Job 36--Elihu Extols God's Greatness

Elihu Extols God's Greatness
36 And Elihu continued, and said:

2 “Bear with me a little, and I will show you,
    for I have yet something to say on God's behalf.
3 I will get my knowledge from afar
    and ascribe righteousness to my Maker.
4 For truly my words are not false;
    one who is perfect in knowledge is with you.

5 “Behold, God is mighty, and does not despise any;
    he is mighty in strength of understanding.
6 He does not keep the wicked alive,
    but gives the afflicted their right.
7 He does not withdraw his eyes from the righteous,
    but with kings on the throne
    he sets them forever, and they are exalted.
8 And if they are bound in chains
    and caught in the cords of affliction,
9 then he declares to them their work
    and their transgressions, that they are behaving arrogantly.
10 He opens their ears to instruction
    and commands that they return from iniquity.
11 If they listen and serve him,
    they complete their days in prosperity,
    and their years in pleasantness.
12 But if they do not listen, they perish by the sword
    and die without knowledge.

13 “The godless in heart cherish anger;
    they do not cry for help when he binds them.
14 They die in youth,
    and their life ends among the cult prostitutes.
15 He delivers the afflicted by their affliction
    and opens their ear by adversity.
16 He also allured you out of distress
    into a broad place where there was no cramping,
    and what was set on your table was full of fatness.

17 “But you are full of the judgment on the wicked;
    judgment and justice seize you.
18 Beware lest wrath entice you into scoffing,
    and let not the greatness of the ransom turn you aside.
19 Will your cry for help avail to keep you from distress,
    or all the force of your strength?
20 Do not long for the night,
    when peoples vanish in their place.
21 Take care; do not turn to iniquity,
    for this you have chosen rather than affliction.
22 Behold, God is exalted in his power;
    who is a teacher like him?
23 Who has prescribed for him his way,
    or who can say, ‘You have done wrong’?

​24 “Remember to extol his work,
    of which men have sung.
25 All mankind has looked on it;
    man beholds it from afar.
26 Behold, God is great, and we know him not;
    the number of his years is unsearchable.
27 For he draws up the drops of water;
    they distill his mist in rain,
28 which the skies pour down
    and drop on mankind abundantly.
29 Can anyone understand the spreading of the clouds,
    the thunderings of his pavilion?
30 Behold, he scatters his lightning about him
    and covers the roots of the sea.
31 For by these he judges peoples;
    he gives food in abundance.
32 He covers his hands with the lightning
    and commands it to strike the mark.
33 Its crashing declares his presence;
    the cattle also declare that he rises.

---

Elihu continues to speak on behalf of God and says that he will get his knowledge from afar (from heaven) and will ascribe righteousness to his Maker and that his words are not false because they are coming directly from God and God cannot lie and has perfect knowledge (Elihu is claiming to be a prophet of God)--we'll see if these claims really hold up or if they are as real as the claims of Eliphaz, Bildad and Zophar when they too said they had a word from the Lord (or at least from a spirit that they assumed was the spirit for the Lord).

Elihu argues that God is no respecter of persons because of any status that they might have here on earth, and He has both the strength and the wisdom to know how much punishment needs to be applied in any given situation to either draw men to repentance or establish to all that the person has rebelled against God and will not repent.  God is always watching--especially "the righteous" that are the people of His eternal covenant of the gospel--and He is control over the rising and falling of kings and nations.

Elihu argues that if a righteous man is ensnared in a trap it's a trap that he got himself into and should not blame God for it--I think meaning that each man is enticed into sin by the desires of his own heart.  We see that taught directly in the New Testament.  God is gracious though and opens the ears of the one who cries out to Him to give that man instructions on what he needs to do to repent, so that the man might be restored in relationship with God and men.  But God will not let His elect continue to live in rebellion and they will "die by the sword" (a phrase used both for battle, but also for execution, especially by a king instituting the death penalty.  In this case saying that God is the King who institutes the death penalty by whatever means He chooses in order that a citizen of His kingdom might not continue to live in such a way to dishonor the name of the King of Kings and Lord of Lords and dishonor His kingdom and His righteousness.)

