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Job 4:12-14  “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.”

Job’s  ‘comforter’, Eliphaz the Temanite, is about to tell his friend exactly what his problem is, and how to fix it.  As we know, this expert advice will be expanded by his three other ‘comforters’, Bildad, Zophar and perhaps Elihu also.  But none of this ‘wisdom’ is of any comfort to the suffering faithful servant of God because it doesn’t align at all with Job’s actual experience.  Those of us who’ve read the end of the story (and the introduction in chapter 1) also know that their advice does not align with what is actually going on from God’s true perspective!  We are therefore not surprised that it is of no help to Job himself.

The real danger of Eliphaz’s opinion is the way he introduced it.  He himself obviously wanted it to have as much traction with his suffering friend as possible, so he claimed it was the result of powerful, bone-shaking divine intervention.  I have just finished reading “Showdown at Big Sandy”, by Greg Doudna. It is written by someone who lost his faith altogether because of the harmful effects of similar claims made by Herbert W. Armstrong and his Worldwide Church of God.  These verses also reminded me of the ongoing harm being done by the claims of Muhammud in the 7^th Century AD, leading to Islam, and by Joseph Smith in the 19^th Century AD, leading to Mormonism!  (I was going to add the more recent phenomnon of the ‘Toronto Blessing’, but that seems to have lost momentum).

How blessed we are to have God’s infallible, inspired Word in the Scriptures of the Old and New Testaments, and to have ready access to it on a daily basis in our mother tongue.  And how important it is that we make regular use of this facility so that we have a reliable basis on which to check such outragerous false claims.  And what a blessing it is that we have a rich inheritance in the time-tested Reformed Evangelical understanding of the Gospel and the Christisan Faith generally, enabling us to encourage each other in the good Berean tradition: “Now the Berean Jews were of more noble character than those in Thessalonica, for they received the message with great eagerness and examined the Scriptures every day to see if what Paul said was true” (Acts 17:11).  Let us never underestimate, or neglect, the rich fruit of these blessings.

– Bruce Christian