Job 11:13-14(v23)“If you set your heart aright, stretch out your hands toward him. If iniquity is in your hand, put it far away. Don’t let unrighteousness…
Zechariah 1:3(v23)Therefore tell them: Yahweh of Armies says: ‘Return to me,’ says Yahweh of Armies, ‘and I will return to you,’ says Yahweh of Armies.
Job 8:5-6(v23)If you want to seek God diligently, make your supplication to the Almighty. If you were pure and upright, surely now he would awaken for…
Psalms 37:4(v26)Also delight yourself in Yahweh, and he will give you the desires of your heart.
Isaiah 58:9(v27)Then you will call, and Yahweh will answer. You will cry for help, and he will say, ‘Here I am.’ “If you take away from among you the yoke,…
Show all 60 cross-references
Isaiah 58:14(v26)then you will delight yourself in Yahweh, and I will make you to ride on the high places of the earth, and I will feed you with the…
Job 27:10(v26)Will he delight himself in the Almighty, and call on God at all times?
Psalms 116:1(v27)I love Yahweh, because he listens to my voice, and my cries for mercy.
Isaiah 55:6-7(v23)Seek Yahweh while he may be found. Call on him while he is near. Let the wicked forsake his way, and the unrighteous man his thoughts. Let…
1 John 5:14-15(v27)This is the boldness which we have toward him, that if we ask anything according to his will, he listens to us. And if we know that he…
Psalms 50:14-15(v27)Offer to God the sacrifice of thanksgiving. Pay your vows to the Most High. Call on me in the day of trouble. I will deliver you, and you…
Psalms 91:15(v27)He will call on me, and I will answer him. I will be with him in trouble. I will deliver him, and honor him.
Job 11:15(v26)Surely then you will lift up your face without spot; Yes, you will be steadfast, and will not fear:
Job 33:26(v27)He prays to God, and he is favorable to him, so that he sees his face with joy. He restores to man his righteousness.
Psalms 16:5-6(v25)Yahweh assigned my portion and my cup. You made my lot secure. The lines have fallen to me in pleasant places. Yes, I have a good…
Psalms 66:17-20(v27)I cried to him with my mouth. He was extolled with my tongue. If I cherished sin in my heart, the Lord wouldn’t have listened. But most…
Isaiah 33:6(v25)There will be stability in your times, abundance of salvation, wisdom, and knowledge. The fear of Yahweh is your treasure.
Genesis 15:1(v25)After these things Yahweh’s word came to Abram in a vision, saying, “Don’t be afraid, Abram. I am your shield, your exceedingly great…
Job 34:28(v27)so that they caused the cry of the poor to come to him. He heard the cry of the afflicted.
Psalms 18:2(v25)Yahweh is my rock, my fortress, and my deliverer; my God, my rock, in whom I take refuge; my shield, and the horn of my salvation, my high…
Psalms 66:13-14(v27)I will come into your temple with burnt offerings. I will pay my vows to you, which my lips promised, and my mouth spoke, when I was in…
Psalms 84:11(v25)For Yahweh God is a sun and a shield. Yahweh will give grace and glory. He withholds no good thing from those who walk blamelessly.
Ecclesiastes 5:4(v27)When you vow a vow to God, don’t defer to pay it; for he has no pleasure in fools. Pay that which you vow.
Romans 7:22(v26)For I delight in God’s law after the inward man,
1 Kings 9:28(v24)They came to Ophir, and fetched from there gold, four hundred and twenty talents, and brought it to king Solomon.
Psalms 56:12(v27)Your vows are on me, God. I will give thank offerings to you.
Psalms 86:4(v26)Bring joy to the soul of your servant, for to you, Lord, do I lift up my soul.
Psalms 116:14(v27)I will pay my vows to Yahweh, yes, in the presence of all his people.
Isaiah 13:12(v24)I will make people more rare than fine gold, even a person than the pure gold of Ophir.
Isaiah 41:10(v25)Don’t you be afraid, for I am with you. Don’t be dismayed, for I am your God. I will strengthen you. Yes, I will help you. Yes, I will…
Hosea 14:1-2(v23)Israel, return to Yahweh your God; for you have fallen because of your sin. Take words with you, and return to Yahweh. Tell him, “Forgive…
Jonah 2:9(v27)But I will sacrifice to you with the voice of thanksgiving. I will pay that which I have vowed. Salvation belongs to Yahweh.”
James 2:5(v25)Listen, my beloved brothers. Didn’t God choose those who are poor in this world to be rich in faith, and heirs of the Kingdom which he…
Joshua 7:13-16(v23)Get up! Sanctify the people, and say, ‘Sanctify yourselves for tomorrow, for Yahweh, the God of Israel, says, “There is a devoted thing…
Psalms 143:8(v26)Cause me to hear your loving kindness in the morning, for I trust in you. Cause me to know the way in which I should walk, for I lift up my…
Song of Solomon 2:3(v26)As the apple tree among the trees of the wood, so is my beloved among the sons. I sat down under his shadow with great delight, his fruit…
Zechariah 5:3-4(v23)Then he said to me, “This is the curse that goes out over the surface of the whole land; for everyone who steals shall be cut off according…
Acts 26:20(v23)but declared first to them of Damascus, at Jerusalem, and throughout all the country of Judea, and also to the Gentiles, that they should…
Romans 8:31(v25)What then shall we say about these things? If God is for us, who can be against us?
2 Corinthians 6:10(v25)as sorrowful, yet always rejoicing; as poor, yet making many rich; as having nothing, and yet possessing all things.
2 Timothy 2:19(v23)However God’s firm foundation stands, having this seal, “The Lord knows those who are his,” and, “Let every one who names the name of the…
1 John 3:20-21(v26)because if our heart condemns us, God is greater than our heart, and knows all things. Beloved, if our hearts don’t condemn us, we have…
Jude 1:20(v23)But you, beloved, keep building up yourselves on your most holy faith, praying in the Holy Spirit.
Genesis 10:29(v24)Ophir, Havilah, and Jobab. All these were the sons of Joktan.
1 Kings 10:21(v24)All king Solomon’s drinking vessels were of gold, and all the vessels of the House of the Forest of Lebanon were of pure gold. None were of…
1 Kings 22:48(v24)Jehoshaphat made ships of Tarshish to go to Ophir for gold, but they didn’t go; for the ships wrecked at Ezion Geber.
2 Chronicles 1:5(v24)Moreover the bronze altar that Bezalel the son of Uri, the son of Hur, had made was there before Yahweh’s tabernacle; and Solomon and the…
2 Chronicles 9:10(v24)The servants of Huram and the servants of Solomon, who brought gold from Ophir, also brought algum trees and precious stones.
2 Chronicles 9:27(v24)The king made silver as common in Jerusalem as stones, and he made cedars to be as abundant as the sycamore trees that are in the lowland.
Job 12:14(v23)Behold, he breaks down, and it can’t be built again. He imprisons a man, and there can be no release.
Job 18:15(v23)There will dwell in his tent that which is none of his. Sulfur will be scattered on his habitation.
Job 31:25(v24)If I have rejoiced because my wealth was great, and because my hand had gotten much;
Job 34:9(v26)For he has said, ‘It profits a man nothing that he should delight himself with God.’
Psalms 45:9(v24)Kings’ daughters are among your honorable women. At your right hand the queen stands in gold of Ophir.
Isaiah 19:22(v23)Yahweh will strike Egypt, striking and healing. They will return to Yahweh, and he will be entreated by them, and will heal them.
Isaiah 31:6(v23)Return to him from whom you have deeply revolted, children of Israel.
Isaiah 33:15(v23)He who walks righteously and speaks blamelessly, he who despises the gain of oppressions, who gestures with his hands, refusing to take a…
Jeremiah 31:4(v23)I will build you again, and you will be built, O virgin of Israel. You will again be adorned with your tambourines, and will go out in the…
Colossians 2:7(v23)rooted and built up in him, and established in the faith, even as you were taught, abounding in it in thanksgiving.
Psalms 25:1(v26)To you, Yahweh, I lift up my soul.
Cross-references from openbible.info (CC BY 4.0)
Explain this passage (18 sources)
Historical commentary, presented as a primary source — not an endorsement.
Geneva Bible translators1599 · Public DomainOn vv23–24God will restore unto thee all thy substance.
God will restore unto thee all thy substance.
Geneva Bible (1599) marginal notes — public domain.
John Trapp1656 · Public DomainOn vv23–27Job 22:23 If thou return to the Almighty, thou…
Job 22:23 If thou return to the Almighty, thou shalt be built up, thou shalt put away iniquity far from thy tabernacles.
Ver. 23. If thou return to the Almighty, thou shalt be built up] By sin men run from God, by repentance they return to him. Break off thy sins by repentance, and put away iniquity far from thy tabernacle (for iniquity and repentance cannot cohabit, and he is no true penitentiary that reformeth not his family, that setteth not up God wherever he hath to do), so shalt thou be built up; that is, thou shalt be restored, and all thy losses in wealth and children shall be made up again; prorsus erigeris qui iam collapsus es; thou, who art now down on all fours, shalt be new set up, and made to stand in thy former strength. Only thou must return usque ad Omnipotentem, all out as far as to the Almighty, thou must not give the half turn only, as hypocrites do, but with thy whole heart; and as Joe 2:12. {See Trapp on "Joe 2:12"} Thus Eliphaz discourseth very well and handsomely of the business in hand; only he was out in this, that he looked upon Job as an impenitent person, and upon his family as ill ordered. As, also, in that he conceived that true repentance is ever rewarded with outward and inward prosperity; whereas a penitent person may continue under crosses, though God will surely save the humble, as he saith afterwards, Job 22:29, and repentance can turn crosses into comforts; and, like the philosopher’s stone, make golden afflictions, 1Pe 1:7. As scarlet pulls out the teeth of a serpent, so this takes away the sting of a judgment. As wine draweth a nourishing virtue from the flesh of vipers, &c.
John Trapp, A Commentary or Exposition upon All the Books of the Old and New Testament (1647–1656) — public domain. Text from a community e-Sword module.
