By Mike Mason

Award winning author Mike Mason brings profound and arresting insights on the life of faith. This article comes from 'The Gospel according to Job (Crossway Books, 1994) Mike, a regular contributor to canadianchristianity.com, is perhaps most well known for his book 'The Mystery of Marriage.' that won the ECPA Gold Medallion award.

[other pieces by Mike Mason]

When it comes to isolating and naming the actual sin Job's friends believe has led to his downfall, they beat about the bush. Throughout the dialogue they hum and haw, making veiled accusations and general moral pronouncements. 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, which is why he is called the accuser (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, 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 we may be sure 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 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. "If any of you lacks wisdom, he should ask God, who gives generously to all without finding fault, and it will be given to him" says James (1:5).

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Enlightenment & empowering

For those who love God everything is above board. 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. He can 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. If Satan 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 love and joy in our hearts and a willingness to perform specific acts 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 decisive moral action.

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 neurotic game of Satan's. The very vagueness of their accusations gives them away.

November 27/2008