Today's Reading: Job, Chapter Five
Eliphaz continues in his "helpful advice" to Job who has lost everything with only his spouse and his friends to support him.
It is interesting that Eliphaz makes assumptions about Job's relationship with God as if he needs to work on it. The difficulty of equating misfortune with God's displeasure is that if the one in question is innocent, what does this say about our understanding of God?
If God is thoroughly just, what does it mean for good people to experience injustice?
As Eliphaz indicates that misery doesn't just happen, he does remind Job that human beings are the authors of their own difficulties. The answer for this is to turn to God.
 |
| Sometimes our disdain is fairly obvious. |
What the reader knows (but apparently to which Eliphaz is ignorant) is that Job is accounted in the first verse of the first chapter as "blameless and upright, one who feared God and turned away from evil."
Eliphaz's attitude of religious or spiritual judgment of Job would surely be salt in the wound for him.
I've been judged before spiritually by others who do not know my relationship with God. Of course, this is only privy to God and oneself. People like to judge external visible properties and ascribe value to them. But Jesus warns us against doing this in the Sermon on the Mount and the Sermon on the Plain.
Eliphaz was sincerely trying to help his friend. No one who sits in silence with someone's misery for seven days has ulterior motives. But this reminds us that we need to watch our words. Even more so, we need to watch our judgment.
How does our spiritual judgment of others often do harm?
Prayer for the day:
O Lord and Master of my life, take from me the spirit of sloth, despair, lust of power, and idle talk. But give rather the spirit of chastity, humility, patience, and love to your servant. Yes, O Lord and King, grant me to see my own transgressions, and not to judge my sibling, for blessed are You, unto ages of ages. Amen.
Prayer by Ephraim of Syria, 4th Century
New Revised Standard Version, Updated Edition. Copyright © 2021 National Council of Churches of Christ in the United States of America. Used by permission. All rights reserved worldwide.
Photo by Tom Woodward via Flickr.com. Used under the Creative Commons license.
No comments:
Post a Comment