Matthew Poole1685 · Public DomainOn vv23–27To the Almighty; or, home to the Almighty; or,…
To the Almighty; or, home to the Almighty; or, so as to reach to the Almighty, and be joined to him. The Hebrew phrase is extraordinary, and emphatical, and implies a thorough and effectual turning not only from sin, (which a hypocrite may do in great part, at least for a time, upon carnal motives, and without any respect or love to God,) but also unto God, so as to love him, and cleave to him, and sincerely devote a man’s self to his fear and service. And he expresseth it in this manner, because he thought Job to be a hypocrite, and therefore counselleth him to turn to God in another and better manner than he had done, to wit, with all his heart, and not feignedly.
Thou shalt be built up; God, who hath pulled thee down in thy estate, and honour, and children, will repair thy ruins, and give thee more children, which is oft called building; Gen 16:2; Exo 1:21; Rth 4:11; and bless thee with prosperity and happiness, as building signifies, Jer 42:10; 31:4.
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Thou shalt put away iniquity far from thy tabernacles: this may be either,
1. A condition, upon which God makes the following promises, If (which particle may be repeated out of the former part of the verse) thou shalt put away, &c., i.e. if thou shalt effectually purge thyself and family from all sin, and keep thyself and them, as far as thou canst, from all appearances and occasions of sin, which is the duty of all, and the practice of true penitents; whereby he seems to reflect upon Job, as if he had been faulty and negligent in the government of himself or children, notwithstanding his sacrificing for them, Job 1. Or rather,
2. A promise, because the conditions required had been expressed together, Job 22:21,22, and in the beginning of this verse, after which he comes to the promises, and begins with this,
thou shalt be built up, and so proceeds to other promises; and therefore it seems not probable that he should return to the conditions again, and mix the conditions and promises together, which he hath so carefully separated in these verses. And so it is either,
1. A spiritual promise, If thou dost sincerely repent, God will give thee more grace effectually to reform thyself and family, according to that rule, To him that hath shall be given. Or,
2. A temporal promise,
Thou shalt put away iniquity, or injury, or perverseness, (i.e. either perverse and injurious men; or God’s judgments, or the punishments of thy sins; as iniquity is very oft used,)
far from thy tabernacles, i.e. from all thy dwellings, and tents, and possessions; no hand of violence shall come near them, no evil plague shall come upon thy own habitation, or upon the habitations of thy children, as lately it did for thine and their sins.
Matthew Poole's English Annotations on the Holy Bible (1683–1685) — public domain. Text from a community e-Sword/MySword module.
John Gill1763 · Public DomainOn vv23–27Then shalt thou lay up gold as dust,.... Have…
Then shalt thou lay up gold as dust,.... Have such plenty of it, as not to be counted:
and the gold of Ophir as the stones of the brooks; which was reckoned the best, probably in Arabia; not in the East and West Indies, which were not known to Job; though some take this to be an exhortation to despise riches, and as a dissuasion from covetousness, rendering the words, "put gold upon the dust", or earth (i), and trample upon it, as a thing not esteemed by thee, as Sephorno interprets it; make no more account of it than of the dust of the earth; let it be like dirt unto thee, "and among the stones of the brooks", Ophir (k); that is, the gold of Ophir, reckon no more of it, though the choicest gold, than the stones of the brook; or thus, "put gold for dust, and the gold of Ophir for the flint of the brooks" (l); esteem it no more than the dust of the earth, or as flint stones; the latter clause I should choose rather to render, "and for a flint the rivers of Ophir", or the golden rivers, from whence the gold of Ophir was; and it is notorious from historians, as Strabo (m) and others, that gold is taken out of rivers; and especially from the writers of the history of the West Indies (n).
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(i) "pone aurum super pulverem", Codurcus; "in pulvere aurum", Cocceius; "abjice humi aurum", Beza; so Grotius. (k) "et inter saxa torrentium Ophir", Codurcus. (l) "Pro rupe aurum Ophirinum", Junius & Tremellius; so Schultens. (m) Geograph. l. 11. p. 344. (n) Pet. Martyr. Decad. 3. l. 4.
John Gill's Exposition of the Whole Bible (1746–1763) — public domain (CC PDM 1.0). Text via the HelloAO Bible API.
John Wesley1765 · Public DomainOn vv23, 26, 27If - The Hebrew phrase is emphatical, and implies…
If - The Hebrew phrase is emphatical, and implies a thorough turning from sin, to God, so as to love him, and cleave to him, and sincerely devote a man's self to his fear and service. Built - God will repair thy ruins, and give thee more children, and bless thee with prosperity. Thou shalt - It is either,
1. a spiritual promise, if thou dost sincerely repent, God will give the grace effectually to reform thyself and family: or,
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2. a temporal promise, thou shalt put away iniquity, or the punishment of thy sins; as iniquity is very often used: far from thy tabernacles; from all thy dwellings, and tents, and possessions.
John Wesley, Explanatory Notes Upon the Whole Bible (1754–1765) — public domain. Text via the GEBible commentary corpus.
Adam Clarke1810 · Public DomainOn vv23–27Verse 23. Thou shalt be built up] God will…
Verse 23. Thou shalt be built up] God will restore thee to thy wonted state of prosperity; and thou shalt again have a household, not only of servants, but of children also. So much may be Implied in the words, Thou shalt be BUILT UP. See my sermon on Job 22:21-23.
Adam Clarke's Commentary on the Bible (1810–1826) — public domain. Text from a community e-Sword/MySword module.
Joseph Benson1811 · Public DomainOn vv23, 24, 26, 27Job 22:23. If thou return to the Almighty —…
Job 22:23. If thou return to the Almighty — The Hebrew phrase, תשׁוב עד שׁדי, tashub gnad shaddai, is emphatical, and implies a thorough turning from sin to God, so as to love him, and cleave to him, and sincerely devote a man’s self to his fear and service. Thou shalt be built up — God will repair thy ruins, and give thee more children, and bless thee with prosperity. Thou shalt put away iniquity, &c. — It is either, 1st, A spiritual promise; if thou dost sincerely repent, God will give thee grace effectually to reform thyself and family: or, 2d, A temporal promise, meaning, thou shalt put away the punishment of thy sins, as iniquity is very often used; far from thy tabernacles — From all thy dwellings, and tents, and possessions.
Joseph Benson's Commentary on the Old and New Testaments (1811–1818) — public domain. Text from a community e-Sword module.
Albert Barnes1834 · Public DomainOn vv23–27If thou return to the Almighty - Assuming that…
If thou return to the Almighty - Assuming that he was an impenitent sinner, and wholly unreconciled to him.
Thou shalt be built up - A figure taken from building up a house, in contradistinction from pulling one down, and denoting that he would be prospered and happy.
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Thou shalt put away iniquity - Rosenmuller, Good, Noyes, and Wemyss, suppose correctly, as it seems to me, that the word “if” is to be understood here to complete the sense - “if thou shalt put away iniquity.”
From thy tabernacle - From thy tent, or dwelling.
Albert Barnes' Notes on the Bible (1834–1885) — public domain. Text from a community e-Sword/MySword module.
Haydock's Catholic Bible Commentary1859 · Public DomainOn vv24–27Gold, to build and adorn thy habitation, ver. 23.…
Gold, to build and adorn thy habitation, ver. 23. Hebrew, "He will give thee gold instead of dust; (or more abundant) yea, gold of the torrents of Ophir." The Phasis is said to roll gold dust, which is of the purest kind, Genesis ii. 11. (Calmet) --- "Thou shalt lay upon gold as dust, and the gold of Ophir, as the stones of the brooks." (Protestants) (Haydock) --- This is an exaggeration, (3 Kings x. 27.; Calmet) and a sort of proverb, intimating that strength and plenty should succeed to infirmity. The foundations should be the hard rock, instead of earth, &c.
George Leo Haydock (1774–1849), Haydock's Catholic Family Bible and Commentary, 1859 edition — public domain. Excludes Psalms (Douay-Rheims chapter numbering differs from Protestant) and Deuterocanonical books (Catholic canon only).
Robert Jamieson, A. R. Fausset & David Brown1871 · Public DomainOn vv23–27Built up--anew, as a restored house.
Built up--anew, as a restored house.
thou shalt put away--rather, "If thou put away" [MICHAELIS].
Jamieson, Fausset & Brown — Commentary Critical and Explanatory on the Whole Bible (1871) — public domain (CC PDM 1.0). Text via the HelloAO Bible API.
Daniel D. Whedon1874 · Public DomainOn vv23–2523. To the Almighty — עד; even to —…
23. To the Almighty — עד; even to — close up to. “Job need not despair of coming, through penitence, again close up to his offended Creator.” — Bernard.
Daniel D. Whedon (gen. ed.), Commentary on the Old and New Testaments (1874–1909) — public domain. Text from a community e-Sword module.
The Cambridge Bible for Schools and Colleges1878 · Public DomainOn vv23, 24, 26, 2723. built up] i. e. probably rebuilt, or, restored.
23. built up] i. e. probably rebuilt, or, restored.
thou shalt put away] Or, if thou put away. The words take up “if thou return” of the first clause.
The Cambridge Bible for Schools and Colleges (gen. ed. J. J. S. Perowne; Cambridge University Press, 1878–1918) — public domain. Text from a community e-Sword module.
Ellicott's Commentary for English Readers1878 · Public DomainOn vv23–26(23) Thou shalt put away iniquity.—All this implies the…
(23) Thou shalt put away iniquity.—All this implies the imputation of apostasy and iniquity to Job.
A Bible Commentary for English Readers, edited by Charles John Ellicott (1878–1897) — public domain. Text from a community e-Sword module.
The Pulpit Commentary1880 · Public DomainOn vv23–27If thou shalt return to the Almighty. Eliphaz, like…
If thou shalt return to the Almighty. Eliphaz, like Bildad in Job_8:5, and Zophar in Job_11:13, taxes Job with having fallen away from God, almost with having apostatized. All his prophecies of future prosperity rest upon the assumption that Job, having fallen away, is now about to turn to God, repent of his misdoings, and be again received with favour. Thou shall be built up; i.e. "restored, re-established! Thou shalt put away iniquity far from thy tabernacles. (comp. Job_11:14, where Zophar implies that Job"s tents have ill-gotten gains concealed in them)
The penitent"s return and restoration.
