When I’m training pastors or counselors I always try to dedicate a bit of time to walking through Job. And I do this because I want us to place ourselves in the role of Job’s friends. These guys are miserable counselors. But it’s important to know why they are awful counselors who were rebuked by God. It’s not because they said things which were untrue. It’s because they said true things at the wrong time. And that’s where I share my principle: good theology, wrongly applied, stinks.
Usually when I’m thinking about this I’m thinking about the guy who kills a fly on the forehead with a mallet. (That’s borrowed from Puritan great, Richard Sibbes). I think about Job’s friends who were giving good theology to a grieving guy. He didn’t need a treatise he needed a hug and to hang onto a different facet of truth. But they blew it and I’ve seen (and been) counselors/pastors who’ve followed in their footsteps.
But there is another way in which this principle applies. We see the other side of this in the prophet Micah. Prophets in Micah’s day were proclaiming a message of peace when they should have been proclaiming judgment. In Micah 2, the prophet mocks their ridiculous optimism. I appreciate Leslie Allen’s summary:
The preaching he disdainfully quotes is optimistic in tone. It is a deliberate denial of the pessimism of Micah and his ilk, as the next line makes clear. It is a contradiction in terms, runs the argument, to prophesy that Yahweh will visit his own people with disaster. Appeal is apparently made to the covenant between Israel and Yahweh, as a source of eternal assurance for the former…A solemn seal had been set upon the relationship between Yahweh and Israel, that is, his people in Judah. Since God is the more powerful partner, he can be expected to protect his people from their enemies. Israel is the object of his special care, and it is hardly likely that he would change sides and support uncircumcised foreigners against his own people. It is true that individuals may from time to time commit misdemeanors, but Yahweh is the great forgiver. (Allen, 296)
Allen goes on to note that their message was much like Job’s comforters—a right message for the wrong people at the wrong time. Not much of what these false prophets were saying was technically untrue, it was just misapplied.
Looking over the landscape of evangelical Christianity I wonder if maybe we’ve swung the pendulum a bit too far in the direction of admonishing people not to be Job’s counselors whilst neglecting to admonish folks to also not be Micah’s prophets. Both are damaging. Job’s counselors left a guy in need of encouragement feeling discouraged and rebuked. Their counsel didn’t land. But Micah’s prophets left a nation in need of rebuke feeling good about themselves and their position.
Truth must be rightly applied. That goes for hard truth and happy truth.
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