Job 4:17

He refers to what he saw or heard then. "Now a thing was secretly brought to me, and my ear received a little of it. In thoughts from the visions of the night, when deep sleep falls on men. Fear came upon me, and trembling" — clearly he did not have enough of grace; grace does not make people afraid in this way. It is judgment that does so, and this is what these good men are full of; they were full of the spirit of judgment.

"Shall mortal man be more just than God?" — or "just before God," in His presence. Compared with His holiness, even the heavenly beings are unclean. The seraphim veil their faces as they proclaim Him. How much less can mortal man, whose mortality is a witness of his sin, boast. His breath is in his nostrils. His life is like a tale soon told, over in a day — like the short-lived moth.

He begins to tell of a terrifying experience of his own. He saw some ghostly figure, and heard a warning about man's frailty and impurity in the presence of his Maker. What Eliphaz heard is perfectly true. No mortal man can be more pure or just than God. In both he falls infinitely short of God's glory.

How true and fitting such words are for all mankind, but Eliphaz was applying them only to Job, not to himself, because Eliphaz did not consider himself "crushed before a moth" and "broken in pieces." This had happened to Job, so Eliphaz took his vision as applying directly to Job. But a vision or dream is meant to apply directly to the one who has it, and Eliphaz missed that one important fact. In the same way, we may hear good ministry which we think fits others better than ourselves.

That is the very thing we must not do. "Judge not, that you be not judged." When we find evil in someone who bears the Lord's name, we are bound to judge him; but no one found any evil in Job at all. And when we find no evil, we are bound not to judge; we are not to give way to our own thoughts; we are to wait on God to make it all plain… [The vision] is all very true, but it did not apply to the case at all.

In Job 9:2 Job asks, "How can a man be in the right before God?" The answer comes from the Lord Jesus. He spoke a parable "to some who trusted in themselves that they were righteous." The proud Pharisee paraded his self-righteousness before God, and he stands condemned. The repentant tax collector "beat his breast, saying, God, be merciful to me, a sinner!" He "went down to his house justified, rather than the other" (Luke 18:9–14). The Lord answered Job's question by showing that the way to be just with God is by condemning ourselves before Him, confessing in true sorrow that we are sinners, and casting ourselves on His mercy. The full answer waited for the death and resurrection of the Lord Jesus. In the letter to the Romans we learn that God justifies us by His grace, through the redemption that is in Christ Jesus, on the principle of faith.