The Discipline of the Almighty Text: Job 5:1-7
Introduction: When True Things Are Not The Truth
We live in an age that is drowning in information but starved of wisdom. We have access to more facts, more data, and more opinions than any generation in human history, and yet we are more confused than ever. The problem is not a lack of true statements. The problem is a lack of The Truth, a person, who gives all the little truths their proper place, their context, and their meaning.
This is precisely the situation we encounter in the book of Job. Job is on his ash heap, scraping his sores, having lost everything, and his friends have arrived to comfort him. And by comfort, I mean they have come to deploy a series of theologically accurate, spiritually sound, and pastorally disastrous propositions. The problem with Job's counselors is not that they were wrong, but rather that they were right woodenly. They possessed a collection of true principles about how God governs the world, but they wielded them like a club, applying them with a sledgehammer certainty that was entirely disconnected from the situation at hand. They had a correct systematic theology, but they were applying it to the wrong man at the wrong time.
Eliphaz the Temanite is the first to speak, and what he says in this chapter is, for the most part, entirely biblical. You could lift many of these verses out and preach a fine sermon on them in another context. He speaks of God's justice, the consequences of sin, and the reality of human affliction. But in this context, addressed to this man, his words are an affliction in themselves. He is a doctor who has correctly identified a disease but is administering the medicine to a healthy man he has mistaken for a patient. His diagnosis is a misdiagnosis, and so his true cure becomes a poison.
This is a profound lesson for us. It is not enough to say true things. We must speak the truth in love, which means speaking it with wisdom, with discernment, and with a right understanding of to whom we are speaking. Eliphaz's speech is a master class in how to be right and wrong at the same time. He is about to lay out the fixed moral order of the universe, and in doing so, he will completely miss the man sitting in front of him and the God who is sovereign over that order.
The Text
"Call now, is there anyone who will answer you? And to which of the holy ones will you turn? For vexation kills the ignorant fool, And jealousy puts to death the simple. I have seen the ignorant fool taking root, And I cursed his abode suddenly. His sons are far from salvation, They are even crushed in the gate, And there is no deliverer. His harvest the hungry devour And take it to a place of thorns, And the schemer pants after their wealth. For wickedness does not come out from the dust, Nor does trouble sprout from the ground, For man is born for trouble, As sparks fly upward."
(Job 5:1-7 LSB)
No Other Mediator (v. 1)
Eliphaz begins his counsel with a rhetorical challenge, intended to isolate Job and drive him to the conclusion Eliphaz has already reached.
"Call now, is there anyone who will answer you? And to which of the holy ones will you turn?" (Job 5:1)
This is a cutting question. Eliphaz is essentially saying, "Go ahead, Job. Appeal your case. Who will listen? Who will take up your cause?" The "holy ones" here likely refers to angels, the members of God's heavenly court. Eliphaz is reminding Job that there is no intermediary, no angelic advocate, who can stand between a man and God to argue a case of injustice. In this, Eliphaz is technically correct. God puts no ultimate trust in His angels; He charges them with error (Job 4:18). They are servants, not saviors. No created being can mediate for another created being before the uncreated God.
The irony here is thick enough to cut with a knife. Eliphaz uses this truth to shut Job's mouth, to tell him his case is hopeless and he has no advocate. But the entire witness of Scripture screams that while no created being can mediate, there is One who can. Job himself will later cry out for a "daysman" or an umpire who could lay his hand on them both (Job 9:33). The gospel answers Eliphaz's rhetorical question with a resounding name: Jesus Christ. To which of the holy ones will you turn? We turn to the Holy One of Israel, the one who is both God and man, our great High Priest.
Eliphaz's theology is too small. It has a God on His throne and sinful man on the earth, and a great chasm between them. He sees no bridge. His counsel, therefore, is one of despair disguised as piety. He tells Job to give up his case because there is no one to hear it. The Christian faith tells us to press our case precisely because there is One who hears it, seated at the right hand of the Father, ever living to make intercession for us (Heb. 7:25).
The Self-Destruction of the Fool (v. 2-3)
Having cut off any hope of an external appeal, Eliphaz turns to Job's internal state, diagnosing him as a fool consumed by his own bitterness.
"For vexation kills the ignorant fool, And jealousy puts to death the simple. I have seen the ignorant fool taking root, And I cursed his abode suddenly." (Job 5:2-3 LSB)
Again, these are true statements. They are proverbs. Vexation, that inward-gnawing resentment and frustration, is a spiritual poison. It does kill the fool. The word for jealousy can also mean envy or passionate zeal, and when it is directed against God's wisdom, it is deadly. The simple man, the one who is easily led astray, is destroyed by it. Eliphaz is setting up a syllogism: Vexation kills fools. You, Job, are full of vexation. Therefore, you must be a fool.
He bolsters his argument with his own personal observation: "I have seen..." This is the voice of experience, the wisdom of age. He has seen fools prosper for a season, "taking root" like a healthy tree. But their success is an illusion. Eliphaz, in his righteous insight, has "cursed his abode suddenly." He saw the inevitable end and pronounced it. He is presenting himself as a man who understands the secret rhythms of God's justice.
