Job 15:10 Commentary and Bible Study

What do you Job know that we also do not know? What superior method of obtaining knowledge is available to you that we do not share? Of course the implied answer is, none. All Job’s claims to certainty are a pretence. Human pride cannot bear the thought that knowledge is available to others that is not available to itself, that God has spoken to another and not to us, that he accepts the person of another above us. Because he obtains knowledge through his native wit, the unbeliever can claim credit for anything that he thinks he knows. Knowledge puffs up if it is the result of native human endeavour alone, and the perception of greater knowledge in another causes jealousy to eat away at a person like acid.‘Since wisdom comes with age and experience, and since the aged agree with us and some of them are even older than your father let alone than you,’ says Eliphaz, ‘then who are you to disagree with us.’ If a man gets wisdom for himself, he is capable of extreme self-righteousness and pride when anything threatens to take it away. It cuts to the quick that any should contradict him or claim to have wisdom that was acquired in any other way. The existence of any other wisdom makes all the efforts of which they are so proud to be nothing. This arouses such strong feeling that it can even lead to murder: Cain was provoked by just such feelings. God has dealt with such pride by providing his people with divine wisdom through his Spirit, so that even a child who believes the gospel understands more than the aged will ever understand without the Spirit of God.‘Are those consolations which we have tried to gently comfort you with of no consequence to you, Job? What we have given you is from God himself and so in refusing our words you refuse God too. We started by speaking gently to you, realising that you were in great distress, but since you go on refusing the best that we have to offer, we have had to become more severe with you.’ Eliphaz was frustrated because nothing the three comforters said was getting through to Job. All this was presumption on the part of the three friends. It was presumption to think that they spoke for God when in fact they did not yet understand the basis on which God accepts a man. The unbeliever takes offence when his doctrine is not accepted, but the righteous know that only the Spirit can prepare the mind to receive sound doctrine. Of course Job had been taught the secret of the Lord: if a man has not received the ‘secret of the Lord’ he does not belong to God – ‘The secret of the LORD is with them that fear him; and he will shew them his covenant’ (Psalm 25:14). It is very distressing for the proud to be shut out of the Lord’s secret. The proud search to see why they too have not been given access to it; everything is a matter of pride to them, for they do not understand grace.