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I THE RETURN.
1. To God. All sin is departure from God; and repentance is a return to God. As the fall is from personal relations, so the recovery is a renewal of personal relations. When the sinner comes to himself, he sees that his one hope is to "arise and go unto" his Father. Thus the very Being against whom he has sinned is sought for pardon and restoration. Now, it is not possible to mend our ways without thus coming back to God. His power and presence are the inspiration of the new life. The very thought of God as the Almighty is a help in this return. Although we are first moved by perceiving his goodness and mercy, we are conscious that we are helpless in ourselves and need heavenly aid to regenerate our souls. Thus the invincible power of God, which was our terror while we remained impenitent, becomes our hope as soon as we repent.
2. From sin, taking the last clause of the verse as a condition of God"s help. We must put away iniquity from our tabernacles if we are to expect God"s restoring mercies.
(1) Sin must be rejected. We cannot return to God and retain our sin. That must ever remain at a distance from him. Therefore we can only return by cutting ourselves off from it, and leaving it behind. It is necessary to abandon the practice of sin as well as to regret the past sin.
(2) Sin must go from the home from the "tabernacles." Private sin must be abandoned; though now curtained in secret, it may not be harboured any longer. Cherished sin must go. Habitual sin must be cast out. It is easy to renounce the strange sin that only touches us now and again. The difficulty is with the besetting sin that which dwells in the tabernacles. Yet this too must go.
II THE RESTORATION. The returning penitent is to be "built up.
1. On fulfilling the conditions. He must return to God; he must renounce sin. There is a foolish notion that God"s goodness will blot out the consequences of sin without these conditions being fulfilled. To do so would be to outrage justice as well as to fly in the face of nature, We cannot have the rewards of grace without first accepting its inward influences. Forgiveness is not merely the canceling of penalties; that is but an incident of the transaction; in itself it is a very personal thing, and until the personal reconciliation in which it consists is accomplished, only the lowest views of God"s government could lead us to look for the external advantages.
2. In personal recover. The sinner himself is to be built up. Sin breaks a man down breaks down character, reputation, faculty, energy. The fallen life is a broken life. Now, the first act o! Divine restoration touches the nature of the sinner himself. He is lifted up from the dust and set on his feet. Like a ruined building, shaken down by the earthquake, he is built up again, that he himself and not merely his belongings may be strong and beautiful. Thus the restored penitent is made a temple for the indwelling of the Holy Ghost, a fortress to keep out future invasions of evil, a palace in which the fairest graces of the kingdom can be nourished, a hospital and asylum for the sick and miserable, a school of new thoughts and enterprises, a home of prayer and love.
3. In external prosperity. It is only too likely that poor Eliphaz thought exclusively, or at all events quite disproportionately, of this when he spoke of Job being built up again. The patriarch"s ruined fortune could be restored. This is not the chief part of a Divine restoration. Still in some way though not always in restored wealth it does follow that the outer as well as the inner life is favoured by a penitent return to God. W. F. A.
The Pulpit Commentary (1880–1919), ed. H.D.M. Spence-Jones & Joseph S. Exell — public domain. Text from a community e-Sword module.
The Biblical Illustrator1887 · Public DomainOn vv23, 26If thou return to the Almighty.
Job_22:23-30
If thou return to the Almighty.
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Spiritual Reformation
I. The nature of a true spiritual reformation is here set forth.
1. Reconciliation to God. Men in their unregenerate state are out of sympathy with their Maker. There is an estrangement of soul.
2. Practical regard to the Divine precepts. Receive, I pray thee, the law from His mouth, and lay up His words in thine heart. Put thy being under the reign of heavenly laws.
3. Renunciation of all iniquity. Thou shalt put away iniquity far from thy tabernacles. There is no reformation where sin is cherished, or where it is allowed to linger.
4. Estimating the best things as worthless in comparison with God. Then shalt thou lay up gold as dust, and the gold of Ophir as the stones of the brook. Yea, the Almighty shall be thy defence, and thou shalt have plenty of silver.
II. The advantages of a true spiritual reformation, as here set forth. Eliphaz says that if Job would only act out his counsel he should, enjoy signal advantages. Thereby good shall come unto thee. What is the good he refers to? He specifies several things.
1. Restoration of lost blessings. Thou shalt be built up. All thy losses shall be repaired, and the breaches in thy fortune healed. How much Job had lost!
2. Delight in God. Job had been complaining of the Almighty; and his face was cast down in sadness.
3. Answer to prayer. Prayer is always answered where it leads to a submission to the Divine will; and true prayer always leads to this.
4. Realisation of purposes. Thou shalt form a plan or purpose, and it shall not be frustrated.
5. rower of usefulness. When men are cast down, thou shalt say, Cheer up. (Homilist.)
Standing right with God
Thou shalt have plenty of silver. But, first, the religion such a motive would produce would be worth little. Religion is not, in its nature, external. And the desire of the silver could only bring to an external conformity to the Divine commands. And, second, the motive cannot be urged. The statement of Eliphaz was grounded in a mistaken view of Divine Providence. Gold and silver are given and withheld as the sovereign Lord sees fit; and their distribution follows not the rules of holy obedience.
I. The hortatory portions or the text.
1. The belief of Eliphaz was, that Job was a great sinner; and he therefore urges the necessity of returning to God. He was mistaken in his particular views of Job.
2. Returning to God, we shall acquaint ourselves with Him, and be at peace. The expression implies knowledge and intimacy.
3. Thus standing right with God, a two-fold duty devolves on us.
(1) Due preparation for practice. Receive the law from His mouth. Acknowledge Him as supreme Lord.
(2) Practice itself. Put away iniquity,--have nothing to do with it personally: from thy tabernacles,--allow it not in the circle which thou governest.
II. Blessings shall come from this better than gold and silver.
1. Good shall come unto thee. Gods favour, the light of His countenance,--all that makes the true eternal good of the soul.
2. The Almighty shall be thy defence: against all real danger. A complete oversight and protection shall be granted thee.
3. Thou shalt delight in the Almighty: in the thought of what He is in Himself, and to thee; and in His consciously possessed favour.
4. Thou shalt lift up thy face unto God. Thou shalt not now be ashamed. Thou shalt have a holy, humble, but firm and joyful confidence. Sin makes the man afraid.
5. Thou shalt make thy prayer unto Him, and He will hear thee. There is permission to enjoy this highest privilege. Pray,--be heard.
6. Thy path shall be truly happy. The light shall shine on thy ways. Even providential obscurity shall make spiritual light more visible. (G. Cubitt.)
Returning to God by conviction and progress
In the return of a human soul to God there is decision arising from conviction,--a conviction forced upon the conscience, and will, and reason, and feelings of the heart and mind, from the unanswerable compulsory power of circumstances. With regard to religious conviction as a necessary step to our returning to the Almighty, we may steel our minds against it from many causes; one, say, from the formal custom of hearing sermons. For blended with this kind of hearing may be a self-comparison with the religious teacher himself, and the self-satisfaction which may arise from this comparison. There may stand in the way of this conviction the strong bias of early impressions, of local customs, and of deeply-rooted habits of thought and conception. We may look at religious duties through not only very limited mediums, and therefore partial, but through certain party-coloured ones, and so mistake the broad expansive and glorious character of Gods truth by the disfiguring and narrowing influence of bigotry, intolerance, and prejudice. When a man, however, steadily and fixedly sets the eye of his faith upon the Almighty, as the all-absorbing and exclusive end of his religious convictions and decisions, he returns to Him in the spirit of the prodigal. He returns to God with a humble heart, a humble faith, and a humble prayer. As a result of the return of the soul to the Almighty, it shall be built up. This points to a progress of religious life and experience. There is a power exerted, on mans behalf above and independently of himself. It is Thou shalt be built up, not Thou shalt build thyself up. The spirit of man assuming the form of a building, in a moral and religious sense, becomes so after the manner of all other structures. It has its foundations in Christ; its gradual rise in the piling up, so to speak, of one virtue upon another, as stone upon stone. But as the earthly building is dependent upon the genius of the architect, so is the spiritual building dependent upon the wisdom and power of the Almighty. We may go where the castle or palace or temple once stood in noble splendour, in proud dignity, and in great strength, but now a crumbling ruin with wails gray with age, battered by the hand of time, or made spectral-like by fire, axe, and sword. But its remaining walls and columns and arches may be restored, strengthened, replenished, and built up again. So with the human soul, its original beauty and grandeur might be defaced by sin, and all its former promises of endurance might be broken by disobedience; but by the grace and mercy of God it may be built up once more. (W. D. Horwood.)
The Biblical Illustrator, edited by Joseph S. Exell (c. 1880s–1900s) — public domain. Text from a community e-Sword module.
Alexander MacLaren1905 · Public DomainOn v26Job 22:26 - Job 22:29.
Job
WHAT LIFE MAY BE MADE
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Job 22:26 - Job 22:29.
These words are a fragment of one of the speeches of Job’s friends, in which the speaker has been harping on the old theme that affliction is the consequence and evidence of sin. He has much ado to square his theory with facts, and especially with the fact which brought him to Job’s dunghill. But he gets over the difficulty by the simple method of assuming that, since his theory must be true, there must be unknown facts which vindicate it in Job’s case; and since affliction is a sign of sin, Job’s afflictions are proof that he has been a sinner. So he charges him with grossest crimes, without a shadow of other reason; and after having poured this oil of vitriol into his wounds by way of consolation, he advises him to be good, on the decidedly low and selfish ground that it will pay.
His often-quoted exhortation, ‘Acquaint thyself with God, and be at peace: thereby good shall come unto thee,’ is, in his meaning of it, an undisguised appeal to purely selfish considerations, and its promise is not in accordance with facts. Whether that saying is noble and true or ignoble and false, depends on the meanings attached to ‘peace’ and ‘good.’ A similar flaw mars the words of our text, as understood by the speaker. But they can be raised to a higher level than that on which he placed them, and regarded as describing the sweet and wonderful prerogatives of the devout life. So understood, they may rebuke and stimulate and encourage us to make our lives conformed to the ideal here.
