INFERIORITY COMPLEX

“‘Can a mortal be more righteous than God? Can a man be more pure than his Maker?’” (4:17)

Lest we have any doubt as to the questionable nature of the mystical communiqué received by Eliphaz, we need only examine its actual content. Like everything originating with the Devil, his words here have a good deal of truth to them. What other material has Satan to work with except the truth? Having no real creative power of his own, there is nothing the least bit original about him. Thus his normal method of working is simply to give the truth a subtle twist, a slight bend, refashioning and redirecting it for his own purposes. Essentially he is a sort of cosmic junk dealer, a recycler of truth. Often enough his wares are still shiny and eminently usable, with plenty of practical wisdom left in them. Indeed the more closely lies and perversions resemble the truth itself, the more likely they are to find a clientele, so that for those who shrink from paying the high cost of unadulterated truth, the Devil’s secondhand garbage serves very well.

In 4:17-19 we see Eliphaz falling for two of Satan’s classic methods of perverting truth: exaggeration and put-down. As to the first, apparently what Eliphaz picked up from Job’s first speech was an undertone of spiritual hubris. He was alarmed that Job’s primary concern was, rather than the faltering of his own faith, the apparent faltering of the Lord’s faithfulness towards him. When Job openly accused God of deliberately hedging him in (3:23), he seemed to be setting himself up as a judge of God’s ways. And so Eliphaz asks, through the intimidating words of his nocturnal spiritual visitant, “Can a mortal be more righteous than God?” As with the rhetorical question of a demagogue seeking to sway a crowd, the implied answer to this reductio ad absurdum is both entirely obvious and entirely irrelevant. Of course a human being cannot be “more righteous” or “more pure” than God—but no one is claiming that. All Job will ever claim in this book is that a human being can be righteous and can be pure, and indeed must be if he is to have any dealings with God at all. Yet even this view Eliphaz debunks in a later speech when he asks, “What is man, that he could be pure, or one born of woman, that he could be righteous?” (15:14). This is one of Satan’s favorite strategies against believers—to undermine the very grounds and possibility of righteousness itself by rubbing our noses in the dirt of our own weakness and sin. This is exactly what Eliphaz proceeds to do in the following verses as, continuing to quote the words of the lying spirit, he challenges, “If God . . . charges his angels with error, how much more those who live in houses of clay, whose foundations are in the dust” (4:18-19). Eliphaz’s real problem, as with all those who buy a mean-spirited theology, is that he has an inferiority complex regarding his humanity. He has a dismally low view of man, and therefore a dismally low view of God and of His grace.

True enough, the Bible itself paints man in the lowest possible terms as a creature not only frail and ephemeral, but utterly corrupt. Yet at the same time Scripture has an incredibly high view—indeed a most amazingly exalted view—of man’s rightful status in creation, both of his original pristine nature and of his ultimate destiny. Thus whenever the Apostle Paul speaks to the people of God, his tone is very different from that of the friends of Job. Never do we catch him placing undue emphasis on what a worthless, abject, and degraded lot we are, fit only to crawl on our bellies in the dust. Instead he reminds us that we are the “dearly loved children of God,” and he continually balances his teaching about sin with words of staggeringly lofty encouragement, such as those that open the epistle to the Ephesians: “Praise be to the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, who has blessed us in the heavenly realms with every spiritual blessing in Christ. For he chose us in him before the creation of the world to be holy and blameless in his sight. In love he predestined us to be adopted as his sons” (Eph. 1:3-5).

Naturally we are utterly unworthy of such high privileges. But as George Müller wrote, “Do not let the consciousness of your unworthiness keep you from believing what God has said concerning you. If you are a believer in the Lord Jesus, then the precious privilege of being in partnership with the Father and the Son is yours.”

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