Friends Like These Are Enemies Indeed
Job 9:1-2 “Then Job responded, “In truth I know that this is so; but how can a person be in the right with God?”
The Book of Job is the oldest completed piece of literature on earth, and in its antiquity, it asks the greatest question ever. How can man be right with God? It is the great question for all the ages, and it is a question that must be answered.
The true answer to this question comes from God, but Satan will answer that question for you too. Satan will tell you how to be just before God, but what he tells you will be a lie. Did you know Satan is really a clever devil?
Sometimes, he will ask you the right question to give you the wrong answer, and sometimes, he will ask you the wrong question to give you the right answer. He is a clever devil. Satan wants to deceive you as to how to be just before God.
If you ask the question as Job asked, how can a man be just before God?, Satan will happily supply you the answer, and his answer will have just enough truth in it to make you believe it. The greatest lies are the ones that sound the closest to the truth.
You know the story of Job. He was in a terrible spot, and many Christians believe that Job is strictly written to show Christians how to survive trouble in this life, but dear friend, that is not the main thrust of Job.
The Book of Job leaves no doubt about that as the question is repeated later in the book.
Job 25:4–6 ““How then can mankind be righteous with God? Or how can anyone who is born of woman be pure? “If even the moon has no brightness And the stars are not pure in His sight, How much less man, that maggot, And a son of man, that worm!””
Satan knows that Job is struggling. God had given Satan permission to test Job, and as he tested Job, Job pondered that great question, and Satan used Job’s three friends to give the answer to Job, and the answers Satan gave through Job’s three friends are the same answers he gives today, and friends like these that Job had are enemies indeed. As we go through their advice to Job, it sounds good until read this in Job 42:7.
“It came about after the Lord had spoken these words to Job, that the Lord said to Eliphaz the Temanite, “My wrath is kindled against you and against your two friends, because you have not spoken of Me what is trustworthy, as My servant Job has.”
1. Satanic Revelation (Job 4:12-17)
Job 4:12–17 ““Now a word was brought to me secretly, And my ear received a whisper of it. “Amid disquieting thoughts from visions of the night, When deep sleep falls on people, Dread came upon me, and trembling, And made all my bones shake. “Then a spirit passed by my face; The hair of my flesh stood up. “Something was standing still, but I could not recognize its appearance; A form was before my eyes; There was silence, then I heard a voice: ‘Can mankind be righteous before God? Can a man be pure before his Maker?”
On the surface, it seems that Eliphaz has been given some kind of divine revelation, but God says in Job 42 that Eliphaz did not speak from the authority of God.
I want you to know that Eliphaz had an experience. He was visited by a demon spirit, or a person possessed by a demon. We need to realize there is no middle ground. Something either comes from God, or it comes from Satan.
I want you to know Eliphaz’s experience was real. The Bible says it shook him to the bones, and it made his hair stand up. He even visibly saw the form before his eyes, and notice this. The demon spirit asked Eliphaz the same question Job asked. Can man be righteous before God?
Eliphaz had a spiritual experience, but there is a difference between a spiritual experience and an experience with God Almighty. Eliphaz was not receiving a revelation from God. He was receiving it from Satan. Satan knows the great question man has to answer, and he is more than willing to offer revelations as to how to answer that question.
People had rather trust their fates to the stars than to the Word of God. I am telling you, dear friend, and I know this is going to make me sound like I was around at the Salem witch trials, but the Bible warns specifically about opening the door to Satan in our lives.
Ephesians 4:27 “and do not give the devil an opportunity.”
You might say those things are innocent, but dear friend Satan does not need much of a crack to steal the soul of your child or grandchild. We are nearing Halloween, and many parents will sit idly by letting their children watch ungodly horror movies which open their children’s eyes to the Satanic realm. Do you know what the Bible says?
1 Thessalonians 5:22 “abstain from every form of evil.”
We talk openly before our children about seeing and talking to our dead parents or grandparents and to ghosts, and we expose our children to that nonsense, and Satan pounces upon that opened mind to reveal how to be right before God, and that child is deceived. Shame on us!!!
We watch shows on TV called American Idol knowing that God says you shall have no other gods before me. We make idols out of athletes and wonder why our children are not saved. Satan’s goal is to control your mind, and one of the main ways he does it is by revelation through experience.
Seances, fortune-tellers, etc are not to be trifled with. What’s really sad is that many of you listening to me at this very minute dismiss those as hoaxes, and Satan is laughing at you as he drags those you love to hell with him.
Revelation 9:21 “and they did not repent of their murders, nor of their sorceries, nor of their sexual immorality, nor of their thefts.”
Drugs and alcohol offer instant gratification at the expense of an eternal soul, and unfortunately, many parents treat it just so casually. “Let me have a glass of wine with my meal.” “Nothing like a cold beer.” “It’s just marijuana” Tell that to a family imprisoned by the addiction of a loved one. It is Satan’s great revelation through experience, and it leads millions to an early grave and to an eternal hell.
Think about that the next time you drink in front of your child. If you try drugs or alcohol, you are not abstaining from evil, and you open yourself up to an experience like Eliphaz had.
2. Sophisticated Rationalism
Job 8:8–9 ““Please inquire of past generations, and consider the things searched out by their fathers. “For we are only of yesterday and know nothing, because our days on earth are as a shadow.”
Bildad, the second of Job’s friends, comes to give his answer to Job about how a man can be just before God.