I. I note, first, that life may be full of delight and confidence in God.
‘Then shalt thou delight thyself in the Almighty, and shalt lift up thy face unto God.’ Now when we ‘delight’ in a thing or a person, we recognise that that thing, or person, fits into a cleft in our hearts, and corresponds to some need in our natures. We not only recognise its good, sweetness, and adaptation to ourselves, but we actually possess in real fruition the sweetness that we recognise, and the good which we apprehend in it. And so these things, the recognition of the supreme sweetness and all-perfect adaptation and sufficiency of God to all that I need; the suppression of tastes and desires which may conflict with that sweetness, and the actual enjoyment and fruition of the sweetness and preciousness which I apprehend-these things are the very heart of a man’s religion. Without delight in God, there is no real religion.
The bulk of men are so sunken and embruted in animal tastes and sensuous desires and fleeting delights, that they have no care for the pure and calm joys which come to those who live near God. But above these stand the men, of whom there are a good many amongst us, whose religion is a matter of fear or of duty or of effort. And above them there stand the men who serve because they trust God, but whose religion is seeking rather than finding, and either from deficient consecration or from false conceptions of Him and of their relation to Him, is overshadowed by an unnatural and unwholesome gloom. And all these kinds of religion, the religion of fear, of duty, of effort, of seeking, and of doubt fighting with faith, are at the best wofully imperfect, and are, some of them, radically erroneous types of the religious life. He is the truly devout man who not only knows God to be great and holy, but feels Him to be sweet and sufficient; who not only fears, but loves; who not only seeks and longs, but possesses; or, in one word, true religion is delighting in God.
So herein is supplied a very sharp test for us. Do our tastes and inclinations set towards Him, and is He better to us than anything beside? Is God to me my dearest faith, the very home of my heart, to which I instinctively turn? Is the brightness of my day the light of His face? Is He the gladness of my joy? Is my Christianity a mill-horse round of service that I am not glad to render? Do I worship because I think it is duty, and are my prayers compulsory and mechanical; or do I worship because my heart goes out to Him? And is my life calm and sweet because I ‘delight in the Lord’?
The next words of my text will help us to answer. ‘Thou shalt lift up thy face unto God.’ That is a clear enough metaphor to express frank confidence of approach to Him. The head hangs down in the consciousness of demerit and sin. ‘Mine iniquities have taken hold upon me,’ wailed the Psalmist, ‘so that I am not able to look up.’ But it is possible for men to go into God’s presence with a sense of peace, and to hold up their heads before their Judge and look Him in the eyes and not be afraid. And unless we have that confidence in Him, not because of our merits, but because of His certain love, there will be no ‘delight in the Lord.’ And there will be no such confidence in Him unless we have ‘access with confidence by faith’ in that Christ who has taken away our sins, and prepared the way for us into the Father’s presence, and by whose death and sacrifice, and by it alone, we sinful men, with open face and uplifted foreheads, can stand to receive upon our visage the full beams of His light, and expatiate and be glad therein. There is no religion worth naming, of which the inmost characteristic is not delight in God. There is no ‘delighting in God’ possible for sinful men unless they can come to Him with frank confidence, and there is no such confidence possible for us unless we apprehend by faith, and thereby make our own, the great work of Jesus Christ our Lord.
II. So, secondly, note, such a life of delighting in God will be blessed by the frankest intercourse with Him.
‘Thou shalt make thy prayer unto Him, and He shall hear thee, and thou shalt pay thy vows.’ These are three stages of this blessed communion that is possible for men. And note, prayer is not regarded in this aspect as duty, nor is it even dwelt upon as privilege, but as being the natural outcome and issue of that delighting in God and confident access to Him which have preceded. That is to say, if a man really has set his heart on God, and knows that in Him is all that he needs, then, of course, he will tell Him everything. As surely as the sunshine draws out the odours from the opening petals of the flowers, will the warmth of the felt divine light and love draw from our hearts the sweet confidence, which it is impossible not to give to Him in whom we delight.
If you have to be driven to prayer by a sense of duty, and if there be no impulse in your heart whispering ever to you, ‘Tell your Love about it!’ you have much need to examine into the reality, and certainly into the depth of your religion. For as surely as instinctive impulse, which needs no spurring from conscience or will, leads us to breathe our confidences to those that we love best, and makes us restless whilst we have a secret hid from them, so surely will a true love to God make it the most natural thing in the world to put all our circumstances, wants, and feeling into the shape of prayers. They may be in briefest words. They may scarcely be vocalised at all, but there will be, if there be a true love to Him, an instinctive turning to Him in every circumstance; and the single-worded cry, if it be no more, for help is sufficient. The arrow may be shot towards Heaven, though it be but slender and short, and it will reach its goal.
For my text goes on to the second stage, ‘He shall hear thee.’ That was not true as Eliphaz meant it. But it is true if we remember the preceding conditions. The fundamental passage, which I suppose underlies part, at least, of our text, is that great word in the psalm, ‘Delight thyself in the Lord, and He shall give thee the desires of thine heart.’ Does that mean that if a man loves God he may get everything he wants? Yes! and No! If it is supposed to mean that our religion is a kind of key to God’s storehouse, enabling us to go in there and rifle it at our pleasure, then it is not true; if it means that a man who delights himself in God will have his supreme desire set upon God, and so will be sure to get it, then it is true. Fulfil the conditions and you are sure of the promise. If our prayer in its deepest essence be ‘Not my will, but Thine,’ it will be answered. When the desires of our heart are for God, and for conformity to His will, as they will be when we ‘delight ourselves in Him,’ then we get our heart’s desires. There is no promise of our being able to impose our wills upon God, which would be a calamity, and not a blessing, but a promise that they who make Him their joy and their desire will never be defrauded of their desire nor robbed of their joy.
And so the third stage of this frank intercourse comes. ‘Thou shalt pay thy vows.’ All life may become a thank-offering to God for the benefits that have flowed unceasing from His hands. First a prayer, then the answer, then the rendered thank-offering. Thus, in swift alternation and reciprocity, is carried on the commerce between Heaven and earth, between man and God. The desires rise to Heaven, but Heaven comes down to earth first; and prayer is not the initial stage, but the second, in the process. God first gives His promise, and the best prayer is the catching up of God’s promise and tossing it back again whence it came. Then comes the second downward motion, which is the answer to prayer, in blessing, and on it follows, finally, the reflection upwards, in thankful surrender and service, of the love that has descended on us, in answer to our desires. So like sunbeams from a mirror, or heat from polished metal, backwards and forwards, in continual alternation and reciprocation of influence and of love, flash and travel bright gleams between the soul and God. ‘Truth springs out of the earth, and righteousness looks down from Heaven. Our God shall give that which is good, and the earth shall yield her increase.’ Is there any other life of which such alternation is the privilege and the joy?
III. Then thirdly, such a life will neither know failure nor darkness.
‘Thou shalt also decree a thing, and it shall be established unto thee, and the light shall shine upon thy ways.’ Then is my will to be omnipotent, and am I to be delivered from the experiences of disappointments and failures and frustrated plans that are common to all humanity, and an essential part of its discipline, because I am a Christian man? Eliphaz may have meant that, but we know something far nobler. Again, I say, remember the conditions precedent. First of all, there must be the delight in God, and the desire towards Him, the submission of the will to Him, and the waiting before Him for guidance. I decree a thing-if I am a true Christian, and in the measure in which I am-only when I am quite sure that God has decreed it. And it is only His decrees, registered in the chancery of my will, of which I may be certain that they shall be established. There will be no failures to the man whose life’s purpose is to serve God, and to grow like Him; but if our purpose is anything less than that, or if we go arbitrarily and self-willedly resolving and saying, ‘Thus I will; thus I command; let my will stand instead of all reason,’ we shall have our contemptuous ‘decrees’ disestablished many a time. If we run our heads against stone walls in that fashion, the walls will stand, and our heads will be broken. To serve Him and to fall into the line of His purpose, and to determine nothing, nor obstinately want anything until we are sure that it is His will-that is the secret of never failing in what we undertake.
We must understand a little more deeply than we are apt to do what is meant by ‘success,’ before we predict unfailing success for any man. But if we have obeyed the commandment from the psalm already quoted, which may be again alluded to in the words of my text-’Commit thy way unto the Lord; trust also in Him’-we shall inherit the ancient promise, ‘and He shall bring it to pass.’ ‘All things work together for good to them that love God,’ and in the measure of our love to Him are our discernment and realisation of what is truly good. Religion gives no screen to keep the weather off us, but it gives us an insight into the truth that storms and rain are good for the only crop that is worth growing here. If we understand what we are here for, we shall be very slow to call sorrow evil, and to crown joy with the exclusive title of blessing and good; and we shall have a deeper canon of interpretation for the words of my text than he who is represented as speaking them ever dreamed of.
So with the promise of light to shine upon our paths. It is ‘the light which never was on sea or land,’ and not the material light which sense-bound eyes can see. That may all go. But if we have God in our hearts, there will be a light upon our way ‘which knows no variableness, neither shadow of turning.’ The Arctic winter, sunless though it be, has a bright heaven radiant with myriad stars, and flashing with strange lights born of no material or visible orb. And so you and I, if we delight ourselves ‘in the Lord,’ will have an unsetting sun to light our paths; ‘and at eventide,’ and in the mirkest midnight, ‘there will be light’ in the darkness.
IV. Lastly, such a life will be always hopeful, and finally crowned with deliverance.
‘When they’-that is, the ways that he has been speaking about-’when they are cast down, thou shalt say, Lifting up.’ That is an exclamation or a prayer, and we might simply render, ‘thou shalt say, Up!’ Even in so blessed a life as has been described, times will come when the path plunges downwards into some ‘valley of the shadow of death.’ But even then the traveller will bate no jot of hope. He will in his heart say ‘Up!’ even while sense says ‘Down!’ either as expressing indomitable confidence and good cheer in the face of depressing circumstances, or as pouring out a prayer to Him who ‘has showed him great and sore troubles’ that He would ‘bring him up again from the depths of the earth.’ The devout life is largely independent of circumstances, and is upheld and calmed by a quiet certainty that the general trend of its path is upward, which enables it to trudge hopefully down an occasional dip in the road.
