Eliphaz’s Second Speech: On the Scandal of Redemptive Suffering: Job: The Wisdom of the Cross [Job 15]

{Pray}

WHY DOES THE WORLD HATE THE GOSPEL? On the face of it, that question is a million miles away from Job’s debates with his friends. And yet, strangely and paradoxically, those debates help us grasp the answer to this contemporary question. The controversy in these heated cycles of speeches is between what I have called The System [friends think; world thinks] and Job’s anguished discovery that The System doesn’t work. The System represents the default understanding of all morally serious men and women, which is that the universe is moral and that whoever or whatever power (or powers) there may be in the universe rewards good behavior and punishes bad behavior. This seems obvious to us by nature and utterly necessary if we are not to be cast adrift into the theatre of the absurd.

In casting doubt on the validity of The System, Job is opening up two complementary possibilities. The immediate possibility is that his own sufferings are not God’s punishment for his unforgiven sin. The other possibility, which is a consequence of the first, is that there is such a thing as sins that are not punished in the sinner because in some way they have been visited on an innocent substitute. The relatively innocent sufferings of Job foreshadow the utterly innocent sufferings of Jesus Christ, and those sufferings make grace possible in human experience.

In principle, therefore, the story of Job is the story of redemptive suffering, the suffering of one that makes redemption possible for others. That is to say, the sufferings of Job, in anticipating the agony of the cross, speak ultimately of the gospel of Jesus Christ. And the hostility of Job’s friends foreshadows and helps us understand the hostility of the world today to the gospel of free grace. We can see how this applies to us.

We move now to the start of the second cycle of speeches. Job has wound up the first cycle with a long and significant speech (chapters 12–14) in which he has pointed the way ahead, toward the forgiveness of sins and the resurrection of the believer. It is Eliphaz’s turn to lead the second cycle, as he led the first. And he is not impressed. As in the three speeches of the first cycle, he begins with a personal word to Job and continues with a description of the fate of the wicked. But unlike the speeches in the first cycle, he does not conclude with a further personal address to Job. This change signals a darkening of the tone. The sympathetic Eliphaz of chapters 4, 5 is gone; now we have a much angrier and hostile Eliphaz who is losing patience with his friend Job. His tone is “much less courteous and pleasant.”

Redemptive Suffering Is a Disgraceful Idea (Job 15: 1–16)

In verses 1–16 Eliphaz speaks directly to Job. He rebukes him in no uncertain terms for what he has said in his speeches so far. He says that redemptive suffering is a disgraceful idea and Eliphaz says at least six things about Job’s words.

Job, Your Words Are … Empty (vv. 2, 3)

Then Eliphaz the Temanite answered and said:

“Should a wise man answer with windy knowledge,

and fill his belly with the east wind?

Should he argue in unprofitable talk,

or in words with which he can do no good?” (vv. 1–3)

Eliphaz thinks Job has been spouting a lot of hot air. His so-called “knowledge” is just a wind blowing around and achieving nothing (v. 2). The “east wind” is the hot breeze blowing in off the desert, a wind that is both unpleasant (being very hot) and unfruitful; coming from the desert, it brings no rain (v. 2). In the same way Job’s words are “unprofitable,” useless, and doing “no good” to anybody (v. 3). Bildad has said something similar (8:2), as has Zophar (11:2). As far as The System is concerned, the idea of undeserved suffering has no correspondence to reality; it is therefore insubstantial talk, the kind of thing idle academics might do in the seminar room, but of no use in giving wisdom for actual life. This is not the kind of talk for “a wise man,” he says to Job (14:2).

But it is worse than this. His words are not only empty—they are dangerous.

Job, Your Words Are … Dangerous (v. 4)

But you are doing away with the fear of God

and hindering meditation before God. (v. 4)

The word “meditation” in this context means a proper reverence for and devotion to God. “The fear of God” is a normal definition of healthy religion, especially used by those who consider themselves “wise”; it is used in the context of the proper reverence and worship of the Lord in Proverbs. The accusation here is that what Job has been saying is undermining proper religion and piety. This may simply mean that Job is himself being impious in challenging God like this.

But more likely it means that if Job’s ideas were to catch on, all the usual incentives to be virtuous and pious would be removed. After all, if blessing does not necessarily follow virtue, why bother to be virtuous? And if God’s curse does not necessarily follow vice, why restrain yourself? Why not eat, drink, and be merry? If we live in a world in which blessing and suffering are not predictable or explicable, what point is there in any morality or religion? Sounds very modern right? Job’s ideas about undeserved suffering are profoundly undermining to the system.

