Job’s Friends, Creeds, and the Sin of Certainty

In my 20s, I was certain that my theological ideas were correct. I was baptized and joined the Seventh-day Adventist Church at seventeen, and within two years, I was studying to become a pastor. The conviction that I had “the truth” and that I belonged to God’s “true people” gave me a sense of purpose and identity. In one sense, my life was on a positive course. I was no longer a shy, insecure teenager whose life seemed meaningless. Knowing that God loved me and had a plan for me changed everything. In another sense, however, I became dogmatic, spiritually proud, and overly confident in my ability to interpret the Bible and judge people. 

I’ve been studying the book of Job from a new perspective in recent months. The folly of Job’s friends has especially absorbed my attention. In fact, I plan to preach a sermon about this on November 15 at Collegedale Community Church. Let me share with you in the paragraphs below why I have found new meaning in learning from the foolishness of Job’s friends. 

The theological errors committed by Eliphaz, Bildad, and Zophar and the spiritual inflexibility of a dogmatic Christian stem from the same root: the human tendency to seek exhaustive, static certainty over dynamic, humble wisdom. Both demonstrate the foolishness of taking a part of God’s truth and insisting it is the whole truth, substituting a simple human system (fundamental beliefs) for divine complexity.

1. Job's Friends: Elevating Principle to Law

Job’s friends operated under the retribution principle, a general truth widely affirmed in Proverbs and Deuteronomy: the righteous prosper, and the wicked suffer. Their error was not that the principle was false, but that they applied it with absolute certainty, eliminating all contextual nuance or mystery. 

Faced with Job’s suffering, their pre-existing theological framework demanded a singular conclusion: Job must have sinned. Their creed became a hermeneutical cage, preventing them from seeing an alternative reality where suffering could be permitted for reasons beyond individual sin. They believed they understood the full transactional mechanism of God's justice, and this certainty made them cruel and ultimately led to their rebuke by God.

2. The Inflexible Creed: Limiting the Limitless

A denominational creed serves a vital purpose in summarizing core beliefs, yet it becomes foolish when treated as the final, complete, and unalterable understanding of God. This inflexibility is the modern parallel to the friends’ error. By assuming the denomination's systematized doctrine—often formulated at a specific historical moment—captures all of God’s truth, the group closes itself off to new scriptural insights, historical context, and the ongoing work of the Holy Spirit. This rigid certainty creates a boundary against mystery, demanding that every new spiritual experience or theological question must fit neatly into the pre-approved human categories. It substitutes the map (the creed) for the territory (God Himself).

3. The Shared Intersection: The Failure of Epistemic Humility

The intersection between Job’s friends and the inflexible creed lies in their shared failure of epistemic humility—the recognition of the limits of human knowledge.

In essence, both parties attempt to domesticate God. They prioritize the closed system (their personal formula or the organizational creed) over the open reality of God's workings. Just as Job's friends thought they could perfectly predict God's actions, the inflexible creed assumes it has perfectly captured God’s nature. In both cases, certainty breeds a self-imposed blindness that hinders both wisdom and true compassion.