Who has helped you utter these words? And whose spirit spoke from your mouth? – Job 26:4

Today’s Scripture Reading (May 11, 2015): Job 25 & 26

I’m tired of being shaped and hyped. There is so much that is happening in this world that I just don’t understand. There is too much hate. There is not enough trust (and that should be expected because there seems to be so little in this world that has earned our trust.) I want to be able to trust those in authority. I want a world where police can be trusted, where the military creates an environment that is safe for everyone (including women.) I want a world where there is equality between the races, where there is a concerted effort to feed the hungry and where food given in aid of disaster victims actually gets where it needs to go. But sometimes the world that I live in seems so far from the world that exists in my dreams. But maybe I’m just tired.

Inside the church we place heavy emphasis on the movement of the Holy Spirit. It is the answer to all of the hype and falsity of the world. The Spirit is truth. Yet even in the church we are guilty of being shaped and hyped. We sometimes say that the Spirit has spoken, when he hasn’t – or at least when it wasn’t the Holy Spirit. And the hype continues often threatening to carry us in the wrong direction.

Job begins his long monologue by focussing his words first straight at Bildad. His sarcasm when considering his friend is obvious. The problem is that as the argument has progressed, Job’s friends have become more concerned with being right than with comforting Job, the reason why they had gathered in the first place. So Job asks Bildad who it was that gave him the words? What spirit was it that was speaking from his mouth? It is not two questions, just one – asked in typical Hebrew parallelism.

The question isn’t a random one. Job remembers something that Eliphaz said back in the very beginning of this strange argument. He said that “a spirit glided past my face” (Job 4:15). Eliphaz couldn’t identify the spirit, but he clearly heard the spirit whisper “‘Can a mortal be more righteous than God? Can even a strong man be more pure than his Maker” (Job 4:17)? Bildad the rephrases the questions “How then can a mortal be righteous before God? How can one born of woman be pure” (Job 25:4)? Job picked up on the similarity. He knows Eliphaz couldn’t identify the spirit, so his question is - could Bildad?

The truth is that Job doubted that the spirit that Eliphaz and Bildad heard had anything to do with God – or truth. But the friends had gotten so wrapped up in being right that they had missed that. In fact, when right becomes more important than love and compassion, we are usually serving the wrong spirit. It is just more hype that is carrying us in the wrong direction.       

Tomorrow’s Scripture Reading: Job 27