Job 22:5 Commentary - Dr Peter Masters | Metropolitan Tabernacle

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Job 22:5

Comments

Eliphaz brings charges for the first time. Until now he has assumed and asserted that Job must be a hypocrite because of what he is suffering. Now he feels it necessary to clothe these accusations in something more concrete to make them sound more plausible. He has absolutely no evidence for this, but that does not stop him. He is not speaking of what he has seen or of what other faithful witnesses have reported to him. He is saying what he assumes must be the case, because he is so convinced of his explanation for what is happening to Job. It is a case of false confidence making someone go far beyond what is safe.Returning now to his regular theme, and having dismissed Job’s protestations of innocence as laughable, Eliphaz asserts more bluntly than ever before the ‘evident’ wickedness of Job. Having no evidence available for his thesis has not stopped him reaching the firmest conclusions. A mind that is unbalanced and full of suspicion can convince itself of a position which is totally groundless and gather together what crumbs of evidence are available to it and, like the palaeontologist, use his imagination to manufacture the rest out of nothing. ‘Your iniquity is without end; I can almost see it. I am justified by my certainty of this in speaking to you in the strongest possible terms and I am prepared to dismiss all doubts because this is the only way to get you to admit your fault.’ So Eliphaz skates out onto thin ice and is ready to fall in, because he trusted too much in his own judgment and could not humble himself to see that here was something that was beyond his own experience and understanding.

Application

We can say that we see something similar when we look at the vast amounts of money spent on space travel with the expectation of finding life on the planets in our solar system. The mere whiff of the presence of water on Mars is sufficient to make serious scientists highly optimistic that they will find life there, and so space probes are sent to detect it. Have these people never thought seriously about the mathematical obstacles to such a conclusion. Do they understand nothing about the complexity of life and the vanishingly small chance, no to say impossibility, of functional proteins self-assembling to form not just one such protein but whole systems of compatible and interacting proteins that are all necessary to form even one bodily system. Remove one of them and the function is absent and there is no selective advantage in any of it. Have they never considered the immense amount of biochemical machinery that needs to be in place for cell division to take place at all. Have they thought seriously about the fact that any chance assembly of the molecules of life at some point in the past would all be lost again unless there was a mechanism of copying and reproduction, with all its mind-boggling complexity, instantly spring into existence at the same time. A little bit of water! What is that? But these money spenders have lost the ability to think rationally. They are so convinced of naturalism and so sure there is no God that they just know they are right! It has to have happened that life arose spontaneously in spite of Pascal, and if it happened once, then putting your head in the sand you can believe it happened any number of times.

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Job 22:5 Commentary and Bible Study