvest they get no share of what they produce. The oppressed groan in the city — and God takes no notice of it! It is an awful picture of facts far too well known to them — and to us. How can Eliphaz fit such facts into his theory that evil is always punished in this life? But, oh, how can God close His eyes to these things, and afflict a faithful man instead of these wrongdoers? This is Job's great trouble, and for this he has found no solution.

These were evils publicly known to take place. Job's friends did not have any such clear charge to lay against him, but only imagined he must have done wrong. But here were cases of manifest wickedness, and God had not dealt with them as He was dealing with Job.

It is all reserved for Christ. The Father will not judge any man; that is not what the Father will do. He is showing love because He is a Father, and showing love because He is God; because God is love just as much as He is light. And therefore it is reserved for Christ, and the reason is plain. Christ was the One they hated without the slightest reason, without a cause.

Their very wealth tempts the rich to hold back the wages of the poor. Only their own affairs matter to them. They put off to a convenient time the claims of people who live from hand to mouth. But the debt cries aloud to Him who always feels for the poor, as the One who alone made Him fully known showed. Yes, the cries of the reapers may never have reached the rich, but they entered the ears of the Lord of hosts, and His blow would fall when least expected.

What a wonderful love this is, shown to the very people who hear the gospel. The gospel was preached to the "poor"; they were the special object of the Lord Jesus. There never was such a thing before, since the world began. Nobody ever made them his grand object, and that for eternity. But Job could not know anything of that.