I recently attended the Passion conference in Atlanta, which was an incredible experience. For those of you who don’t know what Passion is I will explain. Passion is this huge gathering of people 18 to 25 years old. There is a lot of awesome worship and preaching, and it’s designed to ignite my generation to change the world. I have attended three times now, and it is special each year. For this article I want to discuss an idea that was presented by John Piper in the introduction to his message. I must confess this idea made me think so much that I had to go back and re-watch the rest of his talk because I was not paying any attention.
The talk was brought out of the book of Job. If you don’t know much about Job, I’m going to give you a quick crash course. Basically, Job is a rich man who had everything anyone could ever want. This man had like 3,000 camels! I mean, honestly, who doesn’t want 3,000 camels? Job was loaded, and he was a follower of God. It was obvious that God had richly blessed Job. Well, one day Satan was strolling around doing Satan things, and he rolled into God’s throne room. God pointed out Job, calling him a blameless and upright man. Satan noticed all that Job had and how God had blessed him, and that Job loved God. Satan said to God that the only reason Job loved God was because of what God had done for him. Satan asked to take everything away from Job to prove that then Job would no longer love God. God gave Satan permission to take Job’s possessions and children away from him; Job went from having everything to having nothing in a matter of days, and later Satan even takes away Job’s health. Satan basically took everything from Job, attempting to make him curse God (paraphrased from Job 1-2). Contrary to what Satan believed would happen, Job refused to curse God.
What I want to focus on is not this part of Job’s story. Later in Job we see the introduction of three of Job’s friends. These guys were terrible friends who honestly made Job’s situation worse. What Dr. Piper pointed out was a quote from Eliphaz in Job 22:24-25, “if you lay gold in the dust and gold of Ophir among the stones of the torrent-bed then the Almighty will be your gold and your precious silver for then you will delight yourself in the Almighty and lift up your face to God” ESV. This seems true, right? I mean, it’s saying to lay gold in the dust and exalt the Lord our God, isn’t it? But later in Job we have this quote from God himself in Job 42:7, After the Lord had spoken these words to Job, the Lord said to Eliphaz the Temanite: “My anger burns against you and against your two friends, for you have not spoken of me what is right, as my servant Job has.” ESV. At the Passion conference what Dr. Piper argued was that yes, Eliphaz’s words were correct and accurate about God, but they were spoken in a way that made God angry because Eliphaz sought to accuse Job of injustice where there was none. Eliphaz was using these words to accuse Job of not treating God as his Almighty. What Dr. Piper was pointing out was the fact that it is possible to speak truth about God in a way that makes him angry.
So, this leads me to the point of if it’s possible for Eliphaz to speak the truth of God in a way that makes God angry, then it is possible for us to do the same. I would absolutely say that if we are not careful, it can be extremely easy to fall into the same trap Eliphaz did. I guess a valid follow up question would be how does one speak the truth of God in a way that makes him angry. The first thing that pops into my mind is our intent, which is the mistake Eliphaz made. You see, while his words were true of God, his intent was to say that Job had committed injustice by worshiping possessions over God. We can obviously see that this is not true, since Job, even after losing everything including his health, refused to curse God. So, words that should have been meant to glorify God were used to heap blame and shame upon Job. Our intentions are everything when we take God’s word and shove it into another person’s face for the sole purpose of showing that person how bad he or she is. Our intent is not to glorify God but ourselves, and, as we see here, in Job this makes God angry. Yes, you are right in thinking that God commands us to live pure lives, but we do not see Jesus walking around with a copy of the law shoving it in people’s faces. So, I believe that our intentions are one way that we can speak the truth about God in a way that makes him angry. Before you speak, always ask yourself if what is about to come out of your mouth is meant to glorify you or God.
Another way that I see to do this is to take the Bible out of context. One of my favorite examples of this comes from Mathew 4, which is the temptation of Jesus. In this passage Satan literally quotes Scripture word for word to try to tempt Jesus to test God. You see, Satan is quoting from Psalms 91:11-12, which is a passage about trusting God, but he uses it out of context, trying to give Jesus reason to test God. The Bible’s truth can be twisted when we remove it from its context. It is so much easier to quote inspirational sounding passages or verses to serve our own ends than it is to research and see who that word was originally written for, why it was written, or even the cultural significance in that time.
The reason that this is so important to me and why I wanted to write about it is because I want y’all to understand the danger that is within this. For me the realization of this truth caused me to look back on my life and wonder how many times I might have been saying things that were technically true about God, but the way I was doing it could make him angry. For my generation and younger, we grew up and are living in an age of casual Christianity, where basically we do and say whatever we want to on the weekdays and come to glorify God on Sundays and sometimes Wednesdays. Even true believers are living like this, and, to be honest, I believe that this makes God furious. How arrogant are we to think that we fill our glorifying God quota by praising him once a week! It leads me to wonder if God even accepts our praise when it is so casually given. Are we like Eliphaz, making beautiful statements about God but doing so with hearts and minds that make him angry? This has really led me to look at myself over the past week, and I have not been very excited with what I’ve found. Often when I quote Scripture, I find myself not even trying to find the context or, even worse, quoting Scripture to prove how great of a Christian I am. I see sin in my life one day, and I turn around and glorify God the next day with no repentance or confession of my sin. What do you find in your life? I realize this is a hard question to consider, but, in all seriousness, are you living a life or are you acting in a way that when you speak the truth, it makes God angry?