Remember, I pray you, who ever perished, being innocent? or where were the righteous cut off?
All Commentaries on Job 4:7 Go To Job 4
Gregory The Dialogist
AD 604
Whether it be heretics, of whom we have said that the friends of blessed Job bore an image, or whether any of the evil ones, they are as much to blame in their admonitions as they are immoderate in their condemnation. For Eliphaz says, “Who ever perished being innocent? Or where were the righteous cut off?” Since it often happens that in this life both “the innocent perish” and the “righteous are” utterly “cut off,” yet in perishing they are kept for glory eternal. For if innocent people never perished, the prophet would not say, “The righteous perishes, and no man lays it to heart.” If God in his providential dealings did not carry off the righteous, Wisdom would never have said of the righteous person, “Yes, he was taken away quickly, to prevent wickedness from altering his understanding.” If no visitation ever struck the righteous, Peter would never foretell it, saying, “For the time has come that judgment must begin in the house of God.” They, then, are genuinely righteous who produce the love of the heavenly country to meet all the ills of the present life. For all who fear enduring ills in this life are clearly not righteous people. They have forgotten they suffer for the sake of eternal blessings. But Eliphaz does not take into account either that the righteous are cut off or that the innocent perish here. For people often serve God not in the hope of heavenly glory but for an earthly recompense. They make a fiction in their own head of that which they are seeking. Thinking themselves to be instructors in preaching earthly immunity, they show by all their pains what is the thing they love.
