The Poison of Plausible Pieties Text: Job 4:7-11
Introduction: When Good Advice Goes Bad
We find ourselves this morning in a hospital room of sorts. Job is on his ash heap, scraping his sores with a piece of pottery, having lost everything but his life and his wife, and she was not being much of a helpmeet at the moment. Into this chamber of catastrophic loss walk three of his friends, Eliphaz, Bildad, and Zophar. And for seven days, they do the one right thing they manage to do in this entire book. They sit with him in silence. But then, Eliphaz opens his mouth, and the comforting ends and the counseling begins. And it is a disaster.
What we are about to dissect is the first speech of Eliphaz the Temanite. And we must be very careful here, because the devil is not so foolish as to always deal in obvious lies. His most effective work is done with half-truths, with truths misapplied, with principles that are generally sound but are wielded like a bludgeon in a situation that calls for a balm. Eliphaz is not a pagan heretic. What he says here is, in the main, biblically defensible. It is proverbial wisdom. It is the kind of thing you might find stitched on a throw pillow in a Christian bookstore. But in this context, directed at this man, it is cruel. It is the poison of a plausible piety.
The problem with Job's counselors is not that they were wrong, but rather that they were right woodenly. They had a system, a tidy theological box, that explained how the world works: God is just, therefore the righteous prosper and the wicked suffer. Job is suffering immensely. Therefore, Job must be immensely wicked. Q.E.D. It is a clean syllogism, but it is also a soul-crushing lie in this instance. They saw the hard consequences in Job's life and affirmed the consequent, assuming there must have been great sin. But the book of Job is in the canon precisely to warn us against this kind of flat-footed, graceless calculus. It is here to teach us that while the principle of sowing and reaping is iron-clad, we are not always in a position to see the harvest or to know what was sown.
So as we listen to Eliphaz, we must listen with two sets of ears. We must hear the general truth that he speaks, but we must also see the profound error in his application. He is a man trying to perform surgery with a sledgehammer, and Job is the one being hammered.
The Text
"Remember now, who ever perished being innocent? Or where were the upright wiped out? According to what I have seen, those who plow wickedness And those who sow trouble harvest it. By the breath of God they perish, And by the wind of His anger they come to an end. The roaring of the lion and the voice of the fierce lion, And the teeth of the young lions are broken. The lion perishes for lack of prey, And the whelps of the lioness are scattered."
(Job 4:7-11 LSB)
The Unassailable Premise (v. 7)
Eliphaz begins with what he believes is a rhetorical question that will corner Job into confession.
"Remember now, who ever perished being innocent? Or where were the upright wiped out?" (Job 4:7)
This is the central pillar of his argument. It is a challenge based on experience and tradition. "Job, just think about it. Look back through all of human history. Can you name one single case where a truly innocent man was utterly destroyed? Can you point to a time when the genuinely upright were annihilated?" The implied answer, of course, is no. Eliphaz is setting a trap. If Job agrees with the premise, he must then explain why he is the exception. If he disagrees, he appears to be challenging the very justice of God.
Now, is this premise true? In the ultimate sense, yes. The Bible is clear that God is the defender of the righteous. Psalm 37 tells us, "I have been young and now I am old, Yet I have not seen the righteous forsaken Or his descendants begging bread" (Ps. 37:25). God does not ultimately abandon His people. But Eliphaz's timeline is the problem. He is thinking in the here and now. He is looking for a one-to-one correspondence between righteousness and prosperity within the confines of this mortal life. And that is where his theology begins to fray.
Was Abel innocent when he perished? Was Naboth? What about the prophets sawn in two? What about the faithful slaughtered by Jezebel? And what, preeminently, about the Lord Jesus Christ? Here is the ultimate answer to Eliphaz's question. Who perished being innocent? The only truly innocent man who ever lived. He was not just wiped out; He was crushed by God for the sins of others. Eliphaz's tidy system has no room for a suffering servant, no category for substitutionary atonement. His worldview is all law and no gospel. He sees the scales of justice, but he is blind to the altar of sacrifice.
The Farmer and His Harvest (v. 8)
Having laid down his principle, Eliphaz now applies the agricultural metaphor of sowing and reaping, a concept that is thoroughly biblical.
"According to what I have seen, those who plow wickedness And those who sow trouble harvest it." (Job 4:8 LSB)
He appeals to his own observation: "According to what I have seen." This is the language of empiricism, not revelation. He is building his theology from the ground up, based on his limited experience. And what has he seen? He has seen that actions have consequences. This is undeniably true. The Apostle Paul affirms it centuries later: "Do not be deceived, God is not mocked; for whatever a man sows, this he will also reap" (Gal. 6:7). Hosea says, "For they sow the wind, And they reap the whirlwind" (Hos. 8:7).
This is the law of the harvest. It is woven into the fabric of reality. If you plant corn, you get corn. If you plant thistle, you get thistle. If you plow fields of deceit, injustice, and cruelty, you should not be surprised when your barn is full of misery, judgment, and destruction. Eliphaz is correct. This is how God has ordered His world.