Such an obstinate hopefulness and cheery confidence are the natural result of the experiences already described in the text. If we delight in God, hold communion with Him and have known Him as answering prayer, prospering our purposes and illuminating our paths, how shall we not hope? Nothing need depress nor perturb those whose joys and treasures are safe above the region of change and loss. If our riches are there where neither moth, rust, nor thieves can reach, our hearts will be there also, and an inward voice will keep singing, ‘Lift up your heart.’ It is the prerogative of experience to light up the future. It is the privilege of Christian experience to make hope certainty. If we live the life outlined in these verses we shall be able to bring June into December, and feel the future warmth whilst our bones are chilled with the present cold. ‘When the paths are made low, thou shalt say, Up!’
And the end will vindicate such confidence. For the issue of all will be, ‘He will save the humble person’; namely, the man who is of the character described, and who is ‘lowly of eyes’ in conscious unworthiness, even while he lifts up his face to God in confidence in his Father’s love. The ‘saving’ meant here is, of course, temporary and temporal deliverance from passing outward peril. But we may permissibly give it wider and deeper meaning. Continuous partial deliverances lead on to and bring about final full salvation.
We read that into the words, of course. But nothing less than a complete and conclusive deliverance can be the legitimate end of the experience of the Christian life here. Absurdity can no further go than to suppose that a soul which has delighted itself in God, and looked in His face with frank confidence, and poured out his desires to Him, and been the recipient of numberless answers, and the seat of numberless thank-offerings, has travelled along life’s common way in cheerful godliness, has had the light of heaven shining on the path, and has found an immortal hope springing as the natural result of present experience, shall at the last be frustrated of all, and lie down in unconscious sleep, which is nothingness. If that were the end of a Christian life, then ‘the pillared firmament were rottenness, and earth’s base built on stubble.’ No, no! A heaven of endless blessedness and close communion with God is the only possible ending to the facts of the devout life on earth.
We have such a life offered to us all and made possible through faith in Jesus Christ, in whom we may delight ourselves in the Lord, by whom we have ‘access with confidence,’ who is Himself the light of our hope, the answer of our prayers, the joy of our hearts, and who will ‘deliver us from every evil work’ as we travel along the road; ‘and save us’ at last ‘into His heavenly kingdom,’ where we shall be joined to the Delight of our souls, and drink for evermore of the fountain of life.
Alexander MacLaren, Expositions of Holy Scripture (1904–1910) — public domain. Text from a community e-Sword module.
unfoldingWord translationNotes2017 · CC BY-SA 4.0On vv23, 26Connecting Statement:
Connecting Statement:
Eliphaz continues speaking to Job.
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you will be built up
Eliphaz compares Job's restoration to the rebuilding of a house that has fallen. This can be stated in active form. AT: "he will heal you and make you prosper again" (See: Metaphor and Active or Passive)
if you put unrighteousness far away from your tents
Unrighteousness is pictured as a person who is living in Job's tent who must be removed. AT: "if you and everyone in your house stops sinning" (See: Metaphor)
Lay your treasure down in the dust
To lay a treasure in the dust is to treat it as unimportant. AT: "Consider your riches as unimportant as dust" (See: Idiom)
the gold of Ophir among the stones of the brooks
To put gold in the stream is to treat it as no more valuable than stones. AT: "the gold of Ophir is as worthless as stones in a stream" (See: Idiom)
Ophir
This is the name of a region famous for its gold. (See: How to Translate Names)
the Almighty will be your treasure, precious silver to you
This means God will be more valuable to Job than any treasure. (See: Metaphor)
Tyndale Open Study Notes2022 · CC BY-SA 4.0On vv23, 24, 25, 2722:23 return to the Almighty: Bildad (8:5-6) and Zophar…
22:23 return to the Almighty: Bildad (8:5-6) and Zophar (11:13-14) had already misapplied this biblical principle (Isa 55:6-7; Hos 14:1-2; Zech 1:3; Acts 26:20), and now Eliphaz also misapplies it.
GEBible — Godless Engineer's Bible App
Geneva Bible translators 1599 · Public Domain On vv23–24 God will restore unto thee all thy substance.
God will restore unto thee all thy substance.
Geneva Bible (1599) marginal notes — public domain.
John Trapp 1656 · Public Domain On vv23–27 Job 22:23 If thou return to the Almighty, thou…
Job 22:23 If thou return to the Almighty, thou shalt be built up, thou shalt put away iniquity far from thy tabernacles.
Ver. 23. If thou return to the Almighty, thou shalt be built up] By sin men run from God, by repentance they return to him. Break off thy sins by repentance, and put away iniquity far from thy tabernacle (for iniquity and repentance cannot cohabit, and he is no true penitentiary that reformeth not his family, that setteth not up God wherever he hath to do), so shalt thou be built up; that is, thou shalt be restored, and all thy losses in wealth and children shall be made up again; prorsus erigeris qui iam collapsus es; thou, who art now down on all fours, shalt be new set up, and made to stand in thy former strength. Only thou must return usque ad Omnipotentem, all out as far as to the Almighty, thou must not give the half turn only, as hypocrites do, but with thy whole heart; and as Joe 2:12. {See Trapp on "Joe 2:12"} Thus Eliphaz discourseth very well and handsomely of the business in hand; only he was out in this, that he looked upon Job as an impenitent person, and upon his family as ill ordered. As, also, in that he conceived that true repentance is ever rewarded with outward and inward prosperity; whereas a penitent person may continue under crosses, though God will surely save the humble, as he saith afterwards, Job 22:29, and repentance can turn crosses into comforts; and, like the philosopher’s stone, make golden afflictions, 1Pe 1:7. As scarlet pulls out the teeth of a serpent, so this takes away the sting of a judgment. As wine draweth a nourishing virtue from the flesh of vipers, &c.
John Trapp, A Commentary or Exposition upon All the Books of the Old and New Testament (1647–1656) — public domain. Text from a community e-Sword module.
Matthew Poole 1685 · Public Domain On vv23–27 To the Almighty; or, home to the Almighty; or,…
To the Almighty; or, home to the Almighty; or, so as to reach to the Almighty, and be joined to him. The Hebrew phrase is extraordinary, and emphatical, and implies a thorough and effectual turning not only from sin, (which a hypocrite may do in great part, at least for a time, upon carnal motives, and without any respect or love to God,) but also unto God, so as to love him, and cleave to him, and sincerely devote a man’s self to his fear and service. And he expresseth it in this manner, because he thought Job to be a hypocrite, and therefore counselleth him to turn to God in another and better manner than he had done, to wit, with all his heart, and not feignedly.
Thou shalt be built up; God, who hath pulled thee down in thy estate, and honour, and children, will repair thy ruins, and give thee more children, which is oft called building; Gen 16:2; Exo 1:21; Rth 4:11; and bless thee with prosperity and happiness, as building signifies, Jer 42:10; 31:4.
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Thou shalt put away iniquity far from thy tabernacles: this may be either,
1. A condition, upon which God makes the following promises, If (which particle may be repeated out of the former part of the verse) thou shalt put away, &c., i.e. if thou shalt effectually purge thyself and family from all sin, and keep thyself and them, as far as thou canst, from all appearances and occasions of sin, which is the duty of all, and the practice of true penitents; whereby he seems to reflect upon Job, as if he had been faulty and negligent in the government of himself or children, notwithstanding his sacrificing for them, Job 1. Or rather,
2. A promise, because the conditions required had been expressed together, Job 22:21,22, and in the beginning of this verse, after which he comes to the promises, and begins with this,
thou shalt be built up, and so proceeds to other promises; and therefore it seems not probable that he should return to the conditions again, and mix the conditions and promises together, which he hath so carefully separated in these verses. And so it is either,
1. A spiritual promise, If thou dost sincerely repent, God will give thee more grace effectually to reform thyself and family, according to that rule, To him that hath shall be given. Or,
2. A temporal promise,
Thou shalt put away iniquity, or injury, or perverseness, (i.e. either perverse and injurious men; or God’s judgments, or the punishments of thy sins; as iniquity is very oft used,)
far from thy tabernacles, i.e. from all thy dwellings, and tents, and possessions; no hand of violence shall come near them, no evil plague shall come upon thy own habitation, or upon the habitations of thy children, as lately it did for thine and their sins.
Matthew Poole's English Annotations on the Holy Bible (1683–1685) — public domain. Text from a community e-Sword/MySword module.
John Gill 1763 · Public Domain On vv23–27 Then shalt thou lay up gold as dust,.... Have…
Then shalt thou lay up gold as dust,.... Have such plenty of it, as not to be counted:
and the gold of Ophir as the stones of the brooks; which was reckoned the best, probably in Arabia; not in the East and West Indies, which were not known to Job; though some take this to be an exhortation to despise riches, and as a dissuasion from covetousness, rendering the words, "put gold upon the dust", or earth (i), and trample upon it, as a thing not esteemed by thee, as Sephorno interprets it; make no more account of it than of the dust of the earth; let it be like dirt unto thee, "and among the stones of the brooks", Ophir (k); that is, the gold of Ophir, reckon no more of it, though the choicest gold, than the stones of the brook; or thus, "put gold for dust, and the gold of Ophir for the flint of the brooks" (l); esteem it no more than the dust of the earth, or as flint stones; the latter clause I should choose rather to render, "and for a flint the rivers of Ophir", or the golden rivers, from whence the gold of Ophir was; and it is notorious from historians, as Strabo (m) and others, that gold is taken out of rivers; and especially from the writers of the history of the West Indies (n).
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(i) "pone aurum super pulverem", Codurcus; "in pulvere aurum", Cocceius; "abjice humi aurum", Beza; so Grotius. (k) "et inter saxa torrentium Ophir", Codurcus. (l) "Pro rupe aurum Ophirinum", Junius & Tremellius; so Schultens. (m) Geograph. l. 11. p. 344. (n) Pet. Martyr. Decad. 3. l. 4.
John Gill's Exposition of the Whole Bible (1746–1763) — public domain (CC PDM 1.0). Text via the HelloAO Bible API.