Job, Your Words Are … Crafty/Self-Justifying (vv. 5, 6)

For your iniquity teaches your mouth,

and you choose the tongue of the crafty.

Your own mouth condemns you, and not I;

your own lips testify against you. (vv. 5, 6)

Having accused Job of speaking words with no substantial content (vv. 2, 3) and dangerous effects (v. 4), Eliphaz goes on to accuse Job of bad motives. He claims to be able to deduce why Job is saying what he does. It is an old and well-tried strategy to undermine what someone says by psychoanalyzing them and accusing them of evil motives (“You’re only saying that because …”). “Job, you are only saying these things because you know you are guilty and you want to cover it up. Your absurd claims of undeserved suffering are no more than a mask for a guilty conscience,” says Eliphaz in verse 3. But God is a match for such crafty talk (v. 5), for “he catches the wise in their own craftiness” (5:13).

How does Eliphaz know this and claim such access to Job’s heart? Verse 6 tells us: “it is by the words of your mouth that I know you are guilty. You are self-condemned.”

Job, Your Words Are … Arrogant (vv. 7–10)

Are you the first man who was born?

Or were you brought forth before the hills?

Have you listened in the council of God?

And do you limit wisdom to yourself?

What do you know that we do not know?

What do you understand that is not clear to us?

Both the gray-haired and the aged are among us,

older than your father. (vv. 7–10)

Next Eliphaz accuses Job of sheer brazen arrogance. “You seem to think you were a kind of primeval man, born of God before the creation of the world!” “The hills” (v. 7) are a way of speaking of the oldest part of creation, as in our expression “as old as the hills.” “You are speaking as if you had security clearance for God’s cabinet chamber.” The word “council” (v. 8) signifies the place of intimate, confidential conversation; it is where the false prophets of Jeremiah 23 claimed to have been. “You are claiming among human beings ‘a monopoly on wisdom’ [NIV, v. 8b]; you are like the soldier who is out of step but insists he is the only one in step! You seem to think you know something that none of us knows [v. 9], and yet we are much older and senior than you [v. 10].”

So Eliphaz pulls rank on Job. But he also implies that the long-established tradition of morally serious people cannot be lightly challenged. The word group “know” appears more than seventy times in Job. It is a vital question: how do we know what we claim to know? For Eliphaz and his friends, tradition is the best we can do.

Then Eliphaz changes tack.

Job, Your Words Are … Hurtful (vv. 11–13)

Are the comforts of God too small for you,

or the word that deals gently with you?

Why does your heart carry you away,

and why do your eyes flash,

that you turn your spirit against God

and bring such words out of your mouth? (vv. 11–13)

Now Eliphaz says in effect, “I feel hurt by your reaction.” He and his friends had come to bring Job “comfort” (2:11). In his first speech Eliphaz has been sympathetic and considerate; he has given Job “the comforts of God” by means of “the word that deals gently with you” (15:11), that “word” being the message of The System, and perhaps in particular the “word” revealed to Eliphaz in that spooky vision (4:12: “Now a word was brought to me …”). “We have applied The System to your wounds as gently as we could,” says Eliphaz, “and you are being hurtful by not being grateful. Why are you so angry? You used to be one of us, devoted to The System. Why not now?”

Finally, Eliphaz comes back to the main point he has made in his first speech.

Job, Your Words Are … Unrealistic (vv. 14–16)

What is man, that he can be pure?

Or he who is born of a woman, that he can be righteous?

Behold, God puts no trust in his holy ones,

and the heavens are not pure in his sight;

how much less one who is abominable and corrupt,

a man who drinks injustice like water! (vv. 14–16)

Eliphaz has already insisted that human beings cannot be pure or in the right before God (4:17). Job has as good as admitted it himself (9:2). Bildad will echo it later (25:4).

Here he says much the same, but with a twisting of the knife. In chapter 4 the reason was our mortality (we “dwell in houses of clay,” 4:19); now it is that we are actively disgusting to God. “You are not the first man, Job; you are ‘born of a woman,’ a normal mortal (15:14). God is so pure and holy that even the holiness of the angels is not clean to him [v. 15, echoing 4:18].

There is moral pollution even in the upper levels of the cosmos. So what hope have you who are by nature ‘abominable’ (disgusting, vile, repulsive to God) and ‘corrupt’ (filthy to God)? To you, as to all human beings by nature, it is as natural to do ‘injustice’ as it is to drink a glass of water [v. 16]. You have to do wrong, just as you have to drink water to stay alive. Doing wrong is not something you do on special bad days; it is something you do every day.”