Elihu then says that the godless, or wicked, men don't even cry out to God for help.  Maybe that's because they don't even believe He exists (atheists) or they just hate Him so much that they will never pray to Him (and He has no obligation to hear the prayer of the unrighteous anyways because it is the Holy Spirit and Christ who bring our prayers to the throne of God, and the wicked man has neither the Holy Spirit inside of Him or Christ as his Brother and Advocate).  Elihu says that the godless love to be angry (this is one of the characteristics we see of those controlled by the flesh in I Corinthians 6 and other places in the New Testament).  Their lives lead unto death and sexual perversion (it sounds a lot like the argument made in Romans 1).

Then some interesting words--God delivers the afflicted by their affliction, meaning that He uses their affliction to drive them to the point of repentance and possibly salvation.  He uses adversity to open up their ears to be willing to hear what He has to say to them, because often times people are unwilling to hear and listen to the voice of God when everything is going well for them.  God draws people to repentance and brings them back to the table where good food is set before them (think of the parable of the Lost Son that we just studied in The Gospel Project--you can find the text in Luke 15, and the lesson video in our Discipleship Discord).

​I believe the next part is directed towards Job.  Elihu says that judgment like that which comes upon the wicked person is upon Job, and that Job needs to be careful to not be enticed into becoming a scoffer.  Nothing that Job can say or do will stop the wrath of God's justice and judgment from coming if that is in fact what is happening.  It is God that decides when the judgment starts and when it stops because God uses it for a purpose--to drive people to repentance, or sometimes to prove that a God's judgment of the unrighteous is just because the wicked man refuses to repent to be saved.  Sometimes the temporal suffering we receive here and now is a warning of the eternal suffering to come if we do not repent and turn to Christ for salvation.  Of course, the story of Job tells us that there other times that "bad things happen to good people" and that we cannot always make the assumption that someone has done something evil to deserve the punishment they received.  I'll come back again to the question that the disciples asked Jesus before He healed a blind man--"Who sinned that this man was born blind?" (They meant to ask if the child was somehow conceived in sin and that sin of the parents was passed onto the child and he was being punished because of what they did or perhaps the child did something sinful while still in the womb and was being punished by God by being blind from birth)>  Jesus answered that neither the man nor his parents caused the man's blindness by their sin (it was simply a result of sin entering the world through Adam and Eve), but that this was so that God could be glorified.  Sometimes that's how it is with our sufferings--they exist for God to be glorified with how we live through them, or how He delivers us from them, but in all situations, God is to get the glory.  That seems to be what is unknown at this time--God can use pain and suffering in His people for greater glory for Himself.  It's not always about punishment or wrath or even purification--sometimes it's simply about reminding us and everyone around us that God is the only one we can cry out to for help that will hear us and deliver us, but also the one we can speak of like Daniel's three friends facing the fiery furnace:

​
Daniel 3:16-18
English Standard Version
16 Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego answered and said to the king, “O Nebuchadnezzar, we have no need to answer you in this matter. 17 If this be so, our God whom we serve is able to deliver us from the burning fiery furnace, and he will deliver us out of your hand, O king. 18 But if not, be it known to you, O king, that we will not serve your gods or worship the golden image that you have set up.”

