Elihu Speaks – Rev. Leo Douma

Text: Job 32

 

I remember being at our national Synod one year. We were involved in a tense and difficult debate, when we got to a stalemate. All the delegates were quiet, when a young man in his twenties asked to speak. He was either a theological student or very young minister. I could see he was just bursting to have a say in the debate. I got the impression he was one of those young up and comers, one of those who has an answer for everything. Where all the (wise) men of Synod were stumped, this brash young bloke was going to solve the issue. You get annoyed because you think wisdom is with the experienced guys, not some young upstart. Mind you there are those who have 30 years experience and others who have had one year’s experience 30 times. So age is not necessarily an indicator of wisdom. But, at any rate, this young bloke had his say.

A lot of it was what we had already said, but he thought it was new because he said it differently. But I have to admit there was a hint of an idea in all his brashness that helped us forward. As Proverbs says: God can use a crooked stick to hit a straight blow. Now I am telling you this because it gives you a clue as to as to what we see happening here in Job chapter 32.

Job and his three friends are silent; they have come to a stalemate. For 27 chapters these guys have been arguing over why Job has suffered so terribly. You remember God allowed Satan to test Job, to see if Job worshipped God simply for who God is, or for all God gave him. Job lost all his property, his ten children were killed, Job himself was dreadfully sick. Job had cursed the day of his birth and his three friends had responded. Job wanted to know why God had done this to him.

What his three friends, Eliphaz, Bildad and Zophar said boiled down to this: God is just, he punishes the wicked, you have suffered terribly, therefore you must have done something really bad, so confess it and all will be well. But Job insisted he hadn’t done anything wrong and wanted God to give an explanation.

So it goes on, and in Job 31 Job gives his final reply, on oath he has done nothing wrong. And so we find here in chapter 32 the three friends with nothing more to say (:1) “So these three men stopped answering Job because he was righteous in his own eyes”. And now, out of the blue, (:2) we are introduced to “Elihu son of Barakel the Buzite, of the family of Ram.” We have been given no prior indication that this young bloke has been sitting in listening. But he has, and he has (:2) “become very angry with Job for justifying himself rather than God. (:3) He is also angry with the three friends, because they found no way to refute Job and yet condemned him.”

This very angry young man has had enough. He is bursting to speak. He has been quiet because in that culture only the elderly speak, the young are supposed to keep quiet. Note (:4)” Now Elihu had waited before speaking to Job because they were older than he. But when he saw the three men had nothing more to say, his anger was aroused.” So now Elihu just has to speak, he can’t contain himself any longer.

Now what are we supposed to do with this angry young man, all fired up to defend God because he feels Job and his mates are to incompetent to do it right. Commentators are divided in their assessment of him. Some see him as a comic relief, because there is now such awful tension in the debate. They see him as an arrogant young man, full of himself, who just blusters forth with little new to contribute. Others see him as a sort of John the Baptist of Job, some one who prepares the way for God to speak (which God does straight after Elihu finishes talking). Elihu is seen as being a theological bridge between what Job’s friends say and what God says. He prepares Job for what God will say.

So despite his manner, and some awful things Elihu has a valuable place in this story. Mind you, you have to look for the gems. Elihu has a lot to say; he goes on for five chapters, with four speeches. In his second and third speeches, he gets so worked up with his own oratory and powerful reasoning that he ends up being very cruel to Job. Instead of having a pastoral understanding of Job when Job says “I am innocent, I can’t think of anything I have done to deserve such suffering,” Elihu pushes it to the extreme, making out that Job says he is completely without sin, and he tears him up for that.

It is interesting isn’t it, who God can use to speak to us as his instrument. It may be the young, who in their idealism and brashness challenge their elders because we have become cynical and accepting of lack of commitment. It may be the unbelieving workmate whose taunting words: “You a Christian and you do that?” – that God uses to put us back on track. God can speak to us through all sorts of people. Elihu’s input we see is important because at the end of Job, God rebukes the three friends for being wrong, but says nothing about Elihu.

So what is the significance of Elihu in this part of the story? He comes as the answer for Job’s cry to God for an explanation. It seems to Job that God has been silent. Job has been suffering terribly and has cried out to God numerous times but it seems God gives no answer. But now here is this angry young man who God uses as a sort of mediator, one who is keen to set things right, for God and for Job, who begins where the three friends began and ends with words very similar to the voice of God when he appears on the scene in chapter 38.

In chapter 32:6 we see Elihu starting to speak. And we get some idea of his character, because it takes him about 24 verses to say: Guys can I say something. In his very verbose way he simply, very politely, saying, guys I know I’m young, but I have to say something. I know I’m young but wisdom comes not via age but from understanding that God’s spirit gives.

In chapter 33 Elihu actually starts saying what he intends to Job. He starts off well. He lets Job know that what he says is from God, that he will be honest and without partiality in what he says, that he is just like Job, a man taken from clay, that Job has nothing to fear (33:1-7) Then in verse 8 (33:8) Elihu begins to analyze Job’s view of God. This is the problem right through this book. Job, like his three friends, has a narrow view of God. They tend to think of God in terms of their own thinking. God is as limited as their own minds.

We still tend to do that. We want to have God, as well as everything else, all worked out. We don’t like mystery, a deep sense of awe and majesty are not often part of our experience. The book of Job teaches us that God and his ways are way beyond us. We will never grasp all God is doing.

Now, Job’s first view of God, according to Elihu, is that Job saw God as capricious, that is, God seemed to act without any good reason, he just acted, it seemed, out of his feelings. Now that’s us humans projecting our ideas of God onto God. There are those who seem to get out of the wrong side of bed in the morning and are just plain grumps all day. We feel sometimes that’s how God acts. Elihu points out that that is what Job is implying. Cf 33:8-11.

