Job 4:1-11 Then Eliphaz the Temanite answered and said,… However misapplied to his particular case may have been the speeches of Job's friends, there can be no dispute concerning the purity and the sublimity of the great truths for which they here appear as spokesmen. If not well directed to Job, they may be well directed to us. Each of the friends represents a certain aspect of the truths which relate man to God. In the speech of Eliphaz the main position taken is that man, in his ignorance and sinfulness, must be silent in presence of the all-just and all-holy God. I. COMPARISON OF PAST WITH PRESENT EXPERIENCE. (Vers. 1-6.) Job is reminded of what he was, and asked to account for what he is. 1. The appeal to memory. A bright, a radiant memory it was. He had been the director of many - "guide, philosopher, and friend" to young and old in the perplexities of life. Again, he had been the comforter of the sorrowful and the weak; had strengthened the hands that hung down and the feeble knees: had led in straight paths the feet of those who erred. It is a beautiful picture of an amiable, benevolent, God-like career. He had not, like many, to look back upon a barren waste, a selfish and misspent life, but upon one filled with "deeds of light." Thanks to God if any man can turn in the hour of despondency to memories so fair and green! 2. Expostulation with his present mood. How is it, then, now that pain and grief have touched his own person, that he is so utterly cast down? Why not apply the medicine and the balm for your own disease and hurt which were found so healing in the case of others? If the remedy was ever good for them, 'twas because it was first good for you. If the counsel and the comfort you were wont to offer to the sick and sad had not been proved by you, it was of no avail to press them upon others. But if they accepted it and were blessed, why can you not now prescribe for your own malady'? "Physician, heal thyself. Sink in thyself, then ask what ails thee at that shrine!" 3. Appeal to the power of religion and to the consciousness of innocence. The sixth verse would be better rendered, "Is thy religion [fear of God] not thy confidence? thy hope the innocence of thy ways?" Religion is a great mainstay in all the storms of the soul. So long as a man can say, "It is the Lord: let him do what seemeth him good," he has a support which nothing can move. But so also is conscious integrity a grand spring of comfort, because of hope "hops that reaps not shame." To sow the seeds of virtue in health and activity is to reap the harvest of hope in illness, enforced idleness, in weakness, and in death. Hope is the kind nurse of the ailing and the old; and why is Job without the angelic ministry of her presence now? Let us put these questions of Eliphaz to ourselves. II. INFERENCES FROM SUFFERING. (Vers. 7-11.) These Eliphaz proceeds to draw, Job still remaining silent at his first appeal. The inference is that there has been guilt to account for these great troubles. And the inference is justified by an appeal to the great teacher, experience. 1. General experience proves that calamity points to guilt. As a rule, it is not good men who sink, nor upright hearts that are utterly overwhelmed. There are, or seem to be, exceptions of which the philosophy of Eliphaz takes no account. But, indeed, how slight are upon the whole these seeming exceptions to the grand moral rule! As in grammar, so in life, the exceptions may be found, on closer examination, only to enlarge and illustrate our conception of the rule. 2. The teaching of experience is supported by that of nature. (Ver. 8.) The laws of nature are constant. Every reaping implies a previous sowing, every harvest is the offspring of the early labour of the year. Therefore - this is the rigid reasoning of Eliphaz - this trouble of his friend implies a previous sowing in the fields of sin. It is the rough, broad statement of a sublime principle in the government of God. It is given without exceptions, but it will be time enough to look at the exceptions when we have first mastered the rule. 3. Pictures from nature, which illustrate this moral law. (Vers. 9, 10, 11.) Nature flashes back her light upon those truths which we have first learned from experience and conscience. Two such pictures are here sketched. One is that of the violent blast from heaven, which breaks the rotten tree, hurls the dry leaves into the stream, scatters the worthless chaff. Such is the fate of the worthless man, the mind devoid of principle and therefore of vitality and worth. The other picture - and it is less familiar, and perhaps still more powerful - is that of the fierce lion, toothless, vainly roaring, perishing at last for lack of prey, its young ones all dispersed l Such, again, is the fate of the bold, bed man. To this end his devouring lusts have brought him. The appetite for sin continuing to the last - the food of appetite, nay, the very power to enjoy, at last withdrawn. Where, in the compass of so few lines, can we find so powerful an illustration of the wages and the end of sin? Side by side with this powerful image we may place some other pictures in which Scripture represents the doom of the unprincipled and godless man. He is like the chaff before the breeze, like the juniper in the desert, unwetted by the refreshing dew of heaven, like the tree all flourishing to-day, to-morrow feeling the stroke of the woodman's axe, or like the dross which is consumed in the furnace where the true gold brightens, like the rapidly burning tow, or like a dream when one awakes - an image, the unreality of which is destined to be discovered and scorned. - J. Parallel Verses KJV: Then Eliphaz the Temanite answered and said, |
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