Job 5:3

Verse 3 begins, "I have seen …". Turn to Job 15, which gives his second speech, and again we find him saying, "What I have seen I will declare" (verse 17). So it is clear that his argument stands or falls on his own powers of observation. He trusted those powers to tell him what Job's disasters meant.

These sentences make it very clear that Eliphaz was one of those people who argue mostly from their own experience. His motto was, "As I have seen." Now, what we have seen may be all true enough, so far as we are concerned. But it is a total mistake to build a general rule on one person's experience, and yet thousands make that mistake. What, for instance, had the experience of Eliphaz to do with Job? Perhaps he had never met a case quite like it. And if the two cases differ at even one point, the whole argument from experience counts for nothing.

He fears that Job looks far too much like a foolish man (v.2). So he warns him with what he had seen: the foolish taking root, then suddenly exposed to a curse, his sons far from safety and crushed in the gate (v.3). Job's sons had died suddenly. Was Job therefore a foolish man? Eliphaz did not say so, but he hinted that Job was dangerously close to that charge. He had watched foolish people suffer, and he reasoned that since Job was suffering like this, something must be seriously wrong in Job.

"I have seen the fool taking root, but suddenly I cursed his dwelling." Ah, there it is! No prayer for him — cursing his dwelling! No pity for him! Well, that eagerness to judge by appearance produced exactly this spirit. "Do not judge by appearances," said the law. We must wait for solid facts. Sometimes a good man is in circumstances where appearances are very much against him. There we have to take great care. So judging by appearance is very dangerous ground.

Wicked men have prospered for a little season, only to fall under the curse... He is describing the result of his experience and observation: in the end, even in this life, suffering is the sinner's lot. It hardly needs saying how incomplete and unsatisfactory this is. Even in the Old Testament the "man of the earth" prospers; the wicked spreads himself out "like a green laurel tree," and has no pangs even in death.

That principle is that all suffering is punishment rather than teaching, and that it rests on God's justice rather than on His love — though these two are always joined in all His ways. Such a principle must fail to tell the difference between the sufferings of the righteous and those of the wicked. Carried to its logical end, as the friends did carry it, this principle meant that Job's sufferings were for some sin not yet detected, and that his only hope of relief was to confess his sin and obtain mercy.

Jehovah made known to Eliphaz His anger against him and his two companions: they had not spoken to Him rightly, like His servant Job. So they had to come to Him with a sacrifice, through the very man they had so badly misjudged... And His servant Job, whose prayers they had despised, would pray for them.