John Wesley 1765 · Public Domain On vv23, 26, 27 If - The Hebrew phrase is emphatical, and implies…
If - The Hebrew phrase is emphatical, and implies a thorough turning from sin, to God, so as to love him, and cleave to him, and sincerely devote a man's self to his fear and service. Built - God will repair thy ruins, and give thee more children, and bless thee with prosperity. Thou shalt - It is either,
1. a spiritual promise, if thou dost sincerely repent, God will give the grace effectually to reform thyself and family: or,
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2. a temporal promise, thou shalt put away iniquity, or the punishment of thy sins; as iniquity is very often used: far from thy tabernacles; from all thy dwellings, and tents, and possessions.
John Wesley, Explanatory Notes Upon the Whole Bible (1754–1765) — public domain. Text via the GEBible commentary corpus.
Adam Clarke 1810 · Public Domain On vv23–27 Verse 23. Thou shalt be built up] God will…
Verse 23. Thou shalt be built up] God will restore thee to thy wonted state of prosperity; and thou shalt again have a household, not only of servants, but of children also. So much may be Implied in the words, Thou shalt be BUILT UP. See my sermon on Job 22:21-23.
Adam Clarke's Commentary on the Bible (1810–1826) — public domain. Text from a community e-Sword/MySword module.
Joseph Benson 1811 · Public Domain On vv23, 24, 26, 27 Job 22:23. If thou return to the Almighty —…
Job 22:23. If thou return to the Almighty — The Hebrew phrase, תשׁוב עד שׁדי, tashub gnad shaddai, is emphatical, and implies a thorough turning from sin to God, so as to love him, and cleave to him, and sincerely devote a man’s self to his fear and service. Thou shalt be built up — God will repair thy ruins, and give thee more children, and bless thee with prosperity. Thou shalt put away iniquity, &c. — It is either, 1st, A spiritual promise; if thou dost sincerely repent, God will give thee grace effectually to reform thyself and family: or, 2d, A temporal promise, meaning, thou shalt put away the punishment of thy sins, as iniquity is very often used; far from thy tabernacles — From all thy dwellings, and tents, and possessions.
Joseph Benson's Commentary on the Old and New Testaments (1811–1818) — public domain. Text from a community e-Sword module.
Albert Barnes 1834 · Public Domain On vv23–27 If thou return to the Almighty - Assuming that…
If thou return to the Almighty - Assuming that he was an impenitent sinner, and wholly unreconciled to him.
Thou shalt be built up - A figure taken from building up a house, in contradistinction from pulling one down, and denoting that he would be prospered and happy.
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Thou shalt put away iniquity - Rosenmuller, Good, Noyes, and Wemyss, suppose correctly, as it seems to me, that the word “if” is to be understood here to complete the sense - “if thou shalt put away iniquity.”
From thy tabernacle - From thy tent, or dwelling.
Albert Barnes' Notes on the Bible (1834–1885) — public domain. Text from a community e-Sword/MySword module.
Haydock's Catholic Bible Commentary 1859 · Public Domain On vv24–27 Gold, to build and adorn thy habitation, ver. 23.…
Gold, to build and adorn thy habitation, ver. 23. Hebrew, "He will give thee gold instead of dust; (or more abundant) yea, gold of the torrents of Ophir." The Phasis is said to roll gold dust, which is of the purest kind, Genesis ii. 11. (Calmet) --- "Thou shalt lay upon gold as dust, and the gold of Ophir, as the stones of the brooks." (Protestants) (Haydock) --- This is an exaggeration, (3 Kings x. 27.; Calmet) and a sort of proverb, intimating that strength and plenty should succeed to infirmity. The foundations should be the hard rock, instead of earth, &c.
George Leo Haydock (1774–1849), Haydock's Catholic Family Bible and Commentary, 1859 edition — public domain. Excludes Psalms (Douay-Rheims chapter numbering differs from Protestant) and Deuterocanonical books (Catholic canon only).
Robert Jamieson, A. R. Fausset & David Brown 1871 · Public Domain On vv23–27 Built up--anew, as a restored house.
Built up--anew, as a restored house.
thou shalt put away--rather, "If thou put away" [MICHAELIS].
Jamieson, Fausset & Brown — Commentary Critical and Explanatory on the Whole Bible (1871) — public domain (CC PDM 1.0). Text via the HelloAO Bible API.
Daniel D. Whedon 1874 · Public Domain On vv23–25 23. To the Almighty — עד; even to —…
23. To the Almighty — עד; even to — close up to. “Job need not despair of coming, through penitence, again close up to his offended Creator.” — Bernard.
Daniel D. Whedon (gen. ed.), Commentary on the Old and New Testaments (1874–1909) — public domain. Text from a community e-Sword module.
The Cambridge Bible for Schools and Colleges 1878 · Public Domain On vv23, 24, 26, 27 23. built up] i. e. probably rebuilt, or, restored.
23. built up] i. e. probably rebuilt, or, restored.
thou shalt put away] Or, if thou put away. The words take up “if thou return” of the first clause.
The Cambridge Bible for Schools and Colleges (gen. ed. J. J. S. Perowne; Cambridge University Press, 1878–1918) — public domain. Text from a community e-Sword module.
Ellicott's Commentary for English Readers 1878 · Public Domain On vv23–26 (23) Thou shalt put away iniquity.—All this implies the…
(23) Thou shalt put away iniquity.—All this implies the imputation of apostasy and iniquity to Job.
A Bible Commentary for English Readers, edited by Charles John Ellicott (1878–1897) — public domain. Text from a community e-Sword module.
The Pulpit Commentary 1880 · Public Domain On vv23–27 If thou shalt return to the Almighty. Eliphaz, like…
If thou shalt return to the Almighty. Eliphaz, like Bildad in Job_8:5, and Zophar in Job_11:13, taxes Job with having fallen away from God, almost with having apostatized. All his prophecies of future prosperity rest upon the assumption that Job, having fallen away, is now about to turn to God, repent of his misdoings, and be again received with favour. Thou shall be built up; i.e. "restored, re-established! Thou shalt put away iniquity far from thy tabernacles. (comp. Job_11:14, where Zophar implies that Job"s tents have ill-gotten gains concealed in them)
The penitent"s return and restoration.
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I THE RETURN.
1. To God. All sin is departure from God; and repentance is a return to God. As the fall is from personal relations, so the recovery is a renewal of personal relations. When the sinner comes to himself, he sees that his one hope is to "arise and go unto" his Father. Thus the very Being against whom he has sinned is sought for pardon and restoration. Now, it is not possible to mend our ways without thus coming back to God. His power and presence are the inspiration of the new life. The very thought of God as the Almighty is a help in this return. Although we are first moved by perceiving his goodness and mercy, we are conscious that we are helpless in ourselves and need heavenly aid to regenerate our souls. Thus the invincible power of God, which was our terror while we remained impenitent, becomes our hope as soon as we repent.
2. From sin, taking the last clause of the verse as a condition of God"s help. We must put away iniquity from our tabernacles if we are to expect God"s restoring mercies.
(1) Sin must be rejected. We cannot return to God and retain our sin. That must ever remain at a distance from him. Therefore we can only return by cutting ourselves off from it, and leaving it behind. It is necessary to abandon the practice of sin as well as to regret the past sin.
(2) Sin must go from the home from the "tabernacles." Private sin must be abandoned; though now curtained in secret, it may not be harboured any longer. Cherished sin must go. Habitual sin must be cast out. It is easy to renounce the strange sin that only touches us now and again. The difficulty is with the besetting sin that which dwells in the tabernacles. Yet this too must go.
II THE RESTORATION. The returning penitent is to be "built up.
1. On fulfilling the conditions. He must return to God; he must renounce sin. There is a foolish notion that God"s goodness will blot out the consequences of sin without these conditions being fulfilled. To do so would be to outrage justice as well as to fly in the face of nature, We cannot have the rewards of grace without first accepting its inward influences. Forgiveness is not merely the canceling of penalties; that is but an incident of the transaction; in itself it is a very personal thing, and until the personal reconciliation in which it consists is accomplished, only the lowest views of God"s government could lead us to look for the external advantages.
2. In personal recover. The sinner himself is to be built up. Sin breaks a man down breaks down character, reputation, faculty, energy. The fallen life is a broken life. Now, the first act o! Divine restoration touches the nature of the sinner himself. He is lifted up from the dust and set on his feet. Like a ruined building, shaken down by the earthquake, he is built up again, that he himself and not merely his belongings may be strong and beautiful. Thus the restored penitent is made a temple for the indwelling of the Holy Ghost, a fortress to keep out future invasions of evil, a palace in which the fairest graces of the kingdom can be nourished, a hospital and asylum for the sick and miserable, a school of new thoughts and enterprises, a home of prayer and love.
3. In external prosperity. It is only too likely that poor Eliphaz thought exclusively, or at all events quite disproportionately, of this when he spoke of Job being built up again. The patriarch"s ruined fortune could be restored. This is not the chief part of a Divine restoration. Still in some way though not always in restored wealth it does follow that the outer as well as the inner life is favoured by a penitent return to God. W. F. A.
The Pulpit Commentary (1880–1919), ed. H.D.M. Spence-Jones & Joseph S. Exell — public domain. Text from a community e-Sword module.
The Biblical Illustrator 1887 · Public Domain On vv23, 26 If thou return to the Almighty.
Job_22:23-30
If thou return to the Almighty.
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Spiritual Reformation
I. The nature of a true spiritual reformation is here set forth.
1. Reconciliation to God. Men in their unregenerate state are out of sympathy with their Maker. There is an estrangement of soul.
2. Practical regard to the Divine precepts. Receive, I pray thee, the law from His mouth, and lay up His words in thine heart. Put thy being under the reign of heavenly laws.
3. Renunciation of all iniquity. Thou shalt put away iniquity far from thy tabernacles. There is no reformation where sin is cherished, or where it is allowed to linger.
4. Estimating the best things as worthless in comparison with God. Then shalt thou lay up gold as dust, and the gold of Ophir as the stones of the brook. Yea, the Almighty shall be thy defence, and thou shalt have plenty of silver.
II. The advantages of a true spiritual reformation, as here set forth. Eliphaz says that if Job would only act out his counsel he should, enjoy signal advantages. Thereby good shall come unto thee. What is the good he refers to? He specifies several things.
1. Restoration of lost blessings. Thou shalt be built up. All thy losses shall be repaired, and the breaches in thy fortune healed. How much Job had lost!