Reflections on Eliphaz’s Accusation

It is worth taking a step back and asking how Eliphaz’s accusations against Job foreshadow later accusations leveled against the gospel of grace. Eliphaz says that to claim undeserved suffering is empty, dangerous, self-justifying, arrogant, hurtful, and unrealistic. The same accusations are leveled against the claims of undeserved grace.

It is said to be empty, having no correspondence with moral realities.

It is said to be dangerous, undermining the necessary incentives to behave well; what is the point, after all, if free grace forgives all my sin? This was the objection made to Paul’s gospel of grace, as if he were saying, “And why not do evil, that good may come?” (Romans 3:8). This is one reason why the gospel of free grace is continually leaking away from churches: the legalistic religious mind-set hates it. I must earn something…free grace flies in the face of that.

Grace is also said to be self-justifying, something we only believe because we want people to think better of us, a crafty and deceptive means of getting people to think we’re OK when we’re not.

Those with assurance of forgiveness by grace are often accused of being arrogant. “You seem to think you’re better than everybody else. How else could you claim to be sure of going to Heaven?”

Grace is said to be an emotional crutch for those who cannot cope with the moral realities of life, the perfectly adequate comforts of the simple system of moral reward. You only believe in grace, they say, because you are not prepared, having made your bed, to lie on it.

Above all, grace is said to be unrealistic: how can a sinful human being really hope to be in the right before a holy God?

Ultimately, because the book of Job is about undeserved suffering, it is about undeserved grace too. The undeserved suffering of this righteous man foreshadows the undeserved suffering of the One, the Lord Jesus Christ, who knew no sin, and his suffering makes possible the amazing grace of undeserved forgiveness to sinners.

The Portrait of the Wicked [Job 15:17-35]

Eliphaz continues with a vivid description of the miseries experienced by a generalized portrait of the wicked man. Although this wicked man is not named, there are hints that connect him with Job, who is, or so Eliphaz implies, “abominable and corrupt … who drinks injustice like water” (v. 16). Again and again Eliphaz describes the wicked man in language that Job has already used of himself.

It is a clever portrait, for Eliphaz focuses on the fears and the fate of the wicked man, and not on any particular crimes.

This Portrait Is Based on Pure Tradition (vv. 17–19)

I will show you; hear me,

and what I have seen I will declare

(what wise men have told,

without hiding it from their fathers,

to whom alone the land was given,

and no stranger passed among them). (vv. 17–19)

Eliphaz begins his portrait by an appeal to pure tradition. “ ‘I will show you’ a picture of a wicked man, and then you can put two and two together and see where it points. So listen in—‘hear me’—and I will tell you ‘what I have seen’ (v. 17)” (perhaps in the spooky vision of chapter 4). This is wise tradition (v. 18), and it is pure tradition, a tradition begun in some pristine age when “no stranger” with strange unorthodox teaching “passed among them” in the land (v. 19). This tradition is pure; anything else is unorthodox opinions.

We will now look at the portrait.

The Fears of the Wicked (vv. 20–24)

The first focus is on the fears of the wicked, what we might call the terrors of a bad conscience.

The wicked man writhes in pain all his days,

through all the years that are laid up for the ruthless.

Dreadful sounds are in his ears;

in prosperity the destroyer will come upon him.

He does not believe that he will return out of darkness,

and he is marked for the sword.

He wanders abroad for bread, saying, “Where is it?”

He knows that a day of darkness is ready at his hand;

distress and anguish terrify him;

they prevail against him, like a king ready for battle. (vv. 20–24)

Although there are a few places where the exact meaning is uncertain, the overall picture is clear: the wicked man has a miserable life full of dread, distress, and anguish. Verses 20–24 focus on the anticipation of his doom, for “the wicked man is forever plagued by an awareness of his doom; he lives continually with the signs of Death and his attendant forces waiting to consume” him.

So he “writhes in pain” (v. 20) like a woman in hard labor. Job has used the same word root of himself (6:10, “pain unsparing”). He keeps hearing “dreadful sounds” (15:21); he is full of fears, and even when things seem to be going really well “in prosperity” suddenly “the destroyer will come upon him” (v. 21). This is exactly what has happened to Job in chapters 1, 2; he has said of himself, “what I dread befalls me” (3:25). In his heart the wicked man knows he is on a one-way street to darkness and that the sword is hanging over him (15:22). Job feels this about himself—he is heading for Sheol and will not return (7:9, 10).

The translation of verse 23 is uncertain. The word translated “Where?” may be revocalized as “vulture,” and the sense may be that this wicked man is wandering around scavenging for food like a vulture or that he is wandering around like a piece of dead flesh about to be eaten by a vulture. Whichever way we take it, it is a picture of vulnerability and anxiety. His life is full of “distress and anguish” (v. 24), like “the anguish of my spirit” that Job has spoken of (7:11); these will “terrify” him (15:24), just as God terrifies Job with nightmares (7:14).

