Page 83 - Reading Job to Know God

Or where were the upright destroyed?”

If you are righteous, then this is for your own good, for your own
teaching. Verses 7-9, he describes the destruction of the wicked under a
very graphic picture. You do not see it clearly in the English, but in the
Hebrew there are five different Hebrew words for lion. In verse 10, you
have the roaring lion and the young lion. In verse 11, you have the strong,
old, mature lion and the lioness. He is saying, like the lion, the wicked are
strong and violent, and like the lion, the wicked are going to have their
homes destroyed and they themselves are going to be destroyed. Verse 8
“According to what I have seen, those who plow iniquity and those
who sow trouble harvest it.”
Job, you have a lot of trouble in your life. You must have sown it
someplace along the line. You have a harvest of trial. So that is the first
question to Job. Understanding the cry of chapter 3 to be despair, he says,
why are you despairing? Why are you despondent? Why are you folding
under this pressure? Again, he interprets Job’s lament in chapter 3 as
frustration and asks, “Why are you murmuring against God?” Then he
drives home the truth with a testimony in chapter 4:12-21, and a warning
in chapter 5:1-7. I love the testimony of Eliphaz in Verse 12,
“Now a word was brought to me stealthily, and my ear received a
whisper of it. Amid disquieting thoughts from the visions of the
night, when deep sleep falls on men, dread came upon me, and
trembling, and made all my bones shake. Then a spirit passed by my
face; The hair of my flesh bristled up. It stood still, but I could not
discern its appearance; A form was before my eyes; There was
silence, then I heard a voice: ‘Can mankind be just before God? Can
a man be pure before His Maker?
He puts no trust even in His servants; And against His angels He
charges error. How much more those who dwell in houses of
clay,whose foundation is in the dust, who are crushed before the
moth! Between morning and evening they are broken in pieces;
Unobserved, they perish forever. Is not their tent cord plucked up
within them? They die, yet without wisdom.”

I believe this testimony shows great delicacy and consideration for Job. I
did not look at it like that before. But instead of coming right out and
saying, Job, you are a dirty sinner, you have sinned against God, he
narrates the truth of how man’s sinfulness was brought home to his own

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