We are studying the very human issue of faultfinding during this Lenten season. We are using the story of Job and his friends, if you call them that, as they tried to console him, no, really, instruct him in his misery. Eliphaz, Bildad, and Zophar, three miserable comforters, Job said, because they stood around and looked at Job in all his misery, and, instead of caring for him and feeling his pain, they bombarded him with theological lectures. Instead of weeping with him and putting an arm around his emaciated shoulders, instead of simply sitting and listening to the outpourings of his heart, they supposed that they could fix him. They thought that they could point out his faults and let him take care of his issues, and that would be that. They were miserable comforters, all three of them, and the one we are visiting with today, Zophar, is the most incompetent of them all. Eliphaz, the first friend, had trotted out the old spiritual bromides, and Job rejected those quickly. Bildad, the traditionalist, had suggested that Job go back to old ways, old ideas, old pieties, and find an answer in the past, but Job passed that off too. Today Zophar, in a torrent of insensitivity, arrogance, and coldly callous calculating cutting carping, will tell Job, in the cruelest cut of all, “Just say no.”
Zophar the rigid, Zophar the cold and the callous, Zophar the absolutely cocksure. To Job and Job’s pain Zophar has one rule and one rule only. “Just say no.” “Just say no.” Listen to these two have at each other:
Job 11:13-18, 12:2-3, 6, 9-10, 13-14, 13:1-6; 20:2-5, 21:2-3, 29, 30, 34
Sometimes we work so hard at being right that we end up wrong. Sometimes we are so persuaded that we are correct that everything we try to do is undone and bent out of shape. It’s possible to be so right, so correct, that nobody can stand us. It’s possible to be so insufferably right, that everything we think we are trying to do becomes ineffective. I had a friend like that, of whom it was said that he was right in all the wrong ways! Right in all the wrong, unloving, cold, harsh, ineffective ways.
Sometimes we work so hard at being right that we end up wrong.
I remember a seminary professor who was like that. No matter what he did or what he said, there was always a hard edge to it. There was a bite, an acid tongue, a coldness about him that was frightening. I started to take his class in pastoral care and counseling. But after only three or four weeks, during which I felt sliced up and cut down six ways to Sunday, I dropped out. I quit. I really did not want to be in a class where at least once a week I was going to be paraded in front of the other students as a poor excuse for a preacher and an inexcusably sorry counselor. Some of the other students seemed to thrive on that, but not me. This professor’s style of teaching was to get you to report verbatim some visit or some counseling contact you had had, and then to tear it up and spit it out and pepper it with insults. He was absolutely merciless! Faultfinding of that sort was not what I came to hear. And so I decided I wanted out of that class. I needed out of that class. I was going to drop that course.
There was only one problem. You had to get the professor’s permission to drop a course. You had to visit him in his office, explain your reasons, and get his signature on the drop card. I was not looking forward to that. I knocked on his door and presented my drop card; just as I expected, those squinting eyes looked through me and that snarling mouth said, “Why? You have some reason for dropping MY course?”
Now it was true that I was taking a lot of hours and it was true that I was working at a job and doing several other things, so that’s what I told him. I told him I just needed to lighten my load. But, you know, some people are like dogs; they can smell fear. They just know it’s there, and they attack. And so he turned to me, with the coldest eyes you can imagine, with a semi-sneer on his face, and said, “I see, Mr. Smith. So you want to drop MY course. Why not drop somebody else’s course? What’s wrong with this course? What’s wrong with MY course? Is there anything else you want to tell me?!”
I know seminary students are not supposed to lie, and I didn’t exactly lie. I answered with complete truth his question, “is there anything else you want to tell me?”! There truly was nothing else I wanted to tell him! I didn’t want to tell him what was really on my mind and what I thought of his course. Why not? Because he was always so insufferably correct that he made his students feel lower than snakes and dirtier than dirt. He may have been right in everything he said, but all I felt from him was humiliation, rejection, and contempt. I could not, I would not, learn under those circumstances.
That professor showed me that sometimes we can work so hard at being right that we end up wrong. He proved to me that sometimes we are so persuaded that we are correct that everything we try to do is undone and bent out of shape. It’s possible to be so right, so correct, that nobody can stand us. It’s possible to be so insufferably right, that everything we think we are trying to do becomes ineffective.
I
Zophar found fault with Job because Zophar didn’t think Job was trying hard enough. Zophar found fault with Job because he didn’t believe Job had really put his mind to the business of doing what he ought to do. Zophar found fault with Job because Job just didn’t do what Job was supposed to do.
