For you have taken a pledge from your brother for nothing, and stripped the naked of their clothing.
All Commentaries on Job 22:6 Go To Job 22
Gregory The Dialogist
AD 604
Note that from a deadened heart one may throw out words or promises, and from idle words he may in the heinousness of lying blaze out into insults. For these are the corrosions of increasing sin, that the tongue when not restrained should never lie still where it has fallen but is always descending to what is worse.…
In holy Scripture the term pledge [promise] may denote either the gifts of the Holy Spirit or the confession of sin. Thus pledge is taken as the gift of the Holy Spirit, such as where it is said by Paul, “And given the earnest of the Spirit in our hearts.” For we receive a pledge for this, that we may have an assurance of the promise that is made to us. And so the gift of the Holy Spirit is called a pledge, because through this [Spirit] our soul is strengthened to the assuredness of the inward hope. Again by the name of “a pledge,” confession of sin is also intended, as it is written in the law, “If your brother owes you something, and you take away a pledge from him, restore the pledge before the setting of the sun.” When any fellow creature is proven to have done anything wrong against us, our brother is made a debtor to us. Sins we call “debts.” Thus it is said to the servant when he sinned, “I forgave you all that debt.” And in the Lord’s Prayer we pray daily, “Forgive us our debts, as we forgive our debtors.”
Now we “take a pledge” from our debtor, when from the lips of him who is found to have sinned against us, we receive a confession of his sin, whereby we are asked to remit the sin that was committed against us. For anyone who confesses the sin that he has done and begs pardon has already, as it were, given a “pledge” for his debt. This pledge we are bidden to “restore before the sunset,” because before that, in ourselves through pain of the heart, the Sun of righteousness shall set. We are bound to render back the acknowledgment of pardon to him from whom we receive the acknowledgment of transgression, that he who remembers that he has done amiss toward us may be made aware that what he has done wrong is forgiven by us at once.
