Job: Friendship Errors Part 1

It wouldn't be easy for anyone to have to go through a moment in life where all of your friends start trying to convince you of how terrible the things you've done are.

Friendship is a sweet gift from God that he has given us the choice to accept or not. Some people want friends, some people don’t. Job was the kind of man that did want friends. Sadly, the time in his life that I’ve been talking about lately is not a moment in time where his friends were on his side necessarily. They thought that they were on his side in the sense of helping him learn what he needed to repent about in order to make it all go away, but they weren’t actually helping him out at all. In all honesty, Job’s friends were giving bad advice to him that was aimed to make Job think that he was a terrible person who deserved everything that was going on.

The first friend of Job’s whose opinion we hear of is a man named Eliphaz. As we go throughout the portion of the bible that mentions his views on all of this, it is perfectly clear to us that his point of view is flawed.

For example, Job 4:4 says, “Remember now, who ever perished being innocent? Or where were the upright ever cut off?” Wow. He clearly didn’t know the truth back then. Everyone, including the most innocent people out there, have the possibility of perishing. The bible later on actually gives many examples of innocent men who had perished.

According to chapter 5, Eliphaz didn’t just try to blame Job for being a terribly foolish man. In chapter 5, we end up also learning that Eliphaz was trying to advise Job to become a better follower by making it sound like he (Eliphaz) was a better person with better ways of doing things. In Chapter 5 verse 8, Eliphaz says, “But as for me, I would seek God, and to God I would commit my cause.” Eliphaz then continues on by trying to teach Job about how wonderful it’d be to choose God.

I thought it’d be good to bring this story up because, even though we may not deal with it as drastically as Job did, our friends might turn against us sometimes… or at least disagree with us. No matter how dramatically things may come across between you and any friends you may have, keep in mind that God is still with you. He knows what is going on and, as we see later on, God will fix whatever wrong it will cause. We have a God that is perfectly victorious… just not always in the way we’d expect.