Job CLXIII

 Job 15:11-13, “Are the consolations of God too small for you, and the word spoken gently with you? Why does your heart carry you away, and what do your eyes wink at, that you turn your spirit against God, and let such words go out of your mouth?”

Now that Eliphaz was on a roll, he just kept piling on. It’s easy to get on a soapbox and pontificate when you refuse to acknowledge the suffering of another, or see it as less of a trial than what it is. We all experience pain and loss, generally speaking, but the degree to which we experience it varies from person to person. There are so many factors that contribute to the level of heartache and the length to which it remains a companion that, were Eliphaz a wise man, as he insisted due to his graying hairs, he would have remained silent, said nothing, and grieved with his friend.

It’s a callous thing to judge another man’s pain through the prism of your understanding, especially if you haven’t been through what they’re going through or experienced loss in the magnitude they have. None of Job’s three friends had suffered the loss that Job did, and now, as a final furnace, his body betrayed him, his strength leeching out of him with each passing breath, to the point that he saw death as a sweet release rather than a fearsome thing he dared not envision.

In order to give credence to his conclusions, lacking any evidence to substantiate them, Eliphaz attempted to dispirit Job even further by insinuating that God’s consolations were too small for him, and that rather than release his heartache and give voice to his groans, he should be thankful for the situation and circumstance he found himself in.

You can cling to God, you can cling to faith, you can hold tight to hope, without insisting that the trial you’re going through is a reason for joy and jubilation. Pain hurts. Loss hurts. It’s okay to feel them and not walk about pretending otherwise. This is what Eliphaz was asking of Job. I see you sitting in the dirt, covered in painful boils, scratching at yourself. I know you just buried your ten children and lost every material possession, but be a man about it. Shake it off, rub some dirt on it, and get on with life.

Even if one were to give Eliphaz the benefit of the doubt and allow for the possibility that his harsh words came from a place of love wrongly applied, by this point, it was evident that Job was at death’s door, hanging on by frail threads. Knowing the nature of the enemy we face, when God told Satan that nothing was out of bounds except for Job’s life, he took it literally.

His heart still beat in his chest, he still inhaled and expelled air, so technically he was still alive, but let there be no doubt, Job was brought as close to the edge of death as any man without crossing over.

It’s not as though Satan operated from a place of empathy or sympathy. It’s not as though he set out to apply only enough pressure as was required for Job to relent and abandon his faith. He wanted to make an example of Job and, from his first action, set out to break and destroy him utterly. He thought he was close now. One more push, one more negative utterance from those he deemed as friends, and he’d have his prize. He’d prove God wrong!

It was never about Job as a person. It wasn’t as though Satan hated Job specifically. His goal and purpose were to be able to gloat in his arrogance and be able to declare that God was wrong about something, anything, even if it was the faithfulness of one man. This has always been the enemy’s end goal, no matter the iteration in which it plays out from generation to generation.

Perhaps it’s a subconscious coping mechanism wherein if Satan could prove God was wrong about one thing, then there was the outside chance he was wrong about other things, more specifically about himself. Even the current delusion of people insisting they were born in the wrong body is rooted in the enemy’s obsession with proving that God can be mistaken about something, that He is not sovereign, that He is not omniscient, and that His ways are not perfect.

One man sitting in the ashes of his former life, scratching at his boils with a potsherd, was at the center of an unseen battle whose outcome would determine something so monumental as to have eternal ramifications. If Job broke, whether true or not, the enemy would insist he had the right of it. See, I was right all along! Job only serves you because you have blessed the work of his hands and increased his possessions in the land. It wasn’t love. It wasn’t a relationship. It wasn’t faithfulness, it was usury, and once the spigot got turned off, he abandoned his faith. He abandoned You!

As bragging rights go, the enemy could not have hoped for a better outcome had Job relented. Whatever the situation, Job would always be used as a counterargument to God’s sovereignty, because the one man He had singled out among all of his generation, whom God saw as blameless and upright, turned out not to be so impressive after all. The unfolding of this entire drama was bigger than just one man. Satan saw it as an indictment of God’s very nature and righteousness, were he able to apply enough pressure on Job and cause him to break.

This was his one shot, and he wasn’t going to miss it. He wasn’t about to take it easy on Job and risk his remaining faithful, enduring, and persevering, so he pulled out all the stops and went to the very edge of what he was allowed to do to him to achieve the desired outcome.

With love in Christ,

Michael Boldea, Jr.