Job 34--Elihu Asserts God's Justice

Elihu Asserts God's Justice
34 Then Elihu answered and said:

2 “Hear my words, you wise men,
    and give ear to me, you who know;
3 for the ear tests words
    as the palate tastes food.
4 Let us choose what is right;
    let us know among ourselves what is good.
5 For Job has said, ‘I am in the right,
    and God has taken away my right;
6 in spite of my right I am counted a liar;
    my wound is incurable, though I am without transgression.’
7 What man is like Job,
    who drinks up scoffing like water,
8 who travels in company with evildoers
    and walks with wicked men?
9 For he has said, ‘It profits a man nothing
    that he should take delight in God.’

10 “Therefore, hear me, you men of understanding:
    far be it from God that he should do wickedness,
    and from the Almighty that he should do wrong.
11 For according to the work of a man he will repay him,
    and according to his ways he will make it befall him.
12 Of a truth, God will not do wickedly,
    and the Almighty will not pervert justice.
13 Who gave him charge over the earth,
    and who laid on him the whole world?
14 If he should set his heart to it
    and gather to himself his spirit and his breath,
15 all flesh would perish together,
    and man would return to dust.

16 “If you have understanding, hear this;
    listen to what I say.
17 Shall one who hates justice govern?
    Will you condemn him who is righteous and mighty,
18 who says to a king, ‘Worthless one,’
    and to nobles, ‘Wicked man,’
19 who shows no partiality to princes,
    nor regards the rich more than the poor,
    for they are all the work of his hands?
20 In a moment they die;
    at midnight the people are shaken and pass away,
    and the mighty are taken away by no human hand.

21 “For his eyes are on the ways of a man,
    and he sees all his steps.
22 There is no gloom or deep darkness
    where evildoers may hide themselves.
23 For God has no need to consider a man further,
    that he should go before God in judgment.
24 He shatters the mighty without investigation
    and sets others in their place.
25 Thus, knowing their works,
    he overturns them in the night, and they are crushed.
26 He strikes them for their wickedness
    in a place for all to see,
27 because they turned aside from following him
    and had no regard for any of his ways,
28 so that they caused the cry of the poor to come to him,
    and he heard the cry of the afflicted--
29 When he is quiet, who can condemn?
    When he hides his face, who can behold him,
    whether it be a nation or a man?--
30 that a godless man should not reign,
    that he should not ensnare the people.

31 “For has anyone said to God,
    ‘I have borne punishment; I will not offend any more;
32 teach me what I do not see;
    if I have done iniquity, I will do it no more’?
33 Will he then make repayment to suit you,
    because you reject it?
For you must choose, and not I;
    therefore declare what you know.
34 Men of understanding will say to me,
    and the wise man who hears me will say:
35 ‘Job speaks without knowledge;
    his words are without insight.’
36 Would that Job were tried to the end,
    because he answers like wicked men.
37 For he adds rebellion to his sin;
    he claps his hands among us
    and multiplies his words against God.”

---

Elihu now steps in as the defense attorney for God since Job has leveled charges against God that He is unjust and doesn't listen to the cries of the righteous.  Elihu seems to be speaking to the others there almost as we would to a jury and asks them to hear and process the arguments and listen to them and discern what is true and what is error in the same kind of way that the tongue tastes and discerns different flavors.

Elihu's main argument here is that God can never be unjust, so Job has to be wrong in his reasoning.  He would have done great if he would have stopped there, but it seems that even Elihu has fallen into the trap of questioning the righteousness of Job, though he seems to maybe present evidence that others really did not.  Elihu seems to indicate that Job has been hanging out with the scoffers and those who revile God and find no value in worshiping and giving glory to Him.  That may have just been the natural state of things if everyone else abandoned Job and only those who were the "evil"/"bad" people remained and they were the ones that accepted Job when no one else would, but bad company does corrupt good character, and it is possible that there's some truth here to what Elihu is saying because we've seen Job slip and slide a bit from the beginning of the book where he would say absolutely nothing wrong about God and would continue to bless and praise Him to where he has seemed to question God's goodness and justice.

