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