The Pious Heresy of Eliphaz Text: Job 22:1-5
Introduction: The Danger of Tidy Systems
We come now to the third and final round of speeches from Job's friends, and it is here that the gloves truly come off. Eliphaz the Temanite, who began this whole miserable business of comfort with a veneer of sagacity and spiritual experience, now drops all pretense and launches a full-frontal assault on Job's character. What we have in this chapter is a master class in how to get theology right in the abstract and catastrophically wrong in the particular. Eliphaz is not a liberal theologian. He is not a modernist. He says many things that are, on their own, quite true. But he is a man with a tidy system, a neat little box labeled "retributive justice," and because Job's immense suffering does not fit in that box, he concludes that Job's righteousness must be a sham.
This is a perennial temptation for the orthodox. We love our systems, and for good reason. God is a God of order, and His revelation is coherent and systematic. But when our system becomes more real to us than the God who gave it, and when we use that system as a club to batter the afflicted, we have turned our orthodoxy into a weapon of the Accuser. Eliphaz is a prime example of a man who trusts his theological grid more than he trusts the manifest reality of a brother's grief and godly testimony. He cannot conceive of a world where a righteous man suffers intensely for reasons that are hidden in the counsels of God. Therefore, the facts must be altered to fit the theory. Job cannot be righteous. He must be a monstrous sinner, hiding his wickedness behind a facade of piety.
We must pay close attention here, because the spirit of Eliphaz is alive and well. It is the spirit that says, "If that church is struggling, there must be sin in the camp." It is the spirit that says, "If your child is rebellious, you must have failed in your parenting." It is the spirit that looks at any form of suffering and immediately, with a grim sort of satisfaction, begins to hunt for the sin that "must" have caused it. This is the logic of the Pharisees who asked Jesus about the man born blind: "Who sinned, this man or his parents?" Jesus rejected their premise entirely. The suffering was for the glory of God.
In these opening verses of his final speech, Eliphaz lays down his theological foundation. It is a foundation built on the absolute transcendence and self-sufficiency of God. And it is all true. But he uses these glorious truths to construct a fallacious and cruel argument against a man whom God Himself declared to be blameless and upright.
The Text
Then Eliphaz the Temanite answered and said, "Can a mighty man be of use to God, Or an insightful man be useful to himself? Is there any pleasure to the Almighty if you are righteous, Or profit if you make your ways perfect? Is it because of your reverent fear that He reproves you, That He enters into judgment against you? Is not your evil great, And your iniquities without end?"
(Job 22:1-5 LSB)
God's Aseity and Man's Place (v. 1-3)
Eliphaz begins with a series of rhetorical questions designed to establish the absolute transcendence of God. He is not wrong in what he affirms about God, but he is dead wrong in the conclusion he draws from it.
"Can a mighty man be of use to God, Or an insightful man be useful to himself? Is there any pleasure to the Almighty if you are righteous, Or profit if you make your ways perfect?" (Job 22:2-3)
The point Eliphaz is making is a central tenet of classical theism. God is self-existent, self-sufficient, and utterly independent. This is what theologians call His aseity. He needs nothing from us. Our righteousness does not add to His perfection. Our wisdom does not augment His omniscience. Our strength does not contribute to His omnipotence. If a man is wise, the primary beneficiary of that wisdom is the man himself, not God. If you are righteous, you are not doing God a favor. You are not putting Him in your debt.
This is profoundly true. Paul echoes this very sentiment in the Areopagus, telling the Athenians that God is not "served by human hands, as though he needed anything, since he himself gives to all mankind life and breath and everything" (Acts 17:25). Our relationship with God is not a commercial transaction. We are not cosmic business partners. God is the fountain, and we are the cisterns. The flow is entirely one way. All our righteousness is a gift from Him, worked in us by His Spirit, and when He is pleased with it, He is pleased with the reflection of His own character in us. He is like a father who delights in a gift from his toddler, not because he needed a macaroni necklace, but because it is an expression of love from the child he loves.
So, Eliphaz has his doctrine of God straight on this point. But look at the subtle, toxic turn he is making. He is using the doctrine of God's transcendence to erase the doctrine of God's covenantal pleasure. He sets God's aseity against His fatherly delight. The unspoken premise is this: "Job, you seem to think that your track record of righteousness should have obligated God to bless you. You are acting as though God owes you something. But God is so far above you that your righteousness is of no consequence to Him at all. It brings Him no profit, no pleasure. Therefore, He has no reason to bless you for it."
This is a half-truth that functions as a whole lie. While it is true that God does not need our obedience, it is gloriously and repeatedly stated in Scripture that He delights in it. "The LORD takes pleasure in those who fear him, in those who hope in his steadfast love" (Psalm 147:11). The prayer of the upright is His delight (Proverbs 15:8). Eliphaz has taken the Creator/creature distinction and weaponized it, turning God into a cold, distant, cosmic principle, an Unmoved Mover who is utterly indifferent to the faithfulness of His servants. He has created a caricature of God to fit his argument.