Know then that God exacts of you less than your guilt deserves.... If you direct your heart rightly, you will stretch out your hands toward him. If iniquity is in your hand, put it far away, and do not let wickedness reside in your tents. Surely then you will lift up your face without blemish; you will be secure, and will not fear.
Listen to that callous cold-hearted calculation: “God exacts of you less than your guilt deserves.” You think this is bad, Job? You think losing your family and your wealth and sitting up here on the town garbage heap is bad? Well, I’ll just bet that actually you deserve even worse than this! I’ll just bet that you are hiding something, Job, I’ll just bet you are!
And then Zophar brusquely, cynically, sticks in the stiletto: “If iniquity is in your hand, put it far away, and do not let wickedness reside in your tents. Surely then you will lift up your face without blemish; you will be secure, and will not fear.”
In other words, just say no, as a few years ago Nancy Reagan counseled America’s young people. Just say no. Just do what is right. Just face up to what you have to do and do it. Zophar’s answer to the pain of Job’s heart is, “Shape up, man” “Just say no to the things that are wrong.” “If iniquity is in your hand, put if far away.” Zophar finds fault with Job because he thinks Job’s will is weak and his courage is lacking.
The trouble with that is that it doesn’t recognize that the Jobs of this world cannot control themselves. It doesn’t allow for what we call compulsive behavior. It doesn’t understand being out of control. We cannot so easily control our actions. Sometimes things have gone so far and pain is so deep, damage is so deep, that you cannot expect people just to buck up and do what they are supposed to do. There really is such a thing as obsessive, compulsive, uncontrollable behavior. And if you and I are Zophars who just shake our fingers at others and expect them to do what they are supposed to do because we say so, then we are in danger of creating the very thing we are so dead set against. Let me say that again: if all we have to offer people who are in trouble is faultfinding and the “just say no” approach, we are very likely to drive them even farther into the very stuff we are telling them not to do! Faultfinding, Zophar-style, is not redemptive. Faultfinding, Zophar’s way, the “just say no” way, the “do it because I say do it” way, is destructive.
I’m afraid I have tried being Zophar, and I’ve found out what that does. I have worked with some damaged personalities. I have tried to tell them what they ought to do. What was the result? They took my time, my money, my good will, of lots of things, and mostly because I assumed that when somebody promises something, they intend to carry out their promise. Not so. Not so. Recently I said to somebody, “Now this money is for rent and for food and the necessities, until you get on your feet, and I don’t want it spent on any foolishness ..” .. when I said that, I foolishly thought that that was all it would take. I assumed that all I needed to do was to say, like Zophar said to Job, “If iniquity is in your hand, put it far away, and let not wickedness dwell in your tents.” What a disappointment, then, to have a landlady call me and say, “I think you ought to know that so-and-so spent the night shooting crack.” What a disappointment! Didn’t I just tell him not to do that?! Didn’t I tell him, “just say no”?
Well, my disappointment had better be directed not only at this person I thought I was helping, but also at me. I foolishly thought that just telling somebody to be better would make him better! And that’s not only foolish, that’s arrogant, and that’s wide of the mark. It fails to understand that people are in the grip of things they can no longer control.
Oh, don’t get me wrong. I want to hold people responsible. I don’t want to let people to off with the “devil made me do it” excuse. I am not going to be a happy camper if the abused-as-a-child defense gets a murdering conspirator out of a prison sentence, nor am I going to breathe a sigh of relief if some psychiatrist explains why in the highest office in the land there may be a roving eye and a groping hand. I still want to hold people responsible.
But I do know that there is a deeper issue with most of us than just behaving ourselves. I know that there is a power called evil, and that that power, once it gets us in its grip, is not easily shaken. It is not something you just walk away from, nor is it something that gets scared when you just say “no”. There is a power called evil, and if you think that all you have to do is pass out instructions, and that will be that, then you are going to be seriously disappointed, time and again. People, lots of people, cannot respond to the “just say no” approach. Evil has them in its icy grip. Telling people “just say no” doesn’t really address their problem.
II
Friends, the problem with the Zophar mentality, and with a lot of us who try to push people to do the right things, is that we don’t build a relationship first. We don’t love that other person first, and then let the advice and the instructions flow out of that love. The problem is that the world is full of unloving Zophars, ready to give out advice and commands by the bushel basket full, but the folks we are trying to help have only a little thimble to put it in. They are damaged personalities. They are broken and hurting. They need love more than anything else. They need love and understanding, and it might have to be tough love, yes. But they need love and understanding before they need harsh directives.