2. Delight in God. Job had been complaining of the Almighty; and his face was cast down in sadness.
3. Answer to prayer. Prayer is always answered where it leads to a submission to the Divine will; and true prayer always leads to this.
4. Realisation of purposes. Thou shalt form a plan or purpose, and it shall not be frustrated.
5. rower of usefulness. When men are cast down, thou shalt say, Cheer up. (Homilist.)
Standing right with God
Thou shalt have plenty of silver. But, first, the religion such a motive would produce would be worth little. Religion is not, in its nature, external. And the desire of the silver could only bring to an external conformity to the Divine commands. And, second, the motive cannot be urged. The statement of Eliphaz was grounded in a mistaken view of Divine Providence. Gold and silver are given and withheld as the sovereign Lord sees fit; and their distribution follows not the rules of holy obedience.
I. The hortatory portions or the text.
1. The belief of Eliphaz was, that Job was a great sinner; and he therefore urges the necessity of returning to God. He was mistaken in his particular views of Job.
2. Returning to God, we shall acquaint ourselves with Him, and be at peace. The expression implies knowledge and intimacy.
3. Thus standing right with God, a two-fold duty devolves on us.
(1) Due preparation for practice. Receive the law from His mouth. Acknowledge Him as supreme Lord.
(2) Practice itself. Put away iniquity,--have nothing to do with it personally: from thy tabernacles,--allow it not in the circle which thou governest.
II. Blessings shall come from this better than gold and silver.
1. Good shall come unto thee. Gods favour, the light of His countenance,--all that makes the true eternal good of the soul.
2. The Almighty shall be thy defence: against all real danger. A complete oversight and protection shall be granted thee.
3. Thou shalt delight in the Almighty: in the thought of what He is in Himself, and to thee; and in His consciously possessed favour.
4. Thou shalt lift up thy face unto God. Thou shalt not now be ashamed. Thou shalt have a holy, humble, but firm and joyful confidence. Sin makes the man afraid.
5. Thou shalt make thy prayer unto Him, and He will hear thee. There is permission to enjoy this highest privilege. Pray,--be heard.
6. Thy path shall be truly happy. The light shall shine on thy ways. Even providential obscurity shall make spiritual light more visible. (G. Cubitt.)
Returning to God by conviction and progress
In the return of a human soul to God there is decision arising from conviction,--a conviction forced upon the conscience, and will, and reason, and feelings of the heart and mind, from the unanswerable compulsory power of circumstances. With regard to religious conviction as a necessary step to our returning to the Almighty, we may steel our minds against it from many causes; one, say, from the formal custom of hearing sermons. For blended with this kind of hearing may be a self-comparison with the religious teacher himself, and the self-satisfaction which may arise from this comparison. There may stand in the way of this conviction the strong bias of early impressions, of local customs, and of deeply-rooted habits of thought and conception. We may look at religious duties through not only very limited mediums, and therefore partial, but through certain party-coloured ones, and so mistake the broad expansive and glorious character of Gods truth by the disfiguring and narrowing influence of bigotry, intolerance, and prejudice. When a man, however, steadily and fixedly sets the eye of his faith upon the Almighty, as the all-absorbing and exclusive end of his religious convictions and decisions, he returns to Him in the spirit of the prodigal. He returns to God with a humble heart, a humble faith, and a humble prayer. As a result of the return of the soul to the Almighty, it shall be built up. This points to a progress of religious life and experience. There is a power exerted, on mans behalf above and independently of himself. It is Thou shalt be built up, not Thou shalt build thyself up. The spirit of man assuming the form of a building, in a moral and religious sense, becomes so after the manner of all other structures. It has its foundations in Christ; its gradual rise in the piling up, so to speak, of one virtue upon another, as stone upon stone. But as the earthly building is dependent upon the genius of the architect, so is the spiritual building dependent upon the wisdom and power of the Almighty. We may go where the castle or palace or temple once stood in noble splendour, in proud dignity, and in great strength, but now a crumbling ruin with wails gray with age, battered by the hand of time, or made spectral-like by fire, axe, and sword. But its remaining walls and columns and arches may be restored, strengthened, replenished, and built up again. So with the human soul, its original beauty and grandeur might be defaced by sin, and all its former promises of endurance might be broken by disobedience; but by the grace and mercy of God it may be built up once more. (W. D. Horwood.)
The Biblical Illustrator, edited by Joseph S. Exell (c. 1880s–1900s) — public domain. Text from a community e-Sword module.
Alexander MacLaren 1905 · Public Domain On v26 Job 22:26 - Job 22:29.
Job
WHAT LIFE MAY BE MADE
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Job 22:26 - Job 22:29.
These words are a fragment of one of the speeches of Job’s friends, in which the speaker has been harping on the old theme that affliction is the consequence and evidence of sin. He has much ado to square his theory with facts, and especially with the fact which brought him to Job’s dunghill. But he gets over the difficulty by the simple method of assuming that, since his theory must be true, there must be unknown facts which vindicate it in Job’s case; and since affliction is a sign of sin, Job’s afflictions are proof that he has been a sinner. So he charges him with grossest crimes, without a shadow of other reason; and after having poured this oil of vitriol into his wounds by way of consolation, he advises him to be good, on the decidedly low and selfish ground that it will pay.
His often-quoted exhortation, ‘Acquaint thyself with God, and be at peace: thereby good shall come unto thee,’ is, in his meaning of it, an undisguised appeal to purely selfish considerations, and its promise is not in accordance with facts. Whether that saying is noble and true or ignoble and false, depends on the meanings attached to ‘peace’ and ‘good.’ A similar flaw mars the words of our text, as understood by the speaker. But they can be raised to a higher level than that on which he placed them, and regarded as describing the sweet and wonderful prerogatives of the devout life. So understood, they may rebuke and stimulate and encourage us to make our lives conformed to the ideal here.
I. I note, first, that life may be full of delight and confidence in God.
‘Then shalt thou delight thyself in the Almighty, and shalt lift up thy face unto God.’ Now when we ‘delight’ in a thing or a person, we recognise that that thing, or person, fits into a cleft in our hearts, and corresponds to some need in our natures. We not only recognise its good, sweetness, and adaptation to ourselves, but we actually possess in real fruition the sweetness that we recognise, and the good which we apprehend in it. And so these things, the recognition of the supreme sweetness and all-perfect adaptation and sufficiency of God to all that I need; the suppression of tastes and desires which may conflict with that sweetness, and the actual enjoyment and fruition of the sweetness and preciousness which I apprehend-these things are the very heart of a man’s religion. Without delight in God, there is no real religion.
The bulk of men are so sunken and embruted in animal tastes and sensuous desires and fleeting delights, that they have no care for the pure and calm joys which come to those who live near God. But above these stand the men, of whom there are a good many amongst us, whose religion is a matter of fear or of duty or of effort. And above them there stand the men who serve because they trust God, but whose religion is seeking rather than finding, and either from deficient consecration or from false conceptions of Him and of their relation to Him, is overshadowed by an unnatural and unwholesome gloom. And all these kinds of religion, the religion of fear, of duty, of effort, of seeking, and of doubt fighting with faith, are at the best wofully imperfect, and are, some of them, radically erroneous types of the religious life. He is the truly devout man who not only knows God to be great and holy, but feels Him to be sweet and sufficient; who not only fears, but loves; who not only seeks and longs, but possesses; or, in one word, true religion is delighting in God.
So herein is supplied a very sharp test for us. Do our tastes and inclinations set towards Him, and is He better to us than anything beside? Is God to me my dearest faith, the very home of my heart, to which I instinctively turn? Is the brightness of my day the light of His face? Is He the gladness of my joy? Is my Christianity a mill-horse round of service that I am not glad to render? Do I worship because I think it is duty, and are my prayers compulsory and mechanical; or do I worship because my heart goes out to Him? And is my life calm and sweet because I ‘delight in the Lord’?
The next words of my text will help us to answer. ‘Thou shalt lift up thy face unto God.’ That is a clear enough metaphor to express frank confidence of approach to Him. The head hangs down in the consciousness of demerit and sin. ‘Mine iniquities have taken hold upon me,’ wailed the Psalmist, ‘so that I am not able to look up.’ But it is possible for men to go into God’s presence with a sense of peace, and to hold up their heads before their Judge and look Him in the eyes and not be afraid. And unless we have that confidence in Him, not because of our merits, but because of His certain love, there will be no ‘delight in the Lord.’ And there will be no such confidence in Him unless we have ‘access with confidence by faith’ in that Christ who has taken away our sins, and prepared the way for us into the Father’s presence, and by whose death and sacrifice, and by it alone, we sinful men, with open face and uplifted foreheads, can stand to receive upon our visage the full beams of His light, and expatiate and be glad therein. There is no religion worth naming, of which the inmost characteristic is not delight in God. There is no ‘delighting in God’ possible for sinful men unless they can come to Him with frank confidence, and there is no such confidence possible for us unless we apprehend by faith, and thereby make our own, the great work of Jesus Christ our Lord.
II. So, secondly, note, such a life of delighting in God will be blessed by the frankest intercourse with Him.
‘Thou shalt make thy prayer unto Him, and He shall hear thee, and thou shalt pay thy vows.’ These are three stages of this blessed communion that is possible for men. And note, prayer is not regarded in this aspect as duty, nor is it even dwelt upon as privilege, but as being the natural outcome and issue of that delighting in God and confident access to Him which have preceded. That is to say, if a man really has set his heart on God, and knows that in Him is all that he needs, then, of course, he will tell Him everything. As surely as the sunshine draws out the odours from the opening petals of the flowers, will the warmth of the felt divine light and love draw from our hearts the sweet confidence, which it is impossible not to give to Him in whom we delight.
If you have to be driven to prayer by a sense of duty, and if there be no impulse in your heart whispering ever to you, ‘Tell your Love about it!’ you have much need to examine into the reality, and certainly into the depth of your religion. For as surely as instinctive impulse, which needs no spurring from conscience or will, leads us to breathe our confidences to those that we love best, and makes us restless whilst we have a secret hid from them, so surely will a true love to God make it the most natural thing in the world to put all our circumstances, wants, and feeling into the shape of prayers. They may be in briefest words. They may scarcely be vocalised at all, but there will be, if there be a true love to Him, an instinctive turning to Him in every circumstance; and the single-worded cry, if it be no more, for help is sufficient. The arrow may be shot towards Heaven, though it be but slender and short, and it will reach its goal.