But notice the subtle pride. "I have seen... I cursed..." Eliphaz is making himself the arbiter of who is, and who is not, a fool. He is looking at Job's boils and his grief, hearing his anguished cries, and mistaking them for the "vexation" of a rebellious fool. He cannot conceive of a suffering that is not punitive. He cannot imagine a trial that is a test, a fire that is for refining rather than for destruction. His theological grid has no category for a righteous sufferer, and so he must force Job into the category of a wicked fool.
The Fool's Cursed Legacy (v. 4-5)
Eliphaz then elaborates on the curse he has observed, painting a vivid picture of the fool's utter ruin. Every detail is chosen to reflect Job's own recent calamities.
"His sons are far from salvation, They are even crushed in the gate, And there is no deliverer. His harvest the hungry devour And take it to a place of thorns, And the schemer pants after their wealth." (Job 5:4-5 LSB)
This is where the counsel turns from merely mistaken to actively cruel. He speaks of the fool's sons being "far from salvation." Job's ten children have just been killed. He says they are "crushed in the gate," the place of legal proceedings, with no one to defend them. This implies they died under a cloud of guilt and shame. He speaks of the harvest being devoured by the hungry and wealth being snatched away. Job has just lost all his livestock and servants to raiders.
Every word is a twist of the knife. Eliphaz is taking the general truth that sin has consequences, often generational ones, and applying it with surgical precision to Job's open wounds. He is explaining Job's suffering to him by telling him, "This is what happens to wicked fools, and it has happened to you." It is a brutal, heartless application of a true principle. The Bible does teach that a man's sin affects his children and his prosperity. But the book of Job exists to teach us that this is not a simple, one-to-one, mechanical equation. God is not a cosmic vending machine where you insert a sin and a dead child comes out.
Eliphaz's error is the error of all tidy, closed systems of thought that leave no room for mystery, for sovereignty, or for a God who works in ways that confound our neat formulas. He has a flowchart for suffering, and he is determined to make Job fit in one of the boxes.
The Universal Condition (v. 6-7)
Finally, Eliphaz concludes his opening salvo with a grand, philosophical statement about the nature of reality.
"For wickedness does not come out from the dust, Nor does trouble sprout from the ground, For man is born for trouble, As sparks fly upward." (Job 5:6-7 LSB)
Here, Eliphaz is at his most profound, and most correct. Trouble is not a random accident. It doesn't just "sprout from the ground" like a weed. There is a moral calculus to the universe. Affliction has a source. And what is that source? Man. "For man is born for trouble, as sparks fly upward."
This is a magnificent statement of the human condition after the Fall. Just as it is the nature of fire to produce sparks that fly upward, so it is the nature of fallen man to be born into a world of trouble. This is not fatalism; it is realism. We live in a cursed world (Genesis 3:17). We are born into sin and misery. This is a foundational truth. No one gets through this life unscathed. Trouble is the air we breathe.
And this is the tragedy of Eliphaz's whole speech. He gets so close. He correctly identifies that we live in a fallen world where trouble is inevitable. But he draws exactly the wrong conclusion from it. His logic is: Trouble comes from sin. You are in trouble. Therefore, you have sinned. He fails to see the other possibility, the one revealed in the prologue of this book. He fails to see that God, in His sovereignty, might use trouble not just to punish sin, but to test faith, to humble the righteous, to silence Satan, and to display His own glory in a way that nothing else could.
Eliphaz sees the sparks, but he doesn't see the Refiner's fire. He sees the trouble, but he doesn't see the loving, sovereign hand of God that measures and appoints every single spark for His own good purposes.
Conclusion: The Upward Spark
So what do we do with this? We must learn to distinguish between a proverb and a promise, between a general principle and a specific diagnosis. It is true that vexation kills the fool. It is true that sin brings ruin. It is true that man is born to trouble. But the central truth of the gospel is that God has entered into this world of upward-flying sparks.
Eliphaz asked, "to which of the holy ones will you turn?" We turn to the one who, though He knew no sin, was made to be sin for us (2 Cor. 5:21). We turn to the one whose sons, the sons of God, are brought near to salvation, not crushed in the gate. We turn to the one who, on the cross, endured the ultimate vexation and jealousy of God against sin, so that we would not have to.
Yes, man is born to trouble. But in Christ, we are born again to a living hope (1 Peter 1:3). The sparks of our affliction are real, and they sting. But they are not random. They are not meaningless. For those who are in Christ, every spark flies upward, directed by a sovereign hand, to refine us, to humble us, and ultimately, to drive us to the only one who can answer when we call. Our troubles are not a sign of God's rejection, as Eliphaz assumed, but rather the very tool of His fatherly discipline and love. He is the God who makes our suffering make sense, not by explaining it away with tidy formulas, but by absorbing it into His own story, the story of the cross and the empty tomb.