Job 4:12 Commentary and Bible Study

Most of what Eliphaz says comes from reason, but to support this he adds experience, and here there is this vision. What should we make of this? Job lived in an age when as Hebrews says, ‘God, who at sundry times and in divers manners spake in time past unto the fathers by the prophets’ (Hebrews 1:1). Is Eliphaz recording one such early revelation? Some think so. Job and his three friends lived at the time of Abraham or before, and therefore before Moses wrote the Pentateuch. The Book of Job itself may well be the earliest canonical book in the Old Testament. This is a vision that Eliphaz has had personally, and, conveniently, it addresses the very point that he wants to make to Job. Although Scripture does elsewhere describe the overpowering effect upon the individual of receiving a revelation from God (Daniel 10:8; Habakkuk 3:16; Revelation 1:17), and contact with the spirit world instinctively makes man deeply afraid (Mark 6:49-50), there is something contrived and overdramatic about this description. He admits that it was spoken in a way that he did not hear all of it – ‘mine ear received a little thereof’ – and this gives it a strange ring, for what God wishes to reveal, he does not communicate so indistinctly, but ensures that his servants receive all that he wishes to tell them. There is much emphasis in the vision on the physical effects on Eliphaz – ‘fear came upon me, and trembling, which made all my bones to shake’, ‘the hair of my flesh stood up’, and the ghostly appearance of the apparition – ‘a spirit passed before my face’. Eliphaz builds up the atmosphere to enhance the impact of the message. The message is delivered by a spirit, not specifically by an angel, nor by the Lord himself. That is an unusual if not unique way of describing a divine communication. When it comes, what the spirit says agrees in some respects with what the Scripture says elsewhere, but it goes further. It is often said that man cannot be just before God (Psalm 130:3; 143:2; Proverbs 20:9; Ecclesiastes 7:20) and Job says the same (Job 9:30-31). But here the way it is expressed suggests that a dispute is in progress, for the spirit uses something like sarcasm – ‘Shall mortal man be more just than God? shall a man be more pure than his maker?’ What point is Eliphaz making? Is he simply saying that man always falls far short of God’s holy standards? The idea that anyone could be more just than God, more pure than his maker, derives from Job’s complaint which seems to find fault with God and want to correct him. But is there more than that in what he says? Is there also some animus in this statement, which would be entirely consistent with the resentment of one who believed that God accepted them on their own merit, and disliked the testimony of an evangelical believer who said that we need a perfect imputed righteousness?