Job 4:21

This vision describes the greatness and majesty of God and of course is again true. No one can doubt it was a real vision. It makes known man's smallness, his utter nothingness. But did this meet the need of afflicted Job? It could not explain the reason for Job's suffering. These words suggest something like this — Job, you are just like other men before God. Your suffering now shows it. You thought you were right with God, and that He blessed and protected you. But He is holy and just. So your suffering shows you are reaping the consequences of your sin, as others do.

How true these words are, and how well they fit all mankind! But Eliphaz applied them only to Job, not to himself. He did not consider himself "crushed before a moth" and "broken in pieces." That had happened to Job, so Eliphaz treated his vision as pointing straight at 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 that we think applies more to others than to ourselves. Eliphaz could see that Job's excellence was going away. But the excellence of Eliphaz would go away too, as with all men.

This is all quite true, and in other settings it fits well. But, as already said, it misses the mark, because it does not meet Job's need. Truly, in the sight of God, all are as an unclean thing. But does that set aside the righteousness that really exists in the children of God? If all are unclean in the sight of God, then Eliphaz must take his place beside Job. He is not at all ready to do that. And every explanation of suffering fails.

And yet that is the very thing we are called not to do. "Judge not, that you be not judged." When evil shows up in someone who bears the name of the Lord, we must judge him. But there was no evil in Job at all. And where evil does not show up, we must not judge. We are not to give way to our own thoughts. We are to wait on God to make it all plain.

One thing here is too remarkable to pass by. The Spirit of God uses as Scripture the very words that Jehovah later treated as a false estimate — not only of Job, but of Himself... You only have to examine the words of Eliphaz to see that in themselves they contain nothing but truth. But weigh them as applied to Job, and they are wrong beyond excuse... The New Testament quotes the words of Eliphaz in both 1 Corinthians and Hebrews, and there the application is perfectly good. In the Old Testament story the application was wrong, and God reproved the speakers for it.