Pastor Jeremy Stephens

I love the book of Job.  It is the Bible’s version of a horror movie.  Our worst fears are all summed up in its 42 chapters: extreme loss, abandonment, loneliness, disease, betrayal, false accusations….the list goes on and on.  Furthermore, one of the most majestic and awe-inspiring sections in Scripture describing the glory of God comes from His own mouth in the last few chapters.

Most of us know the general outline of the book.  Job is loaded and happy, and Satan comes to God and dares Him to take away all that Job has been blessed with to see if he would still worship God.  The Lord allows Satan to inflict every level of torture on Job short of death. Job’s wife tells him he’s better off dead, and then four of his friends show up to tell him that he needs to repent of the obvious sin in his life (even though that sin isn’t so obvious to Job).  In the end, Job begs God for an audience, the Lord responds in a powerful way.  Then everyone is humbled and relationships and wealth are restored to Job.  God ends as the victor and the Accuser goes home sulking.

Its a fantastic story, but most of us have only read the bookends, and not the content in the middle.

I started reading through my Bible again using the Professor Horner reading plan (check it out at http://www.youversion.com), so I just read chapter four of Job this morning.  I found something interesting.  Job’s “friend” Eliphaz says this:

Now a word was secretly brought to me,
and my ear caught a whisper of it.
In the troubling thoughts of the dreams in the night
when a deep sleep falls on men,
a trembling gripped me–and a terror!–
and made all my bones shake.

Then a breath of air passes by my face;
it makes the hair of my flesh stand up.
It stands still,
but I cannot recognize its appearance;
an image is before my eyes,
and I hear a murmuring voice….
(Job 4:12-16 NET translation)

How often have you heard someone say, “I feel like the Lord is telling me something,” and then continue by saying something completely stupid like, “He’s telling me I need to date this non-Christian so I can help them get saved,” or “He’s telling me that our pastor is a moron and we need to throw him out,” or “The carpet in our church must be green, we cannot change it.”

If you read the rest of the book of Job, we know that Eliphaz was wrong, which points to the reality that this ecstatic experience was inauthentic.

So how are we supposed to discern between what comes from the Lord, and what is just our own preference or prejudice leaking out?