Job Chapter 22



Well now, we begin again with Eliphaz (Job 22). Eliphaz takes it up, and he says, "Can a man be profitable unto God, as he that is wise may be profitable unto himself?" Yes, Eliphaz, but cannot a man please God? It is not for profit that a pious man submits to God, and obeys the word of God, but it is to please Him, and why? Because he loves Him. That is not working for profit. That is a way in which a Jew did afterwards. "Is it any pleasure to the Almighty that thou art righteous?" Yes, it was. He was quite wrong about it. God was pleased with Job - that very man that they were so insidious against, and against whom they insinuated all kinds of evil. God pointed out, as you remember, at the beginning of the Book, that there was not a man on earth that was all round like His servant Job, and yet there was something there that God meant to bring out, of which Job had no idea, i.e., that he never recognized that it was wrong. "Will he reprove thee for fear of thee? Will he enter with thee into judgment? Is not thy wickedness great? and thine iniquities infinite? For thou hast taken a pledge from thy brother for nought" - now come all his evil surmisings once more - "and stripped the naked of their clothing. Thou hast not given water to the weary to drink."

Eliphaz is just imagining what he thinks Job must have done to account for the troubles that he was passing through. "But as for the mighty man, he had the earth" - Job was the mighty man - "and the honourable man dwelt in it. Thou hast sent widows away empty, and the arms of the fatherless have been broken. Therefore snares are round about thee." You see all the reasoning is quite mistaken. "And sudden fear troubleth thee; or darkness, that thou canst not see; and the abundance of waters cover thee. Is not God in the height of heaven? and behold the height of the stars, how high they are! And thou sayest, How doth God know?" That was not what Job said at all, but quite the reverse. "Can he judge through the dark cloud?" Well, undoubtedly he was not a scoffer. Nothing of the sort. He was a pious, narrow-minded man; and there are plenty of such individuals. "Yet he filled their houses," etc. (vers. 1-20). There was a little bit of tenderness in his heart toward Job. "Acquaint now thyself with him, and be at peace: thereby good shall come unto thee. Receive, I pray thee, the law from his mouth." Eliphaz certainly was nothing like Zophar, nor even Bildad. "And lay up his words in thine heart. If thou return to the Almighty, thou shalt be built up." And so it was. Little did he know that that return was about to be made manifest, to their shame. "Then shalt thou lay up gold as dust, and light shall shine upon thy ways" (vers. 21-28). And so it did, in the most marvellous way, and much sooner than Eliphaz expected. "When men are cast down, then thou shalt say, There is lifting up; and he shall save the humble person. He shall deliver -"

There is a very old mistake in this verse (30); that word "island" is all wrong. The same word in Hebrew means "island" and also "not" To give you an instance - take "Ichabod," there you get the "I" (ee) - used adverbially, meaning "not," for "Ichabod" means "not glory," or "inglorious" - "the glory is departed." This was the name that the poor wife of Phinehas gave, in her dying moments, to the son that was born to her - "Not glory." Well now, that is the word here; and if you translate it as a negative particle you get the true sense of it - "him that is not innocent." "Island" only makes nonsense. Nobody could explain it as given in our A.V.; no person has ever done it nor approached it, and it is an astonishing thing that it remains. I believe it is all right in the Revised Version; but it is well worth knowing, because I daresay you have been puzzled to find where "the island of the innocent" came in. You know there is a proud little corner of Europe that calls itself "the Isle of Saints." but the isle of the innocent is still more extraordinary. There has never been such a thing. Man lost his innocence, and has never recovered it. Man gains holiness by the faith of Christ, but no recovery of innocence; that could not be. "He shall deliver [him, or] those that are not innocent" - that is the point of it.

Yes, and God did that, and who were they? Eliphaz, Bildad, and Zophar. They were the people who were "not guiltless"; they were guilty, they were "not innocent." So that here are two words rather mauled in this version. The real force is, "He shall deliver those that are not guiltless," and that was verified in the case of Job's three friends, little as Eliphaz expected it. They were treated by God as being guilty towards their dear brother whom they had so misjudged, to whom they had imputed all kinds of hidden evil, and made him a hypocrite as well as a naughty man. And Eliphaz here unconsciously gives utterance to words that came true. We sometimes find that. Words said passingly by a Christian, who had no idea perhaps that they would ever be verified - and yet how often they have been - as I have known frequently, from very simple souls. Perhaps only some poor brother that could not write, or from a poor old sister that could do very little except mend stockings.

So here we find these words were true. God has a great deal more to do with any good words which are uttered than we at all realise. Eliphaz, although he was so wrong, was, nevertheless, allowed to say words which came true in a marvellous manner about Job himself. "He shall deliver him that is not innocent," or "not guiltless" - that is the proper word - "and he shall be delivered by the pureness of thine hands." This was what God compelled these three men to feel - that Job was more righteous than they; that his hands were cleaner than theirs. They had defiled their hands in setting upon Job so foully and so violently; and they owed it to Job that they were spared their lives.