What if you could travel back in time thousands of years. It is 2000 B.C.–that’s 2,000 years before Christ. Five men of God are sitting around a fire talking. Let’s imagine they conveniently happen to be speaking English (a language that will not be invented for 3,000 years!). The men in robes invite you to pull up a chair, or perhaps a tree stump or a stone, and sit with them while they discuss the deeper things of God. As you take your seat, you watch the sparks fly upward from the fire. It is a dark night and the sky is filled with more stars than your eyes have ever seen.
As the five men resume their conversation, one of them reports that God recently showed him a vision. The man’s name is Eliphaz and as he describes the vision, a quiet hush sends goose bumps down your arms.
“A word was secretly brought to me, my ears caught a whisper of it. Amid disquieting dreams in the night, when deep sleep falls on people, fear and trembling seized me and made all my bones shake.
A spirit glided past my face, and the hair on my body stood on end. It stopped, but I could not tell what it was. A form stood before my eyes, and I heard a hushed voice:
‘Can a mortal be more righteous than God? Can even a strong man be more pure than his Maker? If God places no trust in his servants, if He charges His angels with error, how much more those who live in houses of clay, whose foundations are in the dust, who are crushed more readily than a moth! Between dawn and dusk they are broken to pieces; unnoticed, they perish forever. Are not the cords of their tent pulled up, so that they die without wisdom?’” Job 4:12-21.
What do you think of Eliphaz? When you return to your life in the 21st century, what will you say about your experience? Was Eliphaz correct? Were the things he reported doctrinally sound? I described him as a man of God; clearly he was a believer. But was he correct? No. My study Bible says this in a note: “Although Eliphaz claimed his vision was divinely inspired, it is doubtful that it came from God because later God criticized Eliphaz for misrepresenting Him (Job 42:7).”
As you may recall, God rebukes Job’s friends, saying to Eliphaz, “My wrath is kindled against thee, and against thy two friends, for ye have not spoken of me the thing that is right, as my servant Job hath” Job 42:7.
So what do we do with these speeches? Job records the words of Eliphaz, Bildad, and Zophar, lengthy and poetic passages with plenty of nice lines about God and justice and repaying bad deeds with bad consequences. But God is not specific in His rebuke.
God does not explain which lines from Job’s friends are right and which are wrong. He simply says they “have not spoken … the thing that is right” leaving us no options but to dismiss everything they say.
Like I said, there are some good lines. In 1 Corinthians 3:19, the Apostle Paul quotes the words of Eliphaz from Job 5:13, but that is the only passage from the book of Job that is quoted in the New Testament. Other good lines, such as a line I like to cite from Job 5:7 (“Man is born for adversity as the sparks fly upward”) might be quoted the way you would quote Shakespeare. That is, some of the words of Job’s friends may be poetic or artfully stated, but you cannot quote them as sound doctrine from the Word of God. Remember–God rebuked Job’s friends, leaving us with poetic but ultimately unreliable essays about sowing and reaping and the justice of God.
Dear God, give us wisdom about rightly interpreting Your word. Show us what use (if any) to make of the words of Job’s friends. And show us how to interpret sketchy visions that come to us–like the vision of Eliphaz. Sometimes such dreamy experiences between wakefulness and sleep seem so real, yet ultimately prove false. Remind us to test everything against the scripture. And teach us to interpret the words of godly people around us, including preachers and teachers, against the truth of your word. May we never be deceived by those who misrepresent You.
AΩ.
*Quoting the Chronological Life Application Study Bible: King James Version, Tyndale House, Carol Stream, 2007, p.99.