Job 22:12 Commentary and Bible Study

It is in the interests of the wicked, says Eliphaz, to limit the knowledge of God, but how can one who is able to hold stars in their places and who names each one, who regulates the universe in all its movements and interactions; how can such a one fail to know what goes on in the mind of one of his creatures? These remarks are matched to the capacity of mankind to understand, for God’s sustaining of the universe goes down to the smallest possible level and governs the atoms of each one of those stars. God is in the height of heaven; although its height towers above us and for generations men have looked up in wonder at what is beyond their reach, he is not limited as they are. Although man has now increased in knowledge and begun to stretch up to those heights, there are many respects in which his knowledge remains so limited that he can only stare from a distance at what God has intimate knowledge of. Where man’s knowledge is exhausted, God’s knowledge knows no bounds. But the wicked say – and Eliphaz explicitly charges Job with saying this – that God does not know. Their mistake is to limit God to the level of their own meagre understanding. They do this deliberately in an act of self-deception because they don’t want to believe in a God who knows all things. If he knows all things, he also knows their hearts, and yet they wish to hide from him out of shame at the way they live and think. Eliphaz accuses the wicked of picturing God as so high above them and so surrounded by glory, that he is not mindful of things that take place on the earth. The wicked think to use this state of affairs for their advantage and that they can get away with their evil schemes undetected. They convince themselves that he concerns himself with things above and walks on the circle of heaven, the arch of heaven that seems to be bent over our heads, a realm far away from their squalid schemes.All this is accurate but there is no reason to believe that Job acted in this way. In fact he had given a marvellous exposition of the wisdom and majesty of God in chapter 12, which surpassed in sublimity anything that the comforters said.