Job 5:8 Commentary - Dr Peter Masters | Metropolitan Tabernacle

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Job 5:8

Comments

‘I would seek unto God, and unto God would I commit my cause.’ Eliphaz implies Job is not praying any more, and needs to return to God. Are these words of true encouragement? Can Job draw any comfort from them? Not for a moment. They are all grounded on the assumption that he is a secret sinner and must come clean about it. He must stop claiming to have a righteousness which the three friends do not have – a righteousness which comes by faith, and which makes all their personal righteousness worth nothing. He must come down off his pedestal and start admitting that he is a sinner before God just as they are, and has no perfect righteousness, and in fact that they are more upright than he is, otherwise they would also have been disciplined by God. Consider verses 9-11. Taken at face value, they seem to have nothing wrong with them. They are fine theology. God works miracles (verse 9); he supplies all his creatures with refreshing rains to cause their crops to grow (verse 10); he raises up the oppressed and brings those who mourn to safety (verse 11). You can be a modernist and get things right. When you look at someone’s theology, you look not at what he gets right, but at what he gets wrong. Eliphaz lacks the essential thing – justification by faith. They invent their own way of how man gets to heaven, and even when they make true statements, they mean something different by them to what the believer means. It is hard for the believer to deal with such things.

Application

This is the issue that always lies between the true believer and the nominal, the liberal Christian. It is not an issue that aggravates the believer, because he too stands before God on the basis of an imputed righteousness, but those who seek to be justified by the law (Romans 10:3) and to establish their own righteousness are deeply resentful of anyone who says that their own righteousness is worth nothing, and that we must receive a righteousness from God on the basis of faith alone. There is too much pride attached their own righteousness for them to accept this. But there has never been any other way of justification and salvation, and this was how Job too was justified. Elihu who speaks to Job at the end of the book has a very different attitude to Job. He is not driven by the same bitterness and animus towards Job, because he shares the same standing with God. He is able therefore to see the real problem in Job, and to correct him with true counsel, and be of real help to him.

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Job 5:8 Commentary and Bible Study