A False Premise (v. 4)
Having established his distorted view of God's relationship to human righteousness, Eliphaz now applies it directly to Job's situation.
"Is it because of your reverent fear that He reproves you, That He enters into judgment against you?" (Job 22:4)
This is sarcasm, dripping with contempt. "Do you really think, Job, that God is punishing you for your piety? Are you so arrogant as to believe that your fear of God is the reason you are being judged?" The question is designed to sound absurd, and it is. Of course God does not punish men for their righteousness. But Eliphaz presents a false dilemma. He argues that there are only two possibilities: either God is punishing Job for his piety, or God is punishing Job for his sin. Since the first is ridiculous, the second must be true.
But Eliphaz, in his tidy, man-centered system, has left out the third option, the very one that the prologue of this book has revealed to us as the truth. God is allowing Job to be tested because of his piety. God is not reproving Job; He is refining him. He is not judging Job; He is boasting about him in the heavenly courts. Satan's accusation was precisely that Job's fear of God was mercenary, a means to an end. "Does Job fear God for no reason?" (Job 1:9). God's purpose in this trial is to vindicate His own name and the integrity of a genuine, God-given faith, proving that Job's fear of God is not a transaction but a relationship that holds fast even when all the earthly benefits are stripped away.
Eliphaz cannot see this. His theological system has no category for it. In his world, suffering is always and only punitive. It is a direct, one-to-one consequence of personal sin. He cannot grasp the concept of suffering as a crucible, as a stage for the display of God's glory, or as a participation in a cosmic spiritual war. His theology is two-dimensional, and so he flattens Job's experience to fit it.
The Sledgehammer of Accusation (v. 5)
Having dismissed the possibility that Job is righteous, Eliphaz now drops the hammer. The logic is simple: if Job is suffering this much, he must have sinned this much.
"Is not your evil great, And your iniquities without end?" (Job 22:5)
This is no longer insinuation. This is a direct, slanderous accusation. And it is not just an accusation of some minor failing. Eliphaz posits that Job's evil must be "great" and his iniquities "without end." The punishment must fit the crime, and since the punishment is off the charts, the crime must be as well. In the verses that follow, he will go on to invent a whole catalog of specific sins to lay at Job's door: extortion, refusing water to the weary, withholding bread from the hungry, oppressing widows and orphans. He has no evidence for any of this. His only evidence is the ash heap. He is arguing from the effect back to a supposed cause.
This is the very definition of judging by appearances, which our Lord forbids. Eliphaz is a man walking by sight, not by faith. He sees the calamity and reverse-engineers a crime to justify it. This is the Accuser's work. Satan does it before the throne of God, and Job's friends are now doing it to his face. They came to be comforters, but they have become prosecutors. And the defendant has no advocate but God, who for the moment remains silent.
Notice the progression. Eliphaz begins with a correct, if sterile, doctrine of God's transcendence. He then uses this truth to create a false dilemma about the nature of Job's suffering. And he resolves this dilemma by leveling a series of baseless and wicked accusations against a righteous man. This is how bad theology works. It often starts with a truth, isolates it from other truths, and then applies it with a sledgehammer where a surgeon's scalpel is needed.
Conclusion: The Folly of Playing God
What is the lesson for us in this pious heresy of Eliphaz? It is a profound warning against the intellectual pride that assumes we can always trace the lines of God's providence. We live in a fallen world, and while it is a basic biblical principle that sin brings consequences, the book of Job exists to teach us that this is not a simple, mechanical equation that we can apply to every individual circumstance.
Sometimes the rain falls on the just and the unjust alike. Sometimes the wicked prosper, for a time. And sometimes, the most righteous among us are called to endure the deepest suffering, not for their sin, but for the glory of God and the shaming of the devil. When we encounter a brother or sister in the midst of such a trial, our first duty is not to be a detective, but a comforter. Our job is not to find the "reason" in a way that satisfies our tidy system, but to sit with them in the ashes, to weep with those who weep, and to point them to the only one who truly understands.
Eliphaz's error was that he thought he could read the mind of God by looking at Job's circumstances. He appointed himself as God's prosecuting attorney, and in so doing, he spoke what was not right, as God Himself will declare at the end of this book (Job 42:7). He defended God with lies, which is something God has no need of.
The gospel flips Eliphaz's logic on its head. On the cross, the only truly innocent Man who ever lived endured the greatest suffering imaginable. If Eliphaz were standing at the foot of the cross, his system would have compelled him to conclude, "Is not your evil great, and your iniquities without end?" He would have seen the suffering and assumed the sin. But he would have been blasphemously wrong. Christ was suffering not for His own sin, but for ours. He was the righteous for the unrighteous, to bring us to God.
Therefore, let us learn humility. Let us hold fast to our systematic theology, but let us hold it with an open hand, recognizing that God's ways are higher than our ways. Let us refuse to be Accusers of the brethren. And when we see suffering, let us not rush to a diagnosis, but rather to our knees, praying for grace, wisdom, and a compassionate heart for those who, like our Lord, may be suffering for reasons far grander and more mysterious than our little systems can contain.