3 IMPORTANT TRUTHS JOB’S FRIENDS NEGLECTED by Christopher Ash for Core Christianity
What They Don’t Believe
The trouble with [Job’s] comforters is that so much of what they say sounds right. It would be a useful exercise to read their speeches with a pencil in hand, and to put a tick in the margin against every statement they make with which we agree. There would be many ticks, and generally high marks for doctrinal orthodoxy, so much so that it is easy to think the friends are doctrinally sound teachers whose fault is simply that they are pastorally insensitive.
But more careful consideration suggests that their fault lies deeper than pastoral insensitivity. It is the content, not just the tone, of their teaching that is false. Their problem is not so much what they say as what they leave unsaid. (This is so often the case with false teaching; we need to be on the lookout not only for wrong teaching some church teachers may give, but also for vital biblical ingredients they habitually omit.) There are three vital truths they don’t believe.
1. No Satan
They have no place in their thinking for Satan. We know from Job 1 and 2 that Satan is a real and influential spiritual person. We know that the whole tragedy of Job has its origin in heavenly arguments between the Lord and Satan. But the comforters have no place in their thinking for Satan or for the spiritual battle. We find hints that Job does believe in Satan, however: in Job 3:8 he speaks of Leviathan (we shall return to Leviathan when we reach Job 41), and in Job 26:12–13 he refers to Rahab the serpent monster (another expression in Old Testament symbolism of the great spiritual enemy of the Creator God). But the friends have no place for spiritual forces of evil. In their world evil is purely a human phenomenon. It has no spiritual dimension; there is no spiritual battle. How wrong they are.
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2. Judgment is now.
The wicked are punished now; the righteous are blessed now. But the promises of judgment are not for now. They are for the end. So, for example, Psalm 1 presents a clear distinction between the righteous and the wicked. But it is “in the judgment” that the wicked will not stand (Ps. 1:5). And the judgment is (usually) not yet. The comforters’ “now” theology seems so tidy, but is actually disastrous.
