Page 65 - Reading Job to Know God

Let me provide you with an example of this practice. (Let me coin a
word) “Eliphasizing” – taking the foundation as Eliphaz did from his
experiences. Someone gets up and gives a testimony. “Well, let me tell
you about the day I got saved. I cried for four hours”. And some
uninstructed person sitting in the audience says, “I did not cry when I got
saved; maybe I did not mean it, perhaps I’m not really saved”. This often
leads people astray. Someone says, “I saw so and so get healed after I
fasted and prayed all night”. So then somebody hears that and figures,
“Well, maybe if I pray all night God will answer me. Especially if
uninstructed and immature Christians hear this. They will feel
compelled to duplicate that particular experience. I think this is one of
the great dangers of the testimony meeting.

I used to love those meetings. But the more I hear them, the less I like
them. The reason they have begun to bother me so much, is that they are
often too experience-centered, too much “Eliphasizing”. Everything is
about what people felt or did. Colossians 2:18,

“Stop letting anyone, in gratuitous humility and worship of angels,
defraud you as an umpire, for such a one is taking his stand on the
mere visions he has seen, and is groundlessly conceited over his
sensuous mind”.
If someone would stand up and say, “Here is the truth of God from the
Bible, and here is how God did this in my life”. That would be wonderful
because they would be illustrating an objective principle by their
subjective experience. A lot of time is wasted in self-analysis and self-
interpretation. Too much talk about your own experience, dissipates
spiritual energy. That is how Eliphaz based his arguments. What I have
seen, what I have observed. I had an experience; I had a dream; I had a
vision. And it did not satisfy Job, and Job told him so.
Bildad comes along, and he chooses something else to base his on. Look
at chapter 8:8 “Please inquire of past generations, and consider the
things searched out by their fathers.” Verse 11 “Can the papyrus
grow up without a marsh? Can the rushes grow without water?”
These seem to be proverbs which were taken from the ancients. If you
read the sermons of Bildad, and you can find them in chapter 8, 18 and
25, you will find that he almost exclusively built his arguments on
something someone else said. He was a student. I remember E, Eliphaz,
for Experience, and B, Bildad, for Books. He was a student; he studied all
the tradition. He quoted everybody. So and so said this. He does not have
his own reasoning.
65