Man’s Best Wisdom is Often Just Plain Wrong
4:1 Then Eliphaz the Temanite replied:
4:2 “If someone ventures a word with you, will you be impatient? But who can keep from speaking?
4:3 Think how you have instructed many, how you have strengthened feeble hands.
4:4 Your words have supported those who stumbled; you have strengthened faltering knees.
4:5 But now trouble comes to you, and you are discouraged; it strikes you, and you are dismayed.
4:6 Should not your piety be your confidence and your blameless ways your hope?
4:7 “Consider now: Who, being innocent, has ever perished? Where were the upright ever destroyed?
4:8 As I have observed, those who plow evil and those who sow trouble reap it.
4:9 At the breath of God they are destroyed; at the blast of his anger they perish.
4:10 The lions may roar and growl, yet the teeth of the great lions are broken.
4:11 The lion perishes for lack of prey, and the cubs of the lioness are scattered.
4:12 “A word was secretly brought to me, my ears caught a whisper of it.
4:13 Amid disquieting dreams in the night, when deep sleep falls on men,
4:14 fear and trembling seized me and made all my bones shake.
4:15 A spirit glided past my face, and the hair on my body stood on end.
4:16 It stopped, but I could not tell what it was. A form stood before my eyes, and I heard a hushed voice:
4:17 ‘Can a mortal be more righteous than God? Can a man be more pure than his Maker?
4:18 If God places no trust in his servants, if he charges his angels with error,
4:19 how much more those who live in houses of clay, whose foundations are in the dust, who are crushed more readily than a moth!
4:20 Between dawn and dusk they are broken to pieces; unnoticed, they perish forever.
4:21 Are not the cords of their tent pulled up, so that they die without wisdom?’
