Today, I am reading and commenting on  Job 22-28.

I am always horrified by the accusations Eliphaz makes against Job at the beginning of this passage.  He specifically accuses Job of horrible sins.  Up until this point Job’s friends have merely said that Job’s suffering must be the result of some horrible sin which Job has committed, but have refrained from speculating as to what that sin was.  Here, Eliphaz says that Job must be guilty of these specific sins since he was suffering as he was.  What horrifies me is that Eliphaz is spelling out what the other two were thinking all along even though they had not witnessed Job committing these sins. Nevertheless, they were convinced that he was guilty of them.  Making this assumption is every bit as great of a sin as the sins they accused Job of committing.  It is one thing to look at the sins we have seen someone commit and draw a connection between those sins and the suffering which they experience (and even that has problems in that it might lead us to not have compassion for their suffering) and quite another to project back from their suffering to sins which we believe them to have committed because they are suffering.  The first might be acceptable under some circumstances, but the latter is always putting ourselves in the place of God.

I use the daily Bible reading schedule from “The Bible.net” for my daily Bible reading.