'Acquaint now thyself with Him, and be at peace: thereby good shall
come unto thee.'--JOB xxii. 21.
In the sense in which the speaker meant them, these words are not
true. They mean little more than 'It pays to be religious.' What kind
of notion of acquaintance with God Eliphaz may have had, one scarcely
knows, but at any rate, the whole meaning of the text on his lips is
poor and selfish.
The peace promised is evidently only outward tranquillity and freedom
from trouble, and the good that is to come to Job is plainly mere
worldly prosperity. This strain of thought is expressed even more
clearly in that extraordinary bit of bathos, which with solemn irony
the great dramatist who wrote this book makes this Eliphaz utter
immediately after the text, 'The Almighty shall be thy defence
and--thou shalt have plenty of silver!' It has not been left for
commercial Englishmen to recommend religion on the ground that it
produces successful merchants and makes the best of both worlds.
These friends of Job's all err in believing that suffering is always
and only the measure of sin, and that you can tell a man's great guilt
by observing his great sorrows. And so they have two main subjects on
which they preach at their poor friend, pouring vitriol into his
wounds: first, how wicked he must be to be so haunted by sorrows;
second, how surely he will be delivered if he will only be religious
after their pattern, that is, speak platitudes of conventional
devotion and say, I submit.
This is the meaning of our text as it stands. But we may surely find a
higher sense in which it is true and take that to heart.