GUILT TRIPS

“Teach me, and I will be quiet;  show me where I have been wrong.” (6:24)

When it comes to isolating and naming the actual sin they believe to have led to Job’s downfall, his friends beat about the bush. Throughout the dialogue they make veiled accusations, deliver general moral pronouncements, hum and haw, and equivocate. But all their insinuations are entirely without substance, and by way of actually identifying and getting at the root of Job’s problem (which is, after all, the real goal of counseling), the best they can do is to suggest that his “attitude” is all wrong. It is a bit like telling a man with acute appendicitis that he should try not to feel so much pain.

The hurling of veiled insults and unsubstantiated charges is a favorite tactic of Satan’s, and it is why he is called “the accuser of the brethren” (Rev. 12:10). If he can stir up clouds of guilt in our minds and unsettle us with nebulous worries, then the Devil is in his element. He loves to lay guilt trips, and this is such a familiar obstacle in the Christian life that it is something like the common cold, a condition with symptoms so stereotyped as to be drearily predictable. Whenever we find ourselves plagued by an obscure, uneasy sense of condemnation—a free-floating anxiety unattached to any clear course of remedial action—then the chances are that this is the work of the Devil and not of the Lord. It is the voice of accusation, not of conviction.

The conviction of the Holy Spirit is always precise: He identifies root causes of sin, and He moves the heart to specific acts of repentance and obedience. All those who trust God sufficiently to desire to obey Him, and who are patient in waiting upon Him, will find unfailingly that He gives clear guidance. “In all your ways acknowledge him, and he will direct your paths,” promises Proverbs 3:6. For those who love God everything is aboveboard. To know Him is to know what He requires, and more than that, it is to have the power to carry it out. In fact these two—enlightenment and empowering— go hand in hand, and where they do not, then the Lord is not in it. Undoubtedly God’s ways are full of mystery, and there is much about His work in our lives that we cannot understand. But wherever His work does call for our active participation, in these areas we may be assured of full and precise guidance and enabling.

With the Devil it is exactly the opposite: far from giving clear insight and power to change, he robs us of these, engulfing us instead in clouds of doubt and indecision. True, Satan can be exceedingly clear in his promptings to sin. And he can also be distressingly specific in his accusations, putting his finger on obvious areas of sin and then sending us off on the most preposterous of self-righteous crusades. But such guilt trips end only in a miasma of angst. They are wild-goose chases through which Satan seeks ultimately to bring us to a complete standstill, rendering us incapable of any positive action at all. If he cannot make us wallow in guilt over something we have done, then he will gladly make us wallow in guilt over all that we have not done. He loves to get us dwelling on the myriad ways in which we have utterly failed, whether in our conduct towards God or towards our neighbor.

Yet what the Devil will not do, and can never do, is the very thing that the Holy Spirit always does—which is to kindle in our hearts a joyous willingness to perform some specific act of devotion to the Lord or of love for our neighbor. For the sphere of the Lord is the real world, the world of clear thinking and of decisive moral action. But the sphere of the Devil is that of the endless dimly-lit corridors and twisting staircases of morbid imagination. He is always nudging us toward insanity, and doing so through a complex system of eminently plausible, yet thoroughly paranoid, logic.

The friends of Job, by seeking to arouse murky qualms of compunction in him, and so coax him towards the verge of a reasonable but trumped-up repentance, play this neurotically logical game of Satan’s. The very vagueness of their accusations gives them away.

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