Job shows us this. How did Job respond when Zophar unloaded on him? How did Job feel when he heard the simplistic, black-and-white, right-or-wrong dictates of Mr. Absolutely Correct? Job reacted bitterly and in pain:
"Look, my eye has seen all this, my ear has heard and understood it. What you know, I also know; I am not inferior to you. But I would speak to the Almighty, and I desire to argue my case with God. As for you, you whitewash with lies; all of you are worthless physicians. If you would only keep silent, that would be your wisdom!”
Zophar, you aren’t telling me anything I don’t know! You are not instructing me in things I have never heard of. But the point is I can’t do them, and you don’t care. You do not care for me, you only care about being right!”
Oh, do you see? In our faultfinding, we are so busy telling others what they ought to do and what they ought not to do, that we forget just to love them We forget that our first calling is to understand them, to embrace them, to care for them, to see them as a child of God, to know that they are worth something. Do you see? In our faultfinding, we are so busy being right that we actually drive farther away from us the ones we want to help. It’s not about just saying no to drugs, or no to sex, or no to this or no to that. It’s about pursuing a loving relationship that is so clear, so transparent, so loving that one day they will ask us for help rather than rejecting all the stuff we want to load on them.
Job says, Zophar, it’s not about being right. It’s not about just saying no. “All of you are worthless physicians. If you would only keep silent, that would be your wisdom.” It’s not about being right. It’s about being loving.
A number of years ago I sat down with a young man who was about to make, I thought, a terrible mistake. He was about to move in with his girlfriend, a young woman whom I knew to have had a number of intimate experiences. I was not gentle in what I said. I told him exactly what I thought. I instructed him, “Just say no.” And, as you have probably already guessed, he rejected that. He wanted nothing to do with that. He blew me off in a hurry.
Well, I soon saw that my strategy was wrong. I saw that it was a faultfinding strategy, and that when you are so terribly right nobody can stand you. So I changed. I shifted my approach. And over the next few months I just supported the two of them, I listened to them, through several bumpy spots. I just tried to hear the pain and the deficit that was creating this behavior. Eventually my wife and I found ourselves going to the hospital one day to hold the hand of a very sick, very damaged, very compulsive young woman. That one gesture, that simple little act, brought from the young man so much appreciation and gratitude. He was so glad to have been heard rather than to have to hear a lecture. He was so relieved to have been loved rather than to have been instructed.
Do you know that only a few weeks later the two of them went their separate ways, and the kind of behavior I was so opposed to has never returned? “Just say no” didn’t do that. Just bringing love did it.
Zophar was a faultfinder who thought you could bully people into doing the right thing. But he found that instead you get resistance, you get rebellion, you rejection.
III
I point you today farther than Zophar and Job, arguing on that town garbage heap; I point you to another hill, a green hill far away, outside a city wall, a hill where soldiers gamble and thieves curse and women weep and criminals die. I point you today farther than Zophar and Job, accusing one another and blaming one another; I point you to another scene, where there is one saying, “Father, forgive.” I point you today farther than Zophar and Job, each quite sure that the other is wrong, dead wrong; I point you to two crosses, where one dying man says to another, “This day you shall be with me in paradise.” I point you farther than Zophar, so ready to push away his friend for his sins; and I point you to Jesus, so ready to say, “Come unto me, all who labor and are heavy laden, and I will give you rest.” I point you farther than Job, defeated by his illness and his loss; I point you to Jesus, who has borne our griefs and carried our sorrows. I point you to one who is all compassion, pure unbounded love. I point you to one who sees and knows all the things we have done, but who gently bears us in His arms. And he can do this, this one, for His arms are outstretched upon a cross, where, instead of condemning us, He dies for us. Instead of lecturing us, He gives Himself as an atonement for us. Where so that we might not have to die, but can have everlasting life, He gives Himself. I point you today to Jesus Christ, and tell you the good news, that :
while we were still weak, at the right time Christ died for the ungodly. Indeed, rarely will anyone die for a righteous person--though perhaps for a good person someone might actually dare to die. But God proves his love for us in that while we still were sinners Christ died for us.
Zophar tries to bully us, “Just say no”. Jesus Christ tries to win us, “Just say yes.” Just say yes to love. Just say yes to acceptance. Just say yes to being changed by Him. Just say yes to the power of His blood to cleanse us and make us whole. Just say a resounding, joyful, relieving, heart-filling, “Yes”. Just say yes to Christ.