Elihu sums up all Job has said. First, Job says that God mistreats him without reason, in other words God is capricious. Elihu’s answer to that is brief and to the point. (:12)” But I tell you, in this you are not right.” Why (:12) “for God is greater than man”. Let’s never forget that. God’s ways are much, much higher than our ways. God always acts out of his character which is love. Behind every act of God is a loving heart. And if we don’t think so, as our suffering can have us feel sometimes, it is we who are misjudging God, not God acting for no good reason. We just don’t see what he is aiming to do.

Then in verse 13 (33:13) Elihu moves to the second thing Job complains about God, which is that God seems silent, he doesn’t answer Job. Cf. 33:13-14. That too is one of our problems, isn’t it? God seems silent, he doesn’t seem to answer our prayers or be with us in the midst of our stuff. Elihu helps us here. He says God does speak, but in ways sometimes we don’t realize. There are two ways, Elihu suggests.

First God speaks in dreams. Cf 33:15-18. Now you notice there how Elihu says that God’s objective is to protect us, to protect us from ourselves. The human race seems bent on its own destruction, just watch the news each day! We cause our own biggest problems, stuff we often bury inside ourselves and refuse to deal with. The stuff God puts in our way, the distress, the pain, the warnings, are designed to keep us from hurting ourselves and each other. One of the ways God does that is to speak in dreams says Elihu.

Now does that mean we go all Freudian and start analyzing our dreams? There are several ways to understand Elihu here. One is that God often did speak to his people in dreams in the Old Testament. That was his revelation. Those were the days before there was the Word of God as we have it now. So today we can say God is always speaking to us in the Bible. Read the Word and hear what God is saying. And there is a lot in that. Often we think, why doesn’t God speak, but we haven’t read our Bibles for days or weeks. God is speaking, but we aren’t listening.

But there is also the sense in which we need to take heed to our dreams. A lot of stuff we need to deal with in our lives, we suppress, we don’t want to think about it. But it can come up in our dreams; the mind is always active, bringing up stuff that is troubling us. God can use that as a way to speak to us, to say isn’t it time you and I dealt with this area in your life, before it wrecks you?! If God can use the words of the brazen youth, or the angry neighbour, he can use our own dreams to knock on our door. Are we listening?

The second thing Elihu says is that God also speaks through pain. Cf 33:19-22. Here Elihu’s argument seems to describe all that Job has gone through. The young man is saying: ‘God is speaking to you Job. He is not silent. You think he is not saying anything? He is! Your very sufferings are God speaking to you. Now, it’s not the case, as your three friends make out, that God is punishing you for something you’re refusing to admit. But God is helping you to understand something that you don’t get, and the pain is making that possible’.

I think you can get what Elihu means. When your life has been threatened, your view of life is changed, what you value changes. CS Lewis says this about pain: We can rest contentedly in our sins and stupidities, and anyone who has watched gluttons shoveling down the most exquisite foods as if they did not know what they are eating, will admit that we can ignore even pleasure. But pain insists upon being attended to. God whispers to us in pleasures, speaks in our consciences, but shouts in our pains. It is his megaphone to rouse a deaf world’.

Have you ever had God shout at you through pain? A man once said: “I lived for a long time thinking that my business was the most important thing in my life. But then I had a heart attack and, believe me, God got my attention.” Why do we have to wait for the drastic to happen before we hear God? God in his love brings these things upon us that he might speak to us, that we will hear what he has to say.

Now it is interesting that Elihu says that for pain to speak to us and for us to grow we need a mediator to tell us what is right and to provide a ransom cf 33:23-28. What an amazing preview this is of the gospel! We need a mediator, some one very special (“one in a thousand”) to speak to us, to act for us. Just having pain will not tell us of God and His gracious purposes. Suffering without mediation produces bitterness, resentment, frustration, rebellion against God. It’s no wonder many who suffer have become staunch atheists.

But suffering, when it is interpreted by the mediator God provides is a blessing. We see that in Jesus Christ. We see in his death and resurrection the astonishing love of the Father for his people, to what lengths he will go to save us. In Christ’s suffering we see the just judgment for sin and understand why there is so much pain in the world. In Jesus we see the answer, we see he is the ransom for our sin. In Jesus we see how God can use awful suffering for amazing good, that in pain there can be amazing grace. In Christ we see that God does not punish us for our sin.

That’s all been dealt with by Christ on the cross. So we see that pain can be for our eternal protection, as 33:28 says “He redeemed my soul from going down to the pit and I will enjoy the light”.

The major contribution Elihu brings to the debate in Job, is the shift from thinking all suffering is punishment for sin, to realizing suffering may be God’s way of speaking to us to protect us from eternal destruction. Suffering then is not a punishment but a creative act of grace. It means we don’t look back at the past and search for sin according to the paradigm of Job & his friends.

In suffering we look forward, we look to see what purposes God has for us, gracious purposes to save us, to grow us in faith and maturity. It is seen often that the people we are witnessing to have no interest in Jesus until suffering that shakes their world. The Bible makes it clear that spiritual maturity comes through the difficult times.

The grace of God is seen also in verse 29-30 (cf 33:29-30) Isn’t God patient! He keeps coming back at us speaking in our situation, whether through his Word, dreams, or if need be, through pain and suffering. God uses his megaphone of suffering.

What it all comes down to is being amazed at how much God is beyond us, trusting Him completely that he acts out of his love always, listening to him speak in so many ways, the brash youth, the dream, our pain, but above all, through our mediator Jesus Christ, as we find it in God’s Word. We need to trust we are in His gracious Hands.

Amen.