The Poison of Pious Advice Text: Job 22:21-30
Introduction: When Good Counsel Goes Bad
We live in an age that is drowning in advice. The internet is a roaring sea of self-help gurus, life coaches, and spiritual guides, all offering seven steps to a better life, five ways to financial freedom, and three tricks for a happy marriage. Much of this advice is not just wrong, it is spiritually toxic. But the most dangerous advice, the most potent poison, is the kind that is almost right. It is the counsel that is ninety percent biblical truth, mixed with ten percent man-centered arsenic. This is the kind of counsel that Job receives from his friend Eliphaz, and it is the kind of counsel that still plagues the modern church.
The book of Job confronts us with the jagged problem of righteous suffering. Why do bad things happen to good people? Or, to put it more biblically, why does God ordain suffering for His saints? Into this profound mystery, Job's friends march with the confidence of men who have a very tidy flowchart. For them, the equation is simple: righteousness equals blessing, and suffering equals sin. Therefore, Job's immense suffering must be the result of some immense, hidden sin. They are the original prosperity preachers, and their gospel is a mechanical, transactional system of cosmic justice that you can manage from your end.
In this passage, Eliphaz delivers his final speech. It is a masterpiece of pious, well-intentioned, and utterly soul-crushing error. On the surface, it sounds like a wonderful evangelistic appeal. Repent! Return to God! Find peace! And you will be blessed. Who could argue with that? But the problem is not with the individual words; the problem is with the entire framework. Eliphaz is not calling Job to worship God for His own sake. He is offering God as a means to an end. The end is the restoration of Job's comfort, wealth, and influence. This is a call to use God, not to love Him. It is a theology that works perfectly, right up until the moment you encounter a cross. And it is a theology that must be identified, dismantled, and rejected if we are to have any true fellowship with the God who reigns from a whirlwind, and not from a vending machine.
The Text
Yield now and be at peace with Him; Thereby good will come to you. Please receive instruction from His mouth And set His words in your heart. If you return to the Almighty, you will be restored; If you remove unrighteousness far from your tent, And put your gold in the dust, And the gold of Ophir among the stones of the brooks, Then the Almighty will be your gold And choice silver to you. For then you will delight in the Almighty And lift up your face to God. You will entreat Him, and He will hear you; And you will pay your vows. You will also decree a thing, and it will be established for you; And light will shine on your ways. When some are cast down, you will speak with confidence, And the humble person He will save. He will provide escape for one who is not innocent, And he will escape through the cleanness of your hands.
(Job 22:21-30 LSB)
The Transactional Bargain (vv. 21-24)
Eliphaz begins with what sounds like a gracious invitation, but it is structured like a business proposal.
"Yield now and be at peace with Him; Thereby good will come to you. Please receive instruction from His mouth And set His words in your heart. If you return to the Almighty, you will be restored; If you remove unrighteousness far from your tent, And put your gold in the dust, And the gold of Ophir among the stones of the brooks," (Job 22:21-24 LSB)
The entire premise is transactional. Notice the "if-then" structure. If you yield, then good will come. If you return, then you will be restored. If you get rid of sin and devalue your gold, then God will bless you. This is the essence of every false religion on the planet. It places man in the driver's seat. It makes repentance and piety a form of currency that we use to purchase blessings from God. It is a spiritual lever that we pull to get the divine machine to dispense the goods.
Now, is it good to yield to God? Yes. Is it good to receive His instruction? Of course. Is it good to return to Him and remove unrighteousness? Absolutely. But the motive is everything. Eliphaz is not calling Job to return to God because God is worthy of worship. He is calling Job to return to God because it is a shrewd move to get his stuff back. The ultimate goal here is not God, but "good." The goal is restoration. The goal is a return to the comfortable status quo.
The counsel to "put your gold in the dust" is particularly subtle. It sounds like a call to radical discipleship, like Jesus telling the rich young ruler to sell all he has. But in this context, it is just another investment strategy. Eliphaz is telling Job, "Your problem is that you have idolized your wealth. Treat it like dirt, and then God, seeing your newfound piety, will give you even more of it." It is a way of letting go in order to get a better grip. This is not repentance; it is a calculated risk. It reduces God to a cosmic force that responds to human input according to a predictable formula. This is paganism dressed up in pious language.
The True Treasure (vv. 25-26)
In the middle of this flawed counsel, Eliphaz stumbles upon a glorious truth, almost by accident. It is a diamond in a dung heap.