Furthermore, Elihu says that Job is wrong to accuse God and demand that He show up for court and that Job should in any way be able to question God and make Him give an answer.  God does not have to answer to anyone and would be completely just if one day He decided to destroy all of creation that He had created because He is the Creator and is owner and ruler of all creation.  That puts Him in the position of the sovereign or king here, and Elihu argues that it is God's responsibility to judge and punish wicked kings and princes because His righteousness is so superior to theirs, and that He shows no partiality--everyone no matter their status when they died will stand equal before God and God will know all their deeds without questioning them and will execute perfect judgment with perfect knowledge.

While all of this is true, Elihu seems to have forgotten (at least for the moment) that along with justice, God also loves and is full of both grace and mercy, both of which are totally "unjust" if your idea of justices is someone getting the wrath that they deserve for their rebellion.  Grace gives you good things that you don't deserve because you could never earn the favor of God to deserve those things, and mercy prevents you from incurring the wrath that you do deserve--the translation of the Hebrew word for mercy that we see most often used in the Old Testament is "longsuffering."  God is willing to suffer a long time (not forever) as you rebel against Him, break His Law and cause injury to Him before His wrath is filled up to a point where He will no longer be able to give mercy because to do so would tarnish His name of being Just and often because that wicked man is not afflicting innocent people whom God must defend.

Man too is asked to be "longsuffering" with one another, but should we expect to need to patient for God to intervene?  That seems to be the question here, and is God derelict or unjust when He does not intervene? The answer seems to be, "No," because all of us deserve what Job got and a whole lot more for all the rebellion that we have in our hearts and minds and the rebellious actions that we've committed which we can never pay for as at this time in the Bible there is no atonement for volitional rebellion (what the Bible would call a high-handed sin).  There would be a whole system of sacrifices instituted for accidental sins, but people would still stand guilty because we don't just sin accidentally, we sin because we want to, because that is our nature, and for that, a different kind of Sacrifice was necessary.

Moving on with Elihu's argument, he says that God is not wrong just because Job says say and that doesn't make God liable to repay a price to Job (that his name and reputation be restored).  While it's true that God owes Job nothing, this is exactly what God is going to do for Job anyways in a few chapters.  Even though God is not required to do so and Job has no right to demand it, God will do so in full view of all of Job's friends (including Elihu) to make it abundantly clear that Job was declared righteous and "not guilty" by God and everyone that said that this happened because God had rendered a verdict of "guilty" spoke without knowledge and they were the ones wrong and they needed to come and offer sacrifices to Job for the sin they had committed against him by accusing him without evidence and tarnishing his reputation and questioning his integrity.  Does that mean that Job was perfect?  No, but it probably means that Job was covered by the blood of Jesus and that he was holy and blameless in the sight of God because Job's sins had been taken away and nailed to the cross and were paid for by the death of Christ--even though that hand't happened yet, the payment was made in "full faith and credit" that one day the debt would be "paid in full" (a good translation of when Jesus said "It is finished.").  Old Testament saints were not really saved in a different way and they didn't receive different benefits of salvation than us (other than we have been given the Holy Spirit to live inside of us in all places at all times where the Holy Spirit seemed to come on some people for a limited time and a limited purpose in the Old Testament).  We simply put our faith in what we know did happen instead of putting our faith in what we knew needed to happen.

So, Elihu is mostly right, and again, we don't see God really say anything to Elihu one way or the other, but we get the impression that he's building up towards also leveling charges against Job (specifically for what Job has done and said since the suffering started and they have all been there to hear it).  If Elihu is right and Job has sinned in their midst and continues to argue that he is righteous and not deserving of punishment, that does present an issue for Job's argument.  We'll see Elihu's indictment against Job next time.