“Looking over the landscape of evangelical Christianity I wonder if maybe we’ve swung the pendulum a bit too far in the direction of admonishing people not to be Job’s counselors whilst neglecting to admonish folks to also not be Micah’s prophets. Both are damaging.”

When I’m training pastors or counselors I always try to dedicate a bit of time to walking through Job. And I do this because I want us to place ourselves in the role of Job’s friends. These guys are miserable counselors. But it’s important to know why they are awful counselors who were rebuked by God. It’s not because they said things which were untrue. It’s because they said true things at the wrong time. And that’s where I share my principle: good theology, wrongly applied, stinks.

Usually when I’m thinking about this I’m thinking about the guy who kills a fly on the forehead with a mallet. (That’s borrowed from Puritan great, Richard Sibbes). I think about Job’s friends who were giving good theology to a grieving guy. He didn’t need a treatise he needed a hug and to hang onto a different facet of truth. But they blew it and I’ve seen (and been) counselors/pastors who’ve followed in their footsteps.

But there is another way in which this principle applies. We see the other side of this in the prophet Micah. Prophets in Micah’s day were proclaiming a message of peace when they should have been proclaiming judgment. In Micah 2, the prophet mocks their ridiculous optimism.

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