A LYING SPIRIT

“Amid disquieting dreams in the night,  when deep sleep falls on men,  fear and trembling seized me  and made all my bones shake.  A spirit glided past my face,  and the hair on my body stood on end.” (4:13-15)

What a chilling passage this is! Just to read it is enough to send shivers down the spine. Eliphaz may present the appearance of a conservative, mild-mannered intellectual, but just get him talking about his mystical experiences and there opens up a whole new side to the man.

He tells of being visited in the night by a spirit that filled him with terror. In his hair-raising account one can sense the tone of mounting excitement in his voice. One even gets the feeling that, as frightening as this experience was, Eliphaz would not have missed it for anything, nor would he have minded having it repeated. He leaves no doubt that despite his terror he considered the visitation a good thing, and one that brought him a genuine spiritual insight, “a word from the Lord” (4:12). He is telling, he thinks, of an authentic encounter with a spiritual being sent directly from God, and he repeats the angelic message verbatim for Job’s edification.

How different is Eliphaz’s mystical fear from the sort of fear expressed by Job back in 3:25 when he said, “What I feared has come upon me; what I dreaded has happened to me.” Job’s dread, by contrast, was a feeling that he wanted nothing to do with, for in it he intuitively sensed the grip of something evil. Far from taking any secret delight in such a thing, Job recoiled from it in horror, and in his deepest instincts he was quite certain that there was nothing of God in it. In fact, it seems clear that without having any direct knowledge of Satan, without even knowing Satan’s name, Job nevertheless must have sensed at some level the real and personal presence of the great enemy of his soul.

The difference between night and day could not be greater than the difference between the reactions of these two men to the movement of fear in their hearts. Eliphaz indulged it; Job shrank from it. Job saw it frankly as something evil, while Eliphaz, like a child at a horror movie, seemed almost to exult in the emotion itself. Careful reflection on these marked contrasts suggests that Eliphaz very probably committed the heinous—yet unfortunately all too common— error of mistaking an evil spirit for the Spirit of the Lord, and moreover of repeating the words of a demon as if they were those of God Himself.

Certainly it is true throughout the Bible that meetings with God are normally accompanied by an initial, overwhelming dread. When Isaiah saw the Lord his immediate response was, “Woe to me! I am ruined!” (Isa. 6:5), and when the glory of the Lord shone around the Bethlehem shepherds, “they were terrified” (Luke 2:9). Yet always in such cases the Lord’s first word is one of peace to the trembling heart, for He knows that only in peace can we see and hear Him as He really is—the God of love, in whom “there is no darkness at all” (1 John 1:5). Gideon was so struck by this truth that, after first being terrified that he would die because he had “seen the angel of the Lord face to face,” he ended by building an altar and calling it “The Lord is Peace” (Judges 6:22-24). From that day forth Gideon determined (though admittedly he pushed his conviction to the point of superstition) not to take a single step without having the felt assurance of the Lord’s peace in his heart.

How tragic it is that so many religious people accustom themselves to hearing and obeying the voice of fear rather than the voice of peace. In doing so, they unwittingly pay heed to the Devil, even while fooling themselves that they are trying to follow Christ. This issue of correctly identifying the Lord’s voice may appear at times very subtle and complex, and so it is for the chronic doubter. But for faith it is a simple enough matter. As Jesus promised in John 10:2-5, “[The shepherd] calls his own sheep by name and leads them out . . . his sheep follow him because they know his voice. But they will never follow a stranger; in fact, they will run away from him because they do not recognize a stranger’s voice.”

Mason, M. (2002). The Gospel According to Job: An Honest Look at Pain and Doubt from the Life of One Who Lost Everything. Crossway.