Job 35: Words without knowledge

The root cause of Job’s quarrel with God

• In 35:1-3, Job is asked to examine where his complaints against God originate:
  • Did he assume to care more about justice than God, v2?
  • Did he expect like his adversaries that godliness should be rewarded in this present life, v3?
• Did Job speak too much (‘multiply words’) without knowledge, v16? And what knowledge could this be (see below)?
• These questions to Job are the ones we should ask ourselves if we resent God. According  to Elihu, Job lost his peace with God by justifying himself (32:2) despite having been declared justified (33:32). Is he simply wrong? If not, what has that to do with it?
  • Reconciliation to God is the heart of salvation, the homecoming of the prodigal son who received forgiveness instead of rejection for squandering his inheritance.
  • The theological term for it is justification which in the Old Testament derives from the Hebrew sadaq (to justify), as opposed to rasha (condemn), cf Job 32:2-3, 40:8, and many other instances, see here, just like in the NT (e.g. Lk 18:9-14).
  • That Job sought to justify himself is confirmed in his epiphany (40:8) and by his own confession (42:3): If it were only a reluctant admission of one who was extorted or brainwashed, the story would be too cynical to warrant the parchment and our time. By contrast, if Job’s epiphany opened his eyes to see why Elihu’s counsel was true, it powerfully testifies how God used it in time to melt Job’s grudge and overcome his estrangement.

• But if Elihu was right to find such fault also with Job, how come that Job was declared at the beginning to be God’s faithful servant? Why do we find Job confessing in the end that he erred when the story initially emphasized that he did not sin by anything he said (Job 2:10)?
  • In other words, what exactly was there to confess, and what convinced Job in the end that his charges against God were baseless?
  • Elihu ascribes his answer to genuine inspiration (32:8; 32:18; 33:3-4; 36:3-4), untarnished by error (lit. unblemished), 36:4, and nowhere is his claim put in question. By contrast, all others are proven wrong (42:7). Thus, if anyone can answer how Job got stuck, it must be Elihu.

Knowing God eventually melted Job’s heart (42:5-6). How did Elihu help?

• 35:4 answers both Job and his accusers who displayed the same ignorance on the same issue:
• 35:5-8 The concept that one God is and must be the creator and judge above the heavens (v5) was familiar to them (cf e.g. 9:8; 11:8; 26:13), but what we must learn from it was not. “Job opens his mouth without knowledge”, v16: Elihu did not question Job’s sincerity or zeal, but his knowledge of spiritual truth.
  •  “Their zeal is not based on knowledge”, Paul wrote in like manner of the theologians in his time, Ro 10:2 – not because they were unintelligent, but because God’s wisdom is only revealed by and in Jesus, and with the result that it remains hidden and foolishness to us as long as we do not know him, cf Mk 15:37-39; Heb 9:3, 1Cor 2:14.
  • Not knowing God’s heart but only His eternal power became the reason for Job to feel estranged and unjustly condemned, 9:11-20. For Job’s adversaries, it hardened their false confidence that God was on their side, leading them to judge Job as unworthy (e.g. 18:19-20).
• 35:6-8 On a philosophical level, God’s greatness instead implies that He is exalted too high to be changed by anything we do: According to Elihu, God never owes us for good deeds (cf Lk 17:19), nor can our evil harden him against anyone who repents (cf Lk 15:20). 
  • 35:6 Even our offenses cannot change God. They only prove that God is right to condemn sin as sinful, and to be firmly set against it (36:6-10; cf Ps 51:4; Ro 7:13).*
  • 35:7-8 God judges us not for hurting His feelings (even though we do), but because of what we do to ourselves and to each other. In the very same manner, Jesus was set against sin because it enslaves and destroys people (Jn 8:34-36; Lk 15:24).
  • In short, Elihu rejects the axiom of Job and his friends that God’s disposition towards us is determined by our deeds, and that good deeds can or ever will appease God.

Can any of this ‘explain’ undeserved suffering?

• 35:9-14 Why doesn’t God answer every cry of the oppressed for help when they suffer unjustly like Job?
  • Again, Elihu’s answer at first sounds not like an answer. Instead, he charges mankind of praying to God for the wrong reasons. Calling our own will God’s will and praying that our will be done is the opposite of genuine prayer (Mt 6:10; Ja 4:3). And yet this is precisely how all men naturally ‘pray’ in their ignorance of God. Such theism is the problem, not the solution!
  • 35:10 does not criticise Job for atheism: Job’s prayer was a cry for God’s help, after all. Job professed faith in his creator (31:15) and he trespassed none of His laws, not even with his lips (2:10), with his eyes or his feelings (31:1; 31:29). However, all of this can be done, and for the wrong reason of seeking to prove our own righteousness so that we would not need to submit to the righteousness that is from God (Ro 10:3).
  • If we object that Elihu could not possibly know this before the New Testament, we miss the point: No other salvation is preached anywhere in the Old Testament (Isa 28:16; 1Pet 1:10-12). Also Job had heard of it (19:25). However, in his horrible afflictions, Job only waited for it with resentment and with ever increasing estrangement.
  • 35:12-14 This inability to rejoice in his Redeemer even in the midst of the most severe present trial was proof: Job did not yet rightly trust his Redeemer (cf Ja 1:2). No one can miss the point of Job’s story that God may allow every form of sufferings to test our faith so that it may be refined (Ja 1:3-4; 1Pet 1:6-7). Before Job’s faith was tried, it was a perfection of the kind of theism shared with his fellow philosopher-theologians of which the entire book until here systematically exposed its cruelty and its failure. Now, after losing everything, Job is overcome by despair and estranged from both the God he knew and those who vainly profess to be his servants. So where are we to find the knowledge and the power to not be overcome by grief and resentment?
  • This was Elihu’s errand. Without sufferings, there would be no purified genuine faith in this world ever. But without such messengers and their message, the experience of sufferings would break everyone.
    • Does this mean that unfathomable atrocities and natural disasters should serve the few chosen followers of a creator who permits such suffering for them to become interested in genuine faith?
    • Both atheists and the religious adversaries of Job who despise such faith as worthless are bound to jolt at the thought. However, atheism has no answers even why the world exists at all. The world is how God invented it, pain and sufferings included. It is God’s creation, not ours. Thus, whoever rejects what He made known of His plan for this world and for everyone inhabiting it cannot complain of being left without any answer.
  • Naturally, we imagine a world without sufferings where we could comprehend how God can be just. However, genuine faith is not about comprehending God so that we may trust and believe Him. Faith is about believing Him so that we may comprehend whatever He entrusted us to comprehend (Deut 29:29b; Col 2:2): 
  • To be reconciled to God, it suffices to believe Him that He is just and good. By contrast, comprehending how a creator who subjected this present creation to decay (Ro 8:20-21) can allow suffering and be just is beyond our limits (Deut 29:28a; Ro 11:33). Denying this is to belittle God, even if it is done under the pretense of Job’s adversaries of defending God.
• In 35:15-16, Elihu stresses once more God’s patience, the purpose of which is “…to lead you (i.e. not just ‘others’) to repentance”, Ro 2:4 (lit. ‘change of mind’). And as noted earlier, this was not to condemn Job, but to provide the help of persuasion that he needed to be truly delivered from his grudge (31:1-4; 33:32)