Elihu continues to uncover the faulty thinking of Job about his righteousness and its relationship to God’s process of purifying him. He argues that Job wants God to bend to his perceptions of sin, justice, and righteousness to meet his own (1-8). “Do you think this to be just?” Elihu implies that Job exalts his standard of righteousness above God’s. Job has responded to this trial, in some sense, by implying that his life should have gained him merit before God. “Am I better off now than if I had freely, or even secretly, engaged in sin?” Job struggled with the existential reality that his life of purity, benevolence, pity, and humble service has gained him no apparent favor with God. Elihu discerns that behind Job’s complaint is an idea of works righteousness; his goodness should have assured God’s favor and not led to the time of devastating sorrow, pain, loss, suspicion, and humiliation.
Elihu points to God’s immutable righteousness and justice; his ways, his knowledge, his righteousness, and his wisdom transcends ours like the heavens transcend the earth. Even the clouds do not respond to our flurry of activity—to our huffing and puffing and scurrying on our paths of feverish activity. They are above us; how much more the ways of God? Later Elihu continues to use clouds and weather as indicators of God’s unfrustrable purpose and sovereign rule over the earth (36:27 – 37:20). While sin brings us into guilt before God, it does not change God or his perfection. Our disobedience to his law has no retaliatory effect on God as if we can assault his pride or insult his character. “What do you accomplish against him?” (6)
Likewise, any level of righteousness attained by a creature adds nothing to God, for he is perfectly righteous, unchangeably holy and can neither be increased or decreased in any of his permanently resident perfections. While we should seek righteousness and obedience to his revealed will, our obedience does not add to his holiness, does not increase his righteousness, does not obligate him to us in any way. “If you are righteous, what do you give him, or what does he receive from your hand?” (7)
Our wickedness as well as our righteousness reflects our character, alters the perception others have of us, and shows our conscious regard for God’s law as well as our pervasive and as-yet-unmortified moral corruption. Our wickedness and righteousness are “for a man like yourself and … for a son of man” (8). Neither God’s anger nor his benevolent compassion expands or contracts the boundaries of his character, for his being has no perimeter, no internal variations, no intrinsically discreet parts, and is unalterable by human actions. Job has treated God as if his public and private righteousness were a bargaining chip with God to force his hand for blessing, and thus he seeks an audience with God looking for an explanation for his severe trials. His friends treated Job as if he had large areas of undisclosed iniquitous dealings for surely God would not give such public display of displeasure apart from such turpitude. Although Job’s probing questions and expressions of exasperation arise from a more expansive view of the divine-human encounter, they still partake largely of the mistake of his friends in seeing God’s interaction based on immediate tit-for-tat response to human action and inquiry.
Elihu, therefore, seeks to alter the perspective that is at work in these encounters. The “multitude of oppressions” has evoked frantic questions and feverish efforts to find divine intervention (9). Job wants relief earlier than God intends to give it. Complainers do not start from a foundation of gratitude to God. They do not recognize, even in troubled times, that our position in creation gives joys unexperienced by any other created thing. The gap between humans in God’s image on the one hand and beasts and birds on the other does not evoke a worshipful sense of sovereign blessing from these complainers (10, 11). All they see is the pain, not the present distinctness of created elevation or the possibility of eventual endless intercourse and expansive knowledge in the presence of God. Why is life so hard right now?! “Why have you made me thus?” (Romans 1:21, 22; 9:19-24).
Thus, the cry for answers and the puzzlement concerning such a depth of trial is an expression of pride—unwarranted creaturely pride (12). When we cry to God as if we deserve his immediate attention in the form of an explanation for his arrangement of our life events, this is an empty, creature-centered, selfish attempt to call God to account and an insult to his wisdom—He will not regard it (13). Even more foolishly insulting to the unchallengeable prerogative of God as Creator, Sustainer, and Worker of “all things according to the counsel of his will” (Ephesians 1:11) is the attitude that we have placed a case before him that should compel his answer. We pridefully await, therefore, for him to gather his case together and come to meet us on common ground. “The case is before him,” we suppose, and in that confidence we cross our arms and await for him to meet our demands for answers (14). Job has said in ultimate frustration, “Oh, that I had one to hear me! Behold, here is my signature; Let the Almighty answer me! And the indictment which my adversary has written; surely I would carry it on my shoulder, I would bind it to my self like a crown. I would declare to him the number of my steps; like a prince I would approach him” (31:35-37).
God’s failure to show up for this subpoenaed appearance is not seen by Job as a manifestation of patience. Because God has not lashed out in anger or responded to the folly, Job thinks that he has stated his case well (15). Elihu, by God’s counsel, sees the folly of this confidence clearly and says, “Job opens his mouth emptily; he multiplies words without knowledge” (35:15, 16).
God described Job as a “blameless and upright man, one who fears God and shuns evil” (1:8). Clearly, that description did not mean Job had nothing left to learn of the ways of God nor needed the purifying effects of temporal suffering. Even so, we must learn that all occasions—whether abased or abounding, full or hungry, well-supplied or in need—are arranged by the wise counsel of Providence for our growth in grace, a magnification of the redeeming work of the Son, the perfection of the intercession of the Holy Spirit, and an ongoing display of God’s glory. Job was learning in the throes of desperate conditions what Paul stated with revelatory eloquence in Romans 8:26-39, that nothing “shall be able to separate us from the love of God which is in Christ Jesus our Lord.”
Dr. Tom Nettles is widely regarded as one of the foremost Baptist historians in America. He joined the faculty of Southern Baptist Theological Seminary after teaching at Trinity Evangelical Divinity School where he was professor of Church History and chairman of that department. Previously, he taught at Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary and Mid-America Baptist Theological Seminary. He received a B.A. from Mississippi College and an M.Div. and Ph.D. from Southwestern. In addition to writing numerous journal articles and scholarly papers, Dr. Nettles has authored or edited nine books including By His Grace and For His Glory, Baptists and the Bible, and Why I Am a Baptist.
Courses taught: Historical Theology of the Baptists, Historical Theology Overview, Jonathan Edwards & Andrew Fuller.
