Job LXXXVI

 Given the historical context of the time, Eliphaz was likely the eldest of Job’s three friends, as great value was placed on the wisdom of age in those days. It used to be that the younger deferred to the older among them, whatever the situation might be. It’s easy enough to trace back the decline of society and correlate it to a growing disrespect for authority, one’s elders, one’s parents, and those who’ve been where you are and may have a thing or two to teach you about it.

Just because you know how to change the background screen on Google doesn’t make you omniscient, and although you can watch YouTube videos on how to hammer in a nail, that first time you crack your thumb with the business end of a claw hammer, you’ll come to appreciate the many times your dad told you to always be aware of where your thumbs are placed. There are some things only experience can teach. Either that or find someone with experience and ask them to teach you. It is a wiser course by far since you’ll be circumventing the pain of failure on your way to learning whatever the individual might have to impart.

It’s telling that Eliphaz was the first of Job’s three friends to speak up and that the other two deferred to him and did not attempt to interject or add their own ideas to what he was saying. Their turn will come in short order, but for now, it was Eliphaz who took up the reins.

Job 5:8-11, “But as for me, I would seek God, and to God, I would commit my cause – who does great things, and unsearchable, marvelous things without number. He gives rain on the earth, and sends waters on the fields. He sets on high those who are lowly, and those who mourn are lifted to safety.”

If you’d read the entire chapter through from start to finish, it is here that you begin to wonder if the same individual is speaking. Up until this point, he was disparaging both Job’s faith and his integrity, questioning the power of the God he served, and suddenly, he reverses course and begins to wax poetic about the power of God and the marvelous things He does without number.

But wait; weren’t you the guy insisting that no one was there to answer and wondering which of the holy ones Job would turn to next? Weren’t you the one doing your utmost to vex Job’s spirit and crush him even deeper into the dust if that were at all possible?

Any reasoned dive into this chapter would lead to the conclusion that two people were speaking. The first person through the seventh verse and the second person from the eighth verse onward. Whether it was Eliphaz coming to his senses or resisting the enemy’s whispers, we cannot know, but what is evident and beyond doubt is that the entire tone of his discourse shifts, and he begins to list the attributes of God, who is worthy of being sought, and to whom one’s cause is worth committing to.

The view from an ash heap and a high horse are markedly different. You get a different perspective, one looking up, the other looking down, and Eliphaz decided that after having rebuked Job, it was an opportune moment to highlight his virtues and insist that were he to be brought low and be in Job’s position, he would seek God and commit his cause to Him, as though Job had done any different.

It’s easy to pontificate when you’re not the one struggling. It’s easy to sit in judgment of another when you don’t know the details of the hardship they’re going through or the effort it’s taking for them to hang on by the skin of their teeth. When someone is beaten into the dirt, surprised at themselves for not having given up already, the last thing they want to hear is how someone else would have done it differently. In theory, they might have, but in practice, they may have been more of a blubbering mess than the individual they’re trying to illuminate as to where they went wrong.

What happened to Job wasn’t bad decisions, bad investments, gambling addiction, unwise relationships, faithlessness, duplicity, or lack of reverence for God. There was nothing he could have done to mitigate the disaster that consumed him because the devil had been given leave to do as he willed with Job’s family, possessions, and health.

Some trials cannot be hedged for, planned for, mitigated, or avoided. The best we can hope is that we suffer well through them and that our faith is so rooted and well-established that we will weather the trial and come out stronger for it.

When Jesus had his heart to heart with Peter, informing him that Satan had asked for him that he may be sifted as wheat, the only consolation he received was that Jesus had prayed for him that his faith should not fail. It wasn’t that he be spared the sifting, it wasn’t that he be sheltered from the trial, it was that his faith would be strong enough in the face of it that it would endure the pressure of the testing.

If you believe yourself to be spiritually superior to Peter or somehow more highly favored than he was or more blameless and upright than Job, that’s one thing. If you don’t, rather than assume you will never be tested or sifted, your time would be better spent building up your most holy faith that when your season of sifting comes, it should not fail.

Because the spiritual understanding of many contemporary Christians is superficial at best, they fail to differentiate between God’s protection, provision, and providence in their walk of faith and those seasons where we are allowed to be tested and sifted. The two are not mutually exclusive because God chastens those He loves, and our faith is strengthened, refined, and proven in the flame of the trials He allows in our lives.  

With love in Christ,

Michael Boldea, Jr.