Job LXXXII

 Job 4:8-11, “Even as I have seen, those who plow iniquity and sow trouble reap the same. By the blast of God they perish, and by the breath of His anger they are consumed. The roaring of the lion, the voice of the fierce lion, and the teeth of the young lions are broken. The old lion perishes for lack of prey, and the cubs of the lioness are scattered.”

Job’s friend believed that his situation was a direct result of something he’d done or some sin he’d committed. He interpreted Job’s testing to be punishment, and in order for a just God to dish out punishment, the individual must have committed some grievous act for which punishment was warranted.

Eliphaz’s understanding of how things work was more akin to karma than it was to how the God of all things, He who created the seen and unseen realms alike, operates. If you plow iniquity and sow trouble, that’s what you’ll reap. Do good, and good will come to you. What’s the saying the hippies have? You get back whatever you put out into the world! Good vibes, brother. I’m not saying you should be going around kicking kittens and stealing children’s lunches when they aren’t looking. Yes, you should strive to be noble, virtuous, kind, empathetic, and helpful, but the reason for being these things shouldn’t be the expectation of some mystical exchange of kind for kind, but because it’s the right thing to do.

It’s the reason many believers find themselves in the perfect environment for bitterness to sprout and grow in their hearts. They fall for the promises of charlatans wherein not only are they to expect kind for kind but they’re also told to expect a return on their investment here on earth. It started with the hundredfold return and worked its way up to the thousand-fold return. I mean, who’d pass up that kind of deal? Give a dollar to the sweaty man in the silk suit and gold rings on his fingers, and in no time flat, you’ll get back a thousand. 

Even though they knew of his integrity and that he was a man who feared God and shunned evil, because of their preconceived notion that God would not allow tragedy to befall someone had they not transgressed, Job’s friends concluded that there had been some hidden sin he was guilty of that brought this travail upon him. Since you’re in a spot of trouble, then you must have sown these things at some point. This was Eliphaz’s conclusion because he did not have the mind of God, nor did he understand that their ways differed fundamentally.

The inconsistency between what people in the West are being told they should expect once they become believers and what those of the body of Christ are enduring in regions of the world and entire continents has always been present. What has changed in recent years is that those of the West who glut themselves on fineries and live a life of such duplicity that the devil doesn’t even bother with them are looking down their noses and condemning those currently being persecuted, accusing them of not having enough faith to speak the persecution away and bring on themselves riches and prosperity. It would seem Eliphaz had sons and daughters, and they had sons and daughters, too, and most of them migrated to the West and became members of mega-churches. They assume it’s lack of faith that has brought hardship upon believers in other lands and not the refining of their faith.

Conventional wisdom isn’t always beneficial. When we try to apply conventional wisdom to spiritual things, we often err and, in so doing, position ourselves in opposition to the will and word of God. That we’ve been trying for the past half-century to fuse the two, insisting that they are interchangeable, has only served to confuse and distract the average Christian from pursuing the righteousness of God, refocusing their passions from the things above to the things of this earth anew.

The constant onslaught of prosperity preaching, prosperity thinking, and prosperity living is not as innocuous as some might hope because it redefines and reimagines what it is to be a servant of God, thereby making us bristle and resist every time the testing of the Lord comes upon us, and we do not experience the easy, carefree life we were promised by those we deem to be honest arbiters of the Word, and ambassadors of Christ upon the earth.

When we take a personal opinion or a personal conviction and attempt to generalize it, broad-brushing the entirety of Christendom and insisting that they make it the salvific issue it’s not, we are no better than Job’s friends, who, having started out trying to comfort him, ended up insisting that he’d done something to cause this calamity to come upon him.

If it’s not a salvific issue, don’t make it a salvific issue. If you are ignorant of all the details or only see a piece of the puzzle before you and not the whole, don’t assume that you know what you’ve not been given to know or sit in judgment of someone because it’s not your place.

Job had not sinned. God said as much. Neither with his lips nor his actions, yet here were his friends insisting that he had. While Eliphaz was the first to address Job, he would not be the last, and as we dive into the words they spoke to Job, we can see the difference in their temperament coming to the fore.

By his words and inferences, we can discern that Eliphaz was a moralist through and through. For him, life was black and white, cut and dry, and the entire foundation of his discourse was that the righteous man prospers, and the sinner suffers. Do good, and good will come to you. Do evil, and you will reap evil. It’s the theory of reward or recompense in its simplest form. He could not allow that something beyond his understanding could be taking place in Job’s life or that God had allowed these things to happen to him for some other reason than that of punishment.

Posted on 29 December 2024 | 12:53 pm