Job 4 Devotional

Right Words and a Wrong Verdict

Eliphaz begins gently. He reminds Job that he has strengthened weak hands and steadied those who stumbled (4:3-4). Then he comes to his point: has anyone innocent ever perished (4:7)? People reap what they sow, he says, and he backs it up with a night vision in which a spirit asks whether a mortal can be more righteous than God (4:12-17).

Parts of this are true in general. But the reader knows what Eliphaz does not. God himself has called Job blameless (1:8), and Job's suffering came without cause (2:3). Eliphaz has a system in which suffering always signals sin, and he fits Job into it. At the end of the book the LORD says that Eliphaz and his friends did not speak accurately about him (42:7). When Jesus' disciples assumed a man's blindness came from someone's sin, Jesus said it did not (John 9:2-3). God's ways cannot be read off a person's circumstances. That frees us to sit with a suffering friend without first deciding what they must have done.

To think about: When someone you know is suffering, what assumptions do you need to set down before you speak?