Job CLXXI

 With all the things Job’s friends thought they knew, were sure of, and insisted upon, there was one thing that eluded them, the most critical and consequential thing of all: Job loved God! Truly, deeply, completely, without equivocation or shadow of turning, Job loved God. Because Job loved God, he was known by Him, and He was neither unaware nor unconcerned about him as an individual.

Just as Paul wrote to the Corinthians, Job’s friends were puffed up with the knowledge they thought they possessed, having abandoned love, not understanding that love edifies.

1 Corinthians 8:2-3, “And if anyone thinks that he knows anything, he knows nothing yet as he ought to know. But if anyone loves God, this one is known by Him.”

We don’t know what we don’t know, and half the time the things we know are not as we ought to know them, but that doesn’t stop us from giving our take, our opinion, our interpretation, and perhaps worst of all, sharing our feelings on topics and situations we do not possess complete knowledge of.

Tragically, our feelings never play second fiddle; they never take second place, and if we make our feelings our guiding light rather than the inerrant Word of God, we will always find a way to circumvent it, downplay it, and insist that, for whatever reason, our feelings matter more than what the Word of God says.

Trying to convince believers of what Jesus said, and that we should take it seriously, be sober, and prepare for the events He forewarned of, is like pulling teeth with a pair of rusty tongs, because their feelings supersede the authority of Scripture and as such, they’ve convinced themselves that willing a different outcome to what has already been spoken in the Word is enough to make it so.

Back in the day, the buzz phrases were “I don’t receive that” or “it doesn’t bear witness with my spirit”, even though all you did was quote Scripture verbatim and point to it and what it says about the last days. Whether you receive it or not is entirely up to you, but know that your feelings on a particular matter will not invalidate scripture.

Hubris has a way of making us so myopic as to conclude that we are the only ones that can be right about something, even if it’s at the expense of what the Scripture clearly says, or what the evidence before us clearly shows. Don’t let hubris cloud your judgment or make you see something that isn’t there. Once you go down that road, the tendency to double down even when all evidence proves contradictory to your presumption is almost overwhelming.

When we’re unwilling to admit we were wrong about something or someone, even when proven so, we begin to rationalize and insist that we may not have gotten all the details right, but surely there must be something nefarious beneath the surface—anything except the simplest explanation that we were wrong and mistaken. 

Eliphaz could not allow for the possibility that he was wrong or that he had misread the situation. It was anathema to him, and in his mind, the more examples he came up with, the stronger his case against Job became. What started out as an attempt to comfort a suffering friend transformed into layers upon layers of accusations against him because, were he to admit he was wrong, Eliphaz’s pride would have been wounded.

To kick someone when they’re down, to hurt someone already hurting to appease our pride, is a special kind of wrong, yet we see people do it constantly, because to them, their pride is the driving force of what they do in life.

Their need to be right supersedes both empathy and humanity, and somehow they find a way to make it about themselves rather than the individual in question. I know you’ve lost everything and you’re sitting in an ash pile praying for death, but I’ve been sitting on the stony ground for a week, and it’s not helping my sciatica, so can we just get on with it, admit that you sinned, and we can go on our merry way?

When everything is reduced to the natural and we do not allow for the supernatural in our lives, then every answer to every question we have must necessarily be tethered to the natural. Eliphaz, for all his insistence that he was wise and that his gray hairs were evidence of his claims, did not allow for anything beyond what he could see, touch, hear, and deduce with his carnal mind. There was nothing beyond the physical that could be seen, or a spiritual prism through which he could view Job’s plight and conclude something other than what he’d already concluded.

I see a broken man before me, a man who was once the greatest of all the people of the East, and the only explanation is that he must have sinned. He must have done something to stir God’s anger against him, because if not for God being against you, there’s no way to lose everything, including your ten children, so suddenly. Ergo, Job sinned, and my singular purpose is to convince him to cop to it, confess his faults, admit his heinous acts, and once he does that, I will have been proven to be right.

Sure, he says he’s innocent, but every guilty person says they’re innocent, don’t they? Sure, he’s lying in the dirt, scratching at his boils, gasping for breath, and if not for his evident sin, I would have more empathy for him.

By this point, Eliphaz had worked himself up into a lather, so convinced of Job’s sin as to grow angry and frustrated every time Job insisted upon his innocence. If only Eliphaz could have seen how this drama would play out and what God’s response to him and his friends would be to their verbal berating and accusations of Job, perhaps he would have been less inclined to be so vitriolic. Alas, only God knows the end from the beginning, only He is privy to all the nuances of one’s existence, and only He is the final arbiter and judge.  

With love in Christ,

Michael Boldea, Jr.