For my text goes on to the second stage, ‘He shall hear thee.’ That was not true as Eliphaz meant it. But it is true if we remember the preceding conditions. The fundamental passage, which I suppose underlies part, at least, of our text, is that great word in the psalm, ‘Delight thyself in the Lord, and He shall give thee the desires of thine heart.’ Does that mean that if a man loves God he may get everything he wants? Yes! and No! If it is supposed to mean that our religion is a kind of key to God’s storehouse, enabling us to go in there and rifle it at our pleasure, then it is not true; if it means that a man who delights himself in God will have his supreme desire set upon God, and so will be sure to get it, then it is true. Fulfil the conditions and you are sure of the promise. If our prayer in its deepest essence be ‘Not my will, but Thine,’ it will be answered. When the desires of our heart are for God, and for conformity to His will, as they will be when we ‘delight ourselves in Him,’ then we get our heart’s desires. There is no promise of our being able to impose our wills upon God, which would be a calamity, and not a blessing, but a promise that they who make Him their joy and their desire will never be defrauded of their desire nor robbed of their joy.
And so the third stage of this frank intercourse comes. ‘Thou shalt pay thy vows.’ All life may become a thank-offering to God for the benefits that have flowed unceasing from His hands. First a prayer, then the answer, then the rendered thank-offering. Thus, in swift alternation and reciprocity, is carried on the commerce between Heaven and earth, between man and God. The desires rise to Heaven, but Heaven comes down to earth first; and prayer is not the initial stage, but the second, in the process. God first gives His promise, and the best prayer is the catching up of God’s promise and tossing it back again whence it came. Then comes the second downward motion, which is the answer to prayer, in blessing, and on it follows, finally, the reflection upwards, in thankful surrender and service, of the love that has descended on us, in answer to our desires. So like sunbeams from a mirror, or heat from polished metal, backwards and forwards, in continual alternation and reciprocation of influence and of love, flash and travel bright gleams between the soul and God. ‘Truth springs out of the earth, and righteousness looks down from Heaven. Our God shall give that which is good, and the earth shall yield her increase.’ Is there any other life of which such alternation is the privilege and the joy?
III. Then thirdly, such a life will neither know failure nor darkness.
‘Thou shalt also decree a thing, and it shall be established unto thee, and the light shall shine upon thy ways.’ Then is my will to be omnipotent, and am I to be delivered from the experiences of disappointments and failures and frustrated plans that are common to all humanity, and an essential part of its discipline, because I am a Christian man? Eliphaz may have meant that, but we know something far nobler. Again, I say, remember the conditions precedent. First of all, there must be the delight in God, and the desire towards Him, the submission of the will to Him, and the waiting before Him for guidance. I decree a thing-if I am a true Christian, and in the measure in which I am-only when I am quite sure that God has decreed it. And it is only His decrees, registered in the chancery of my will, of which I may be certain that they shall be established. There will be no failures to the man whose life’s purpose is to serve God, and to grow like Him; but if our purpose is anything less than that, or if we go arbitrarily and self-willedly resolving and saying, ‘Thus I will; thus I command; let my will stand instead of all reason,’ we shall have our contemptuous ‘decrees’ disestablished many a time. If we run our heads against stone walls in that fashion, the walls will stand, and our heads will be broken. To serve Him and to fall into the line of His purpose, and to determine nothing, nor obstinately want anything until we are sure that it is His will-that is the secret of never failing in what we undertake.
We must understand a little more deeply than we are apt to do what is meant by ‘success,’ before we predict unfailing success for any man. But if we have obeyed the commandment from the psalm already quoted, which may be again alluded to in the words of my text-’Commit thy way unto the Lord; trust also in Him’-we shall inherit the ancient promise, ‘and He shall bring it to pass.’ ‘All things work together for good to them that love God,’ and in the measure of our love to Him are our discernment and realisation of what is truly good. Religion gives no screen to keep the weather off us, but it gives us an insight into the truth that storms and rain are good for the only crop that is worth growing here. If we understand what we are here for, we shall be very slow to call sorrow evil, and to crown joy with the exclusive title of blessing and good; and we shall have a deeper canon of interpretation for the words of my text than he who is represented as speaking them ever dreamed of.
So with the promise of light to shine upon our paths. It is ‘the light which never was on sea or land,’ and not the material light which sense-bound eyes can see. That may all go. But if we have God in our hearts, there will be a light upon our way ‘which knows no variableness, neither shadow of turning.’ The Arctic winter, sunless though it be, has a bright heaven radiant with myriad stars, and flashing with strange lights born of no material or visible orb. And so you and I, if we delight ourselves ‘in the Lord,’ will have an unsetting sun to light our paths; ‘and at eventide,’ and in the mirkest midnight, ‘there will be light’ in the darkness.
IV. Lastly, such a life will be always hopeful, and finally crowned with deliverance.
‘When they’-that is, the ways that he has been speaking about-’when they are cast down, thou shalt say, Lifting up.’ That is an exclamation or a prayer, and we might simply render, ‘thou shalt say, Up!’ Even in so blessed a life as has been described, times will come when the path plunges downwards into some ‘valley of the shadow of death.’ But even then the traveller will bate no jot of hope. He will in his heart say ‘Up!’ even while sense says ‘Down!’ either as expressing indomitable confidence and good cheer in the face of depressing circumstances, or as pouring out a prayer to Him who ‘has showed him great and sore troubles’ that He would ‘bring him up again from the depths of the earth.’ The devout life is largely independent of circumstances, and is upheld and calmed by a quiet certainty that the general trend of its path is upward, which enables it to trudge hopefully down an occasional dip in the road.
Such an obstinate hopefulness and cheery confidence are the natural result of the experiences already described in the text. If we delight in God, hold communion with Him and have known Him as answering prayer, prospering our purposes and illuminating our paths, how shall we not hope? Nothing need depress nor perturb those whose joys and treasures are safe above the region of change and loss. If our riches are there where neither moth, rust, nor thieves can reach, our hearts will be there also, and an inward voice will keep singing, ‘Lift up your heart.’ It is the prerogative of experience to light up the future. It is the privilege of Christian experience to make hope certainty. If we live the life outlined in these verses we shall be able to bring June into December, and feel the future warmth whilst our bones are chilled with the present cold. ‘When the paths are made low, thou shalt say, Up!’
And the end will vindicate such confidence. For the issue of all will be, ‘He will save the humble person’; namely, the man who is of the character described, and who is ‘lowly of eyes’ in conscious unworthiness, even while he lifts up his face to God in confidence in his Father’s love. The ‘saving’ meant here is, of course, temporary and temporal deliverance from passing outward peril. But we may permissibly give it wider and deeper meaning. Continuous partial deliverances lead on to and bring about final full salvation.
We read that into the words, of course. But nothing less than a complete and conclusive deliverance can be the legitimate end of the experience of the Christian life here. Absurdity can no further go than to suppose that a soul which has delighted itself in God, and looked in His face with frank confidence, and poured out his desires to Him, and been the recipient of numberless answers, and the seat of numberless thank-offerings, has travelled along life’s common way in cheerful godliness, has had the light of heaven shining on the path, and has found an immortal hope springing as the natural result of present experience, shall at the last be frustrated of all, and lie down in unconscious sleep, which is nothingness. If that were the end of a Christian life, then ‘the pillared firmament were rottenness, and earth’s base built on stubble.’ No, no! A heaven of endless blessedness and close communion with God is the only possible ending to the facts of the devout life on earth.
We have such a life offered to us all and made possible through faith in Jesus Christ, in whom we may delight ourselves in the Lord, by whom we have ‘access with confidence,’ who is Himself the light of our hope, the answer of our prayers, the joy of our hearts, and who will ‘deliver us from every evil work’ as we travel along the road; ‘and save us’ at last ‘into His heavenly kingdom,’ where we shall be joined to the Delight of our souls, and drink for evermore of the fountain of life.
Alexander MacLaren, Expositions of Holy Scripture (1904–1910) — public domain. Text from a community e-Sword module.
unfoldingWord translationNotes 2017 · CC BY-SA 4.0 On vv23, 26 Connecting Statement:
Connecting Statement:
Eliphaz continues speaking to Job.
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you will be built up
Eliphaz compares Job's restoration to the rebuilding of a house that has fallen. This can be stated in active form. AT: "he will heal you and make you prosper again" (See: Metaphor and Active or Passive)
if you put unrighteousness far away from your tents
Unrighteousness is pictured as a person who is living in Job's tent who must be removed. AT: "if you and everyone in your house stops sinning" (See: Metaphor)
Lay your treasure down in the dust
To lay a treasure in the dust is to treat it as unimportant. AT: "Consider your riches as unimportant as dust" (See: Idiom)
the gold of Ophir among the stones of the brooks
To put gold in the stream is to treat it as no more valuable than stones. AT: "the gold of Ophir is as worthless as stones in a stream" (See: Idiom)
Ophir
This is the name of a region famous for its gold. (See: How to Translate Names)
the Almighty will be your treasure, precious silver to you
This means God will be more valuable to Job than any treasure. (See: Metaphor)
translationWords
return
Almighty
righteous
tent
gold
silver
unfoldingWord translationNotes — © Distant Shores Media and the Door43 World Missions Community, licensed CC BY-SA 4.0. Source: git.door43.org/Door43/en_tn.
Tyndale Open Study Notes 2022 · CC BY-SA 4.0 On vv23, 24, 25, 27 22:23 return to the Almighty: Bildad (8:5-6) and Zophar…
22:23 return to the Almighty: Bildad (8:5-6) and Zophar (11:13-14) had already misapplied this biblical principle (Isa 55:6-7; Hos 14:1-2; Zech 1:3; Acts 26:20), and now Eliphaz also misapplies it.
Tyndale Open Study Notes — © Tyndale Open Resources, licensed CC BY-SA 4.0. Text via the HelloAO Bible API.