The world uses this tactic on us when it notes our insistence that we hold truth, and it draws attention to the smallness of Christ’s little flock. This should be allowed to intimidate us. Yes, the world outnumbers us, and yes, they appeal to experience, but we have the truth, though it is not to our own credit as if it was by our own skill or wisdom that we obtained it. Rather it was revealed to us by God when we were in darkness and by means of it we have light and life. We hold on to the truth of God with our lives because it is life to us. We dare not concede to any that they have a wisdom that surpasses or negates it, and we are not ashamed to appear to the world to hold uncompromisingly to it.
Continuing in the same vein, Eliphaz asks whether Job has had direct communication from God that makes him speak with such assured authority. Is he the only one who knows? Does he limit wisdom to himself alone and deny it to all others? This is of course, as Hartley says, sarcasm and an overinterpretation of Job’s defence and overreaction to it. Job was not claiming to be the only one that understood the truth, for he would have certainly have agreed that there were others living in his day who truly knew God and accepted his revelation, but this is often how nominal believers react to the claims of those who know God. It seems preposterous to them that anyone should maintain that they have certain knowledge of God or even that certainty is possible, for they cannot accept that others know any more than they do. They cannot accept that human beings have any more than their own sanctified wisdom with which to work out the truth. They will not admit that there is anything higher than human knowledge. They interpret all claims to certainty about the truth as arrogance, going far beyond what they would dare to say based on their own method of obtaining knowledge. They would indeed be right if the certainty which the believer claims about God was obtained only through his own native skill. Job of course did not claim this, and nor does any other believer. We are happy to confess that all that we have comes from God. But this raises another hurdle for the unbelieving mind: ‘How is it that God has revealed it to you and not to me? Does this mean that all my own efforts to obtain wisdom are worthless and I have to go back to square one?’ Not recognising the supernatural work of God in the heart, the nominal believer must interpret all claims to true knowledge of God as conceit on the part of the Christian. So then Eliphaz asks, has God spoken personally to you, and the answer is yes. Of course this is not a matter of private communication which is not imparted to others, for God’s revelation is for all believers in the world. But the believer something more than the wisdom of experience; he has ‘a more sure word of prophecy’ on which to base his hope, and nothing less than this would suffice.