It is a frightening picture of the subjective anxiety and terror that haunts the wicked man. And it fits so frighteningly well with how Job has described his own state of mind. “Put two and two together,” says Eliphaz. “If you have these feelings, what does that say about your morality and standing before God? Bad feelings are a sure indicator of bad character.”

Then Eliphaz moves on from the subjective terror of the wicked to the objective ruin that awaits them.

The Fate of the Wicked (vv. 25–35)

The focus now shifts to the fate of the wicked, from the subjective terrors of a bad conscience to the objective ruin they deserve.

Because he has stretched out his hand against God

and defies the Almighty,

running stubbornly against him

with a thickly bossed shield;

because he has covered his face with his fat

and gathered fat upon his waist

and has lived in desolate cities,

in houses that none should inhabit,

which were ready to become heaps of ruins;

he will not be rich, and his wealth will not endure,

nor will his possessions spread over the earth;

he will not depart from darkness;

the flame will dry up his shoots,

and by the breath of his mouth he will depart.

Let him not trust in emptiness, deceiving himself,

for emptiness will be his payment.

It will be paid in full before his time,

and his branch will not be green.

He will shake off his unripe grape like the vine,

and cast off his blossom like the olive tree.

For the company of the godless is barren,

and fire consumes the tents of bribery.

They conceive trouble and give birth to evil,

and their womb prepares deceit. (vv. 25–35)

This wicked man suffers because he has arrogantly challenged God to a fight (vv. 25, 26). He has “stretched out his hand against God,” shaking his fist at God (v. 25). He is like a foolish warrior running to battle with God. And this, according to Eliphaz, is what Job is doing when he insists on an audience with God.

Furthermore, in his prosperity he has “covered his face with his fat and gathered fat upon his waist” (v. 27); he has the double chin and the heavy belly of a rich man who has indulged himself in too many donuts. He thinks he is a warrior, but in fact his self-indulgence has weakened him. Just as an obese out of shape man is in no physical condition for a fight, so a selfish man is in no moral condition for a contest with God.

Verse 28 is more naturally translated with a future tense: “he will live in desolate cities and in houses that none should inhabit.” However rich he is, as Job was, his riches will not last (v. 29); just like Job, he will go bankrupt because of his wickedness. He is on a one-way street to “darkness” (v. 30a), and the fire of God’s judgment “will dry up his shoots” (v. 30b), so that he has no hope, just as the fire (lightning) of 1:16 had destroyed Job’s property.

If he trusts in “emptiness” (vanity, idols, anything but God), then “emptiness will be his payment” (v. 31), as Job is discovering (7:3: “so I am allotted months of emptiness”). No matter how fruitful he looks in the early days of his prosperity, he will not actually bear fruit (15:32, 33) but will be like a vine that sheds its grapes before they ripen or an olive tree whose blossom blows away and never becomes fruitful.

In his wickedness he keeps company with godless people (as in Proverbs 1:10–19 or Psalm 1), with people who love bribery and injustice; but he will find their company “barren” and ready to be consumed by the “fire” of God’s judgment (v. 34). That is the destiny of these wicked people who “conceive … and give birth to evil” (v. 35). The word “trouble” in verse 35 has been used by Eliphaz in his first speech (4:8; 5:6, 7) and by Job of himself (3:10). Eliphaz’s point is that no one reaps trouble without first sowing trouble. “So if you are reaping trouble, Job, what does this prove about what you must have sown?” That’s what The System teaches us, that is what the world says.

Conclusion

This is a terrifying picture of the fears and the fate of the wicked. Both the subjective fears and the objective fate are closely paralleled in Job’s own dark experience. The lesson of The System is simple: this proves you are a sinner. Wherever grace is denied, cruelty follows.

It is this harsh, grace-free system that Job is challenging with his insistence that his sufferings are undeserved. Let us learn from Eliphaz to recognize the natural man’s objections to grace and take great care not to let the grace leach out of our teaching and our convictions.

It is frightening how you and I can hear ourselves saying what the comforters say and how close they are not only to religions like Islam but also to some so-called Biblical Christianity.

Matthew Henry, in his commentary, was extremely harsh towards the friends of Job…why? Because he understood...The more we find ourselves in sympathy with the comforters, the less we have really grasped the gospel of grace.

Why does the world hate the gospel? Because the gospel teaches undeserved grace and that flies in the face of what the world says…let us as Christians cling to the doctrine of grace.