Job 20:12 Commentary and Bible Study

The thought in these verses is the secret partiality a man has to his own sin. Like someone who keeps some tasty morsal hidden in his mouth which he conceals from others, and who privately enjoys the taste though no one else knows what he is doing, so the hypocrite secretly relishes his sin. He enjoys the taste of evil; in fact it is a favourite taste to him and he has a craving for it. At the same time he knows that others will regard it as shameful and so he cannot be open about what he is doing. At times it is necessary to open his mouth to speak or for some other reason, but if he must do so he is always careful, so to speak, to hide this morsal under his tongue. This cunning is characteristic of the hypocrite and it shows him to be guilty for he would not bother to hide what he was not ashamed of. Rather than spitting it out in repentance, he spares it in his mouth. He knows that this is damaging to him and that every moment that he continues embracing his sin binds him more tightly to it, but to him it is worth the price. This is a description of the way that a hypocrite plays games with their own conscience. He must keep his sin close to him where he can taste it, but he develops all manner of techniques to mask what he is doing. He makes sure that no one is around when he does evil and takes elaborate steps to cover his tracks.This disgusting practice has its way of catching up with the individual however. Sin has its consequences and some of them are fairly immediate. Not only does he face a lost eternity and the terrible prospect of facing God without a defence on the Day of Judgment, but the overridden conscience torments the soul even before that day arrives. What was so sweet in the mouth for a brief moment, becomes a cause of terrible pain within him. The conscience delivers a warning that cannot be ignored, as it tells of the enormity of sin and the certainty of God’s justice being enforced. This highly skilful description of the working of the conscience is in many respects correct. Many do behave in this way, but the application of it to Job is misplaced and cruel, and gives Job a huge extra burden to lift which Satan uses to try to break him.Zophar describes how the attempts of the wicked to gain from their wickedness are frustrated by God. Here is a man who by greed or cunning has secured for himself a bigger portion than all those around him. What is he going to do with this plateful to prevent his ill-gotten gains from being taken from him? He will swallow them of course, because once they are in his stomach they are beyond reach. But he has failed to take account of God’s ability to fish them right out of his belly. There are no secrets from the Lord, no places which are inaccessible to him. The wicked do something similar when they put their gains in foreign bank accounts where the taxman cannot see them, or launder their money, or stash away their gains where they imagine no one can find them. Shifting again, he represents the greedy man as inadvertently sucking in the poison of vipers. Some see this as a picture of the effect of sin. He thought he was taking in some dainty morsels, but it became to him like a snake bite, as if he had sucked in the very poison of the viper. He thought he was about to enjoy the results of his evil schemes and his illicit gains (verse 20), but God turned the sweetness of sin into bitterness of guilt. Zophar speaks as if oral consumption of snake poison causes harm, rather than the mixing of poison with the blood, and as if the tongue of the snake inflicted injury rather than its tooth by which poison is injected, but this form of expression is within the bounds of poetic licence. The general picture is of an effect very different to that which the wicked expected. Human beings do not consider where their sin is leading them. Gill, noting that the tense of the verb is future, makes verse 16 to refer to the punishment of sin.