Job 5:22

As we open Job 5, we find Eliphaz continuing on this note and again he refers to what he had seen. Verse 3 begins, "I have seen …". Turn to Job 15, which records his second speech, and again we find him saying, "what I have seen I will declare" (verse 17). So his argument rests mainly on his own powers of observation. He trusted those powers to tell him what Job's disasters meant.

He is genuinely shocked at Job's outburst. He then sets out his law that God repays every person in this present life. He does this more to lift Job out of his wild despair into godly speech than to condemn him as ungodly. If Job did fear God, as Eliphaz still believed, why was that not his confidence? Why were his upright ways not his hope? Clearly Eliphaz knew as little as Job about where this trial came from, what it was, and what it was for.

Coming to the detail, Eliphaz names the worst trials from outside: famine and war, even to destruction. He names the inner, bitter pains too, caused by a biting tongue — the very pains Job was suffering at that moment. No harmful beast can injure such a man, for when one is right with God, He makes all things his friends. The home of the righteous stays secure, and his descendants bear witness to the faithfulness of God. Death only closes this beautiful picture in calm — the old believer gathered to his ancestors like a sheaf of grain fully ripe. We can extend the view in the clearer light of the New Testament, and ask: "Who shall separate us from the love of Christ? Shall tribulation, or distress, or persecution, or famine, or nakedness, or danger, or sword? … No, in all these things we are more than conquerors through him who loved us."

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. How wise is the way of the Lord! How deep and admirable is what God has given us in the Scriptures! The New Testament quotes the words of Eliphaz both in the first letter to the Corinthians and in the letter to the Hebrews. There the application is entirely right. In the Old Testament story the application was wrong, and God reproved the speakers for it.

In verses 20 to 27 Eliphaz describes the many blessings that would be Job's if he took the advice of Eliphaz. In the end God did give these blessings to Job. That came after He spoke to Job in chapters 38-41 and broke him down to judge the pride of his own sinful nature. But Eliphaz had not seen what Job truly needed — the very need Eliphaz had himself.

If Eliphaz had said this to Job in a kind, encouraging way, it might have helped him. Instead he was blaming Job for not gaining such blessing, since Job would not confess that he was guilty of secret sin.