Job 29:17

He opposed the wicked. He broke their fangs — their power to profit by oppression — and rescued their victims from their grip.

After these wise words, Eliphaz launched into a series of accusations against Job. God's own testimony about Job at the start of the story shows they must have been completely false. Reading them, we can see what pushed Job to sing his own praises, as he does in Job 29. Eliphaz did not deal in vague hints. He stated plainly that Job had wronged the needy, the naked, the weary, the hungry, the widow and the fatherless. In Job 29, Job answers these charges, and he is just as plain in declaring how well he had treated these very people.

He was pointing to the people he had helped out of their many troubles. And that was really true. God delighted in Job; that was all right. He found at last that God did delight in him, but he did not find that out until after the trial. The honour people paid him, and his sense of his own great kindness, raised him above the ordinary business of other men. All that lifted him up. Well, that is a very natural thing. But it is not spiritual, and it is the very thing that God was firmly putting down in him.

One of the beautiful things about Job was that he did not pretend to be noble, and he did not try to be a prince. He was like a king in the nobility of his character — what a king ought to be. He was truly noble in his ways. All that would have been admirable if he had not said it or thought it. That is the important point. "Do not let your left hand know what your right hand is doing." It does not mean that other people must not know. The wrong is that our own left hand should know what our right hand does — that is, we ought not to think about it. The deed is done to God. It is only a little interest paid back on the wonderful spiritual capital that the Lord has put in our hands.

This "righteousness," as Job 29 shows us, was about his outward conduct. The searching light of God had not yet entered his soul. He had been accused of being a deceiver and a hypocrite. He knew he was not, and he was not going to plead guilty to it for a moment. We know he was not either. But outward correctness does not in itself count as righteousness in the presence of God.

This is a truly remarkable speech. We look in vain here for any breath of a broken and repentant spirit. There is no sign of self-loathing, or even of self-distrust. We cannot find even one word of felt weakness and nothingness. In this one chapter, Job refers to himself more than forty times, while he refers to God only five times.

So Job 29 has become one of the great "I" chapters of the Bible. Ecclesiastes 2 is Solomon's "I" chapter — the true chapter of the self-gratified "I." Job 29 is the chapter of the self-satisfied "I." Romans 7 is the chapter of the self-condemned "I." To be self-condemned is far better than to be self-gratified or self-satisfied. Best of all is to be self-eclipsed, as we find Paul to be in Philippians 3.