More people are deceived by Bildad’s sophisticated rationalism than by Eliphaz’s Satanic revelation. “Job, the answer can be found in the past. You just need to search history and find the answers from yesterday.”
What a dangerous, dangerous thought! Philosophy and the humanities cannot tell a man how to be right before God.
This is becoming more and more common. People in churches everywhere say things like, “We just need to go back to the good ole days.” Do you know what you are saying when you say that? You are saying what Bildad said. “Please inquire of past generations.” Past generations are not the secret to being right before God. Past generations were just as ungodly; they just were not as open with their ungodliness. The Bible as we read last week says there is nothing new under the sun.
The answer is not found in the rationalism of the past. Many of you sitting here have just turned me off. Today, abortion is the solution to an unwanted pregnancy. Seventy-five years ago, a young lady trapped by those same circumstances would be sent off by “God-fearing people” to be by herself to have a child just to leave that child in state custody because it was not proper to have a child out of wedlock.
Dear friend, sin is sin. Every generation is ungodly. There are no good ole days unless you go back to the Garden of Eden before sin entered into the picture. Today, especially in our nation, sophisticated rationalism has taken the shape of constitutional privilege.
“I have my constitutional rights says a person who has never read the Constitution. I am not made right before God by the Constitution of the United States of America. If I cling to that for my righteousness before God, I am going to die unjust before God.
Bildad says to Job, “Turn to your past to be right before God.” “Study the former things.” But Bildad’s sophisticated rationalism does not make you just before God any more than Eliphaz’s Satainc revelation does.
3. Sterile Ritualism
Sterile ritualism is the most dangerous lie in answering how to be just before God because it sounds like the truth. The best lie is the one that sounds closest to the truth. Pay attention to these verses.
Job 11:13–17 ““If you would direct your heart rightly and spread out your hands to Him, if wrongdoing is in your hand, put it far away, And do not let malice dwell in your tents; Then, indeed, you could lift up your face without moral blemish, And you would be firmly established and not fear. “For you would forget your trouble; Like waters that have passed by, you would remember it. “Your life would be brighter than noonday; Darkness would be like the morning.”
We are introduced to Job’s third friend, Zophar, and he gives Job the worst answer as to how to be just before God because he gives the answer that sounds like the truth.
What Zophar describes is what is happening in churches all across the world this morning.
Notice Zophar’s advice.
Meditation (If you would direct your heart rightly).
If you will listen to K-Love and meditate and prepare yourself, you can be just before God. If you read the KJV, you are preparing your hearth rightly. If you sing Amazing Grace, you are preparing your heart rightly. Those all sound good but none of those make you just before God.
Ceremony (If you spread out your hands to Him).
If you just act like Billy Binkley, you will be just. If you just go through the motions, you will be okay.
Reformation (Put away your wrongdoing). Just turn over a new leaf. If you reform yourself, you will be just before God.
Churches are full of people trying to reform themselves by going through the motions. Jude says that those are the kinds of people who slip into the church unnoticed. They act the part, but they are not just before God.
What we are left with is seemingly an unanswerable question. Satanic revelation cannot make us just before God. Sterile rationalism cannot make us just before God, and sterile ritualism cannot make us just before God, but praise God because He has the answer to Job’s question.
4. Spiritual Regeneration
Job 9:32–33 ““For He is not a man, as I am, that I may answer Him— That we may go to court together! “There is no arbitrator between us, Who can place his hand upon us both.”
The crux of the problem is that God is holy, and man is not, and that leaves man with a question that he cannot answer without God’s help.
God is holy. Man is sinful. For man to be just before God, man would have to made like God by God. What man needed was an arbitrator, One who could link God to man, and that One is Jesus Christ.
Job 9:33 is one the great verses in the Bible. To be just before God, man needed an arbitrator that could come between God and man, but that arbitrator could not just be a man, and that arbitrator could not just be God. That arbitrator had to be both man and God. In the oldest book in the Bible, Job was looking forward to Jesus Christ.
The arbitrator had to be able to link man and God, and only Jesus Christi could fill that role. You and I could never be holy apart from God. We are sinners by birth, by nature, and by choice. Everything about us separates us from God, but Jesus Christ because He was God could take God with one hand and because He was man He could take my sin with the other hand and forever serve as the link that makes me just before God.
Hebrews 7:25–26 “Therefore He is also able to save forever those who come to God through Him, since He always lives to make intercession for them. For it was fitting for us to have such a high priest, holy, innocent, undefiled, separated from sinners, and exalted above the heavens;”
As long as God exists, Jesus Christ will bridge the gap between my sin and God’s holiness. It is the only way that man could ever be just before God. Jesus Christ had to come to this world in the form of man because God so loved the world that He did not want any to perish unjustified.
God’s Son had to be the link from my sinfulness to God’s righteousness. That is why meditation, ceremony, and reformation are not enough. None of those do anything about the sin problem. It is the fact that I am a sinner that makes me unjust before God, and to make me just, God did not spare His only begotten Son who died for my sin.
Jesus Christ, who knew no sin, had to become my sin that day on Calvary if I were ever to be just before God. Jesus Christ did for me what I never could do on my own. He is wanting to be your arbitrator too.
Dear friend, are you just before God? You are not if you have not turned to your Arbitrator. If you ever want to have a relationship with God Almighty, you must turn to Jesus who bridged the gap between you and God.
It is the great question. How can man be just before God? Satan will answer that question for you, but the true answer is found in Jesus Christ. Will you turn to Him today?