Job 34: The bad news (Elihu)

An inquiry with witnesses and a jury

• 34:1-4 Job had asked for an inquiry to prove God guilty of injustice that the innocent suffer while the guilty are spared. In response, Elihu invites the reader to join a peer review to collectively examine the case and discern the truth:
• 34:5-6 sums up Job’s quarrel:
  • “By not giving me what I deserve, God treats me as if I were unrighteous. After experiencing this dark side of the apparent unfairness of God, I have no hope left to be relieved from my affliction while in this world (i.e. until a final judgement, cf Job 14:12).
• 34:7-9 While Elihu rejected the unjust verdict of Job’s adversaries, some modern translators make him put words into Job’s mouth that he never uttered:
  • e.g. that it is a waste of time to please God (NLT, v9): This inaccurate translation is how atheists might talk, but Job roundly rejected atheism, Job 21:14-16, and he never stopped seeking to please God, Job 2:10.
  • Elihu understood what truly troubled Job: “It profits a man nothing when he is pleased with God“. Delight in God is a category known to saints only (Ps 37:4; Isa 33:6), but not to atheists (Job 27:10; cf Prov 2:14, 10:23). Elihu understood this and therefore didn’t treat Job as an apostate who pretends to be a saint, but as a saint tempted by apostasy.
  • Indeed, Elihu had promised from the start to offer something better than the condemnation heaped on Job by moralists (32:12-14): Elihu didn’t find fault to condemn Job, but to see him becoming justified by faith (33:32), faith that is alive and therefore grows into more faith (Ro 1:17). Getting there required a compelling argument, as well as a painful look in a mirror:

Elihu’s rebuttal of Job’s charges against God

• 34:10-12 By definition, it is impossible that God could be unjust: If there is a God, he cannot be godless, or else he would not be God at all.
• 34:13-15 For by definition, this is who God is:
  • Not the creation, but its creator; the first cause of everything, both immanent in all things seen and unseen and transcending them as well.
• 34:16-17a (YLT) …Yea, does one hating justice govern?
  • In the sense of: How could He govern at all (if He were unjust)?
• 34:17b Or the Most Just dost thou condemn?
  • i.e. are you above God that you can judge Him as unjust? If even we judge this as inappropriate, how much more does the judge of judges?
• 34:18-20 God’s perfect justice can be recognized in His impartiality:
  • No leniency for the powerful: God is not egalitarian, but perfectly impartial.
  • None can escape God: All hear His verdict and are tormented in their consciences by His categoric condemnation of all evil, cf Job 33:15-20; Ro 1:18; 1:32; 2:1.
  • 34:20 They also must all die and give an account when He returns on the day when the heavens will be no more, cf Job 14:12
• 34:21-26 For this is who God is, omniscient (21), omnipresent (22), omnipotent (23-26). 
• 34:27-28 But this is what man is:
  • A rebel who will worship anything but God (27) and who therefore becomes his own worst enemy (28): By declaring himself as the ultimate judge, man is bound to become an oppressor of his fellow man.
• 34:29, two translations: a) Who can condemn God for hiding in silence (e.g. NIV)? Or b): Who can condemn God of acting wickedly when He gives peace (to the undeserving)? This was Job’s charge.
• 34:30 If God were not God, there would be no limit to evil: God is that limit, for He cannot be overcome by it.

In a universe of blind physical forces and genetic replication, people are going to get hurt, other people are going to get lucky and you won’t find any rhyme or reason in it, nor any justice.

Richard Dawkins (River out of Eden, 1992; emphasis added)

What then was Elihu’s verdict against Job’s complaint, and why?

• 34:31-33 (exceedingly difficult to translate):

Albert Schultens (1739) enumerates no less than 15 different interpretations which have been given of this verse (v31). …The drift of all the remarks of Elihu is, that God is a great and inscrutable Sovereign; that he has a right to reign, and that man should submit unqualifiedly to him. In this passage he does not reproach Job harshly.

Albert Barnes, Commentary on Job 34:31

• 34:34-35 calls on the readers as the jury:

• 34:36 “Oh, that Job might be tested to the utmost for answering like a wicked man”:
  • not in the sense of wishing Job additional sufferings, but ‘tested’ in the present judicial trial that Job had requested (31:35).

Here lies arguably the turning point of the book that requires discernment (v4): Even though Job confessed God as his Redeemer (19:25-27), his peace with God was shattered. Why? Where exactly did Job stray that he ended up quarreling with God? Is it because he too insisted on the merits of his own righteousness?

• ‘…answering like a wicked man’: Unlike all others, Elihu located the root of Job’s discontent not in his immorality, but in his (theological) reasoning about the merits of his morality. Since Elihu has not yet said it, expect him to do so next. For on this point, Job still held the same axiom as his adversaries: “God must reward good behaviour with prosperity in the here and now, or else he cannot be just.” Because of this wrong axiom, Job was bound to focus on clearing himself and to be caught in an argument whether he deserved such hardship (as claimed by his adversaries, 22:9-10) or whether he didn’t (23:10-12). 

34:37 How can Job be charged of ‘rebellion’ after God had called him a faithful servant like no other? 

• Simply judging Elihu as grossly mistaken or unfair does not solve the riddle; it would only create new ones:
  • If Elihu had been wrong, why didn’t God charge Elihu of falsehood, together with Job’s other phony accusers (42:7)? Why did God instead rebuke Job?
  • Equally implausible are speculations that Elihu is only a later addition by an anonymous editor. For what editor would not have revised on the same occasion how many friends accused Job? And what editor in his right mind would try to turn the hero of this popular story into its villain? And who, as a reader, would give up the original story for such a clumsily tampered version?
• So the riddle must be there on purpose, likely to draw attention to what this book is all about: If Elihu is right, Job was in the wrong despite his unparalleled uprightness (1:8):
  • That is why Elihu’s verdict is so ‘in your face’, 32:21, and yet so important.
  • That Job’s quarrel with God is in essence an attempt to justify himself (32:2) is confirmed later in the book by God’s own oracle (40:8). This verdict leaves no doubt: 
  • Job (more than any other ordinary citizen) was “zealous for God, but not (yet) based on knowledge” (cf Ro 10:2). For being ignorant of the righteousness that comes from God (through faith alone, Ro 1:16-17; 3:22; 1Jn 1:9; cf Lk 15:20-24; 18:13-14), and seeking to establish their own… (cf Ro 10:3):When writing this, the apostle Paul had in mind his fellow Jews who were like Job at this point.
• Elihu also disapproves of Job ‘clapping his hands among us’ (an expression of derision of his friends, cf Job 27:23): For example, in 12:2-3; 16:2-3; 17:10; 21:34, Job’s words leave no doubt that he did increasingly despise his adversaries. And this should not surprise us, for the axiom that self-sacrificial living puts God in our debt, combined with the frustration that God refuses to comply, is the root of discord with both God and our fellow men (cf Gen 4:4-9).