But his application to Job is a monstrous leap of logic. He sees Job's harvest of trouble and reasons backward to assume that Job must have been plowing wickedness. He is a detective who has found the body but has arrested the wrong man. He cannot conceive of a scenario where a righteous man might be afflicted for reasons beyond his immediate comprehension, for reasons that are being worked out in the heavenly court, as we, the readers, know is the case. He has a true principle, but he is using it to bear false witness against his brother.
The Breath of God's Judgment (v. 9)
Eliphaz continues, describing the active role of God in bringing about this harvest of judgment.
"By the breath of God they perish, And by the wind of His anger they come to an end." (Job 4:9 LSB)
The destruction of the wicked is not an impersonal, mechanical process. It is not just karma. It is the personal, holy wrath of God against sin. The "breath of God" and the "wind of His anger" are powerful biblical images for divine judgment. Isaiah uses this same language to describe the fate of the Assyrians and, ultimately, the Antichrist: "And the breath of the LORD, like a stream of brimstone, sets it afire" (Isa. 30:33), and "He will strike the earth with the rod of His mouth, And with the breath of His lips He will slay the wicked" (Isa. 11:4). The wicked do not just fade away; they are blown away by the fury of a holy God.
Again, the theology is sound. God does judge sin. His anger is real. But think of what this must have sounded like to Job. His children were killed by a great wind (Job 1:19). Eliphaz is, perhaps unintentionally, twisting the knife. He is essentially saying, "Job, that tornado that killed your children? That was the hot breath of God's anger against your secret sin." This is comfort from hell. It takes a general truth about God's justice and turns it into a specific and false accusation. He is using the doctrine of divine wrath to beat a man who is already on the ground.
The Broken Lions (v. 10-11)
Eliphaz concludes this section with a vivid series of metaphors about lions, symbols of power, ferocity, and predatory strength.
"The roaring of the lion and the voice of the fierce lion, And the teeth of the young lions are broken. The lion perishes for lack of prey, And the whelps of the lioness are scattered." (Job 4:10-11 LSB)
The wicked, in their arrogance, are like a pride of lions. They roar, they intimidate, they devour. They seem invincible. David uses this same imagery for his enemies: "They open wide their mouth at me, As a ravening and a roaring lion" (Ps. 22:13). But Eliphaz declares that God is the great lion-tamer. He breaks their teeth. He cuts off their food supply. He scatters their young. No matter how powerful the wicked seem, God can and will neutralize them completely.
This is a glorious truth for the oppressed and a terrifying warning for the oppressor. God shatters the strength of the proud. But why is Eliphaz saying this to Job? Job was the "greatest of all the men of the east" (Job 1:3). He was a man of immense power, wealth, and influence, a veritable lion in his society. Now, his teeth are broken, his prey is gone, and his children, his whelps, are scattered and dead. Eliphaz is not-so-subtly classifying Job with the predatory wicked whom God brings to ruin. He is saying, "You looked like a mighty lion, Job, but now you are just another carcass in God's cosmic safari. This is what happens to wicked tyrants."
The Gospel for Bad Counselors
So what do we do with this? We must see that Eliphaz's error is our natural, default, fallen human religion. It is the religion of karma, of merit, of "you get what you deserve." It is the religion of the older brother in the story of the prodigal son. It is a religion of score-keeping, and it has no room for grace, for mystery, or for a God whose ways are higher than our ways.
The entire book of Job stands as a monumental rebuke to this kind of thinking. It tells us that suffering is not always punitive. Sometimes it is purificative, as God refines the faith of His saints. Sometimes it is pedagogical, as God teaches us things about Himself we could learn no other way. And sometimes, as in Job's case, it is polemical, as God wages war against Satan in the heavenly realms and uses the faithfulness of His servants on earth as His chosen weapon.
Eliphaz thought the story was about Job's sin. But the story was about God's sovereignty and Satan's slander. Eliphaz's counsel was worthless because he diagnosed the wrong disease. He was applying the law to a man who needed to see the hidden purposes of God's love.
And this drives us, as it must always drive us, to the cross. At the cross, Eliphaz's entire system is turned on its head. The only innocent man who ever lived perishes. The one who sowed nothing but perfect righteousness reaped the whirlwind of God's wrath. The Lion of the tribe of Judah was slaughtered, His teeth seemingly broken, His life perishing for lack of prey. The breath of God's anger, which should have consumed us, came upon Him.
Why? So that the neat, tidy, damnable ledger of our sin could be nailed to His cross. He took the judgment that our wicked plowing deserved so that we could receive the harvest of His perfect sowing. He became the scattered whelp so that we could be gathered as sons. God's justice is not a simple quid pro quo, as Eliphaz believed. It is a profound and mysterious tapestry of substitution and grace. We do reap what we sow. But the glory of the gospel is that believers have been crucified with Christ. We have died to the law of the harvest of sin and death. Our harvest was reaped by another, on a hill outside Jerusalem, two thousand years ago. And in exchange, we are now invited to reap a harvest we did not sow: the perfect righteousness of Jesus Christ. That is a truth that will comfort a suffering soul, because it is a truth that has room for a cross.