Job 4:5

In his opening words, Eliphaz begins the fault-finding that marks the friends' words all the way through. What he says is true. Job had comforted others in distress, and he should have borne up under his own trials. And yet, would we not expect some words of sympathy from a friend — a "brother born for adversity"? Would grace not always teach us to "weep with those who weep"? The blessed Man of Sorrows did not scold sufferers like this. Human sorrow moved Him with compassion, even to tears.

Instead, Eliphaz all but thrust a sword into Job's soul. He criticised him for being depressed when trouble came to him (v.5). Why did Eliphaz not do as he says Job had done in the past, strengthening the weak hands and upholding those who stumbled? It is easy for us to see what we think is wrong in another without giving him what might help him.

Simple, all this — to see and say it about someone else! With the chill and the shadow on us, is it always so easy? So it is with more than Job. At the critical moment, when the hour calls for strength, we have nothing but weakness. The arguments we used with others still stand where they did, but they do not help. No one has refuted them, yet they bring us no comfort. We need more than argument: the living strength of the God of strength alone is enough in the day of personal need. And it is a terrible thing to realise then how much of the energy that has carried us along was not that.

In the argument of the three friends there is one unified line of thought, resting on a shared principle. That principle is this: all suffering is punishment, not instruction. It rests on God's justice rather than on His love — though the two are always joined in all His ways. Such a principle must fail to tell the sufferings of the righteous from those of the wicked. The friends carried it to its logical end. So Job's sufferings had to be for sin not yet found out, and his only hope of relief was to confess that sin and be shown mercy.

Abstract truth is completely useless to the saints of God. Truth that is misunderstood and misapplied may do more harm than many a false thing. Misapplied truth lends the apparent authority of God to an error, and it carries all the more weight because it comes as the truth. If someone says a foolish or clearly false thing, people dismiss it; but no believer can brush aside the truth of God. So when people use the truth of God wrongly, to crush someone who at that moment is an object of intense interest to God — how foreign and offensive that is to His mind!

And now Satan renews the attack through his friend Eliphaz. Poisoned arrows are shot through his lips, in chapter 4:3-8. "You have instructed many." It is terrible when Satan can fix a poor believer's thoughts on himself like this. "What!" he says, "is this you? You, who profess so much — you who instruct others — you who are looked up to?" ... This is the thin end of Satan's great wedge. It is the first hint that Job is a hypocrite. We shall find this wedge driven, blow after blow, as we go on in the book.