Sometimes our pain and suffering comes about by us being righteous and being obedient to God.  In fact, Jesus promises this to us in the New Testament--that they will do many things to try to use pain and suffering and loss of freedom and possibly even loss of life to stop the spread of the gospel, and that anyone who suffers for the sake of the gospel and the name of Christ will be blessed and receive an eternal reward for being faithful to the end--even faithful to the point of death itself.  Again, I think this is something these men have not yet learned about God as he's still working among men to try to teach them what His Law is (before giving it to Moses) through a system of positive and negative reinforcement.  He's blessing them for doing the right things and punishing them for doing the wrong things so that they learn what He desires them to do, since all of that was corrupted by the Fall and the years of rampant wickedness and rebellion that followed pre-Flood.  God will be gracious and give His Law to the people of Israel (sons of God), telling them to be a light to all the nations and teach them everything that He had commanded them in the Law and to make converts from all the nations (that should sound familiar--kind of like The Great Commission).  But Israel took the light they had been given and hid it (like where Jesus talks about lighting a lamp and putting it under a basket).  They kept it for themselves and only themselves and refused to share it with the others who they assumed didn't receive it because they didn't deserve it.  They wanted the wicked Gentiles to experience nothing but the wrath of God and not to experience His grace or mercy.  We see this in the Parable of the Lost Son with the older brother (who I believe is the son that is truly lost) when he wants nothing but condemnation for the sin that his brother committed--sin he's sure he knows but never saw happen and that was not committed against him--and he hates his Father for having compassion and grace and mercy for forgiving and restoring the younger brother and refuses to go inside to celebrate his brother being "born again" (twice the Father says the younger son was dead, but is alive again and was lost, but is found).  That older son refused to be part of heaven because he couldn't believe in a God who would save "those" people when he was always about the business of DOING things to try to make God pleased with Him.  This is the error so many made with application of God's Law--it was never about doing, but about being--Jesus restores this in Matthew 5-7 in The Sermon on the Mount and the disciples get it that it's an impossible standard that only the Son of God Himself can live up to in order to be THAT righteous.  None of us stand a chance of making it on our own merits.  That's something that we've seen Job and possibly Elihu understand, that that God is going to confirm shortly.  It's about Him and what He does, not about us and what we do.

​I know that was a huge aside, so let's return to the text at verse 20.  Elihu encourages Job to not give up on God and "embrace the darkness" and just become one of the wicked and rebellious people.  I think Elihu and Job's friends saw this as a real possibility as time went on and Job slipped further and further into depression and his arguments changed from praising God in the midst of his pain and suffering to crying out that God would kill him or go back in time and blot him out from history so that he never existed or that in some way God would just let him die so that he would be at peace.  But it got worse from there as Job seemed to become angry and frustrated that God would not answer him and continued to let him suffer and he started to question the goodness of God and His justice and compassion, and his arguments became more self-centered and less about shining the spotlight on God who he would continue to glorify no matter the circumstances.  Was Satan right that Job would curse God?  No!  Job never went that far, and God was gracious enough to stop it before it might get to that point.  Again, just wait for what God has to say.

Elihu urges Job not to choose the path of iniquity and to be careful to not be proud and arrogant and assume that he has something to teach God or that he can in any way correct Him.  God is perfect in power and knowledge.  We should be going to Him to ask Him to teach us and to correct our ways and show us where we have gone wrong and to ask Him to show us the path we are supposed to take.

Elihu concludes here by reminding Job of what he did right to start off with.  Remember to continue in praise and worship, because it will help you to have a right attitude about God and your situations.  Remember who God is by what He has done in and through you and in and through other people who you know.  He is the God that gives us the dew and the rain for the daily provision and those times of extra blessings when they heavens open up and pour out their abundance on us--yet not everyone sees the rain in this way, but it is often associated with the blessings of God in the Bible.

Then Elihu breaks out in adoration and praise for who God is--the one who controls the rain, the thunder, the lightening, and who controls the oceans of the great deep and uses them to cover the "roots" of the sea (the fountains of the great deep, most likely).  He uses the storms and seas to judge His people, but He also gives them an abundance of food as an expression of His loving-kindness.  He directs the path of the storm and the lightning strikes where and when He commands, and even the beasts of the field (the "cattle") declare the existence of God and His presence and glory.

Elihu is encouraging Job to repent of his pride and arrogance and testing God and to once again return to the point of worshiping Him for who He is and what He has done.  I personally think Elihu hit the nail on the head and that Job has slipped a bit since the last time we saw God proclaim Job's innocence in Job 2:10.  Why do I think that?  Because God is going to have some words of correction for Job really soon that are going to sound a lot like the words of Elihu.  God Himself will speak from the whirlwind and no one will be confused about who is speaking for God because God will speak for Himself.  It is going to be quite the scene that I can't wait for you to see.