"Then the Almighty will be your gold And choice silver to you. For then you will delight in the Almighty And lift up your face to God." (Job 22:25-26 LSB)
Here is the heart of true religion. The reward for turning from idols is not more stuff. The reward for turning from idols is God Himself. The goal of the Christian life is not to get God's blessings, but to get God. He is the treasure. He is the inheritance. He is the great reward. David understood this when he said, "Whom have I in heaven but You? And there is none upon earth that I desire besides You" (Psalm 73:25).
This is the central failure of all prosperity gospels, ancient and modern. They promise you God's stuff, but the true gospel promises you God. The prosperity gospel promises you a full bank account and an empty soul. The true gospel may lead to an empty bank account, but it gives you a soul filled with the Almighty Himself. Eliphaz gets the words right, but the context makes it clear that he doesn't understand the music. For him, God becoming your gold is simply the middle step before you get your actual gold back. But for the true believer, God becoming our gold is the final destination. There is nothing beyond it. To have Him is to have everything.
When God is your treasure, then you will "delight in the Almighty." Delight follows treasure. You enjoy what you value most. If your treasure is your health, your family, or your reputation, then your delight will be fragile, rising and falling with your circumstances. But if God is your treasure, your delight is as secure as He is. You can "lift up your face to God" in the midst of the ash heap because your joy is not located in the things that can be burned. It is located in the unburnable God.
The Power Fantasy (vv. 27-30)
Having reached this accidental peak, Eliphaz's counsel quickly descends back into a man-centered power fantasy.
"You will entreat Him, and He will hear you; And you will pay your vows. You will also decree a thing, and it will be established for you; And light will shine on your ways... He will provide escape for one who is not innocent, And he will escape through the cleanness of your hands." (Job 22:27-30 LSB)
Again, these are half-truths that conceal a deadly lie. Does God hear the prayers of the righteous? Yes. But the promise here is absolute and unconditional. It is a blank check. "You will decree a thing, and it will be established for you." This is not the language of a creature submitting to the Creator. This is the language of a god. This is the word-of-faith heresy in seed form. It suggests that our words have the power to create reality, that God is obligated to ratify our decrees.
This is a profound misunderstanding of sovereignty. We do not command God. We entreat Him. We ask, we seek, we knock. We submit our requests to His sovereign and good pleasure. We pray, "Thy will be done." Eliphaz offers Job a return to a position of command, not a life of submission. He promises that light will shine on "your ways." But the Christian life is about our ways being conformed to His way.
The final verses are the most troubling. "The humble person He will save." True enough. But then, "He will provide escape for one who is not innocent, And he will escape through the cleanness of your hands." This is salvation by works, plain and simple. It makes our deliverance dependent on our own moral purity. Eliphaz's system has no category for grace. It has no room for a man who is declared righteous while still being a sinner. If escape depends on the cleanness of our hands, then we are all damned. For our hands are filthy. Our righteousness is as a polluted garment.
The Gospel Correction
Eliphaz's entire system is shattered by the cross of Jesus Christ. His tidy world of predictable outcomes cannot account for the ultimate righteous sufferer. Jesus Christ, the only truly innocent man, suffered the wrath of God not because of some secret sin, but for our sins. The neat formula of "sow-reap" finds its ultimate fulfillment at Calvary, where Christ sowed righteousness and reaped a curse, so that we who sowed sin might reap a blessing.
The gospel call is not, "Clean up your act so that God will bless you." The gospel call is, "You cannot clean up your act. Come to the one who has cleaned it for you." We do not yield to God in order to strike a bargain for peace. We have peace with God because Christ yielded Himself to the cross (Romans 5:1).
The Almighty becomes our gold not when we devalue our own, but when the Spirit opens our eyes to see that Christ is infinitely more valuable than anything this world can offer. He is the pearl of great price, for whom we joyfully sell all that we have.
And we do not decree things into existence. Rather, we rest in the great decree of God, made before the foundation of the world, to save a people for Himself through the blood of His Son. Light shines on our ways not because we are so clever, but because He is the Light of the World, and He has shone into our darkness (2 Cor. 4:6).
Finally, we are not delivered by the cleanness of our hands. We are delivered because of the nail-pierced hands of another. Our escape is not secured by our innocence, but by His. The only clean hands that can save belong to Jesus Christ, and it is by His righteousness, imputed to us by faith, that we are saved. Eliphaz offered Job a ladder to climb back to God. The gospel gives us a savior who came down from God to us, because all our ladders are rotten and lead nowhere. Do not listen to the poison of pious advice. Listen to the gospel of grace.