Elihu and Job, Part Two

I briefly commented on Elihu and Job in a previous entry. I wanted to revisit the subject because I've finally finished his dialogue and moved to the theophany in Job 38.

As a quick review, Job and his comforters go back and forth through the book essentially arguing about the nature of justice. Job maintains his innocence and integrity against his friends, who insist he has committed some trespass and is being punished for it.

Elihu appears somewhat abruptly—reading between the lines we might guess that the dialogue between Job and his friends occurs in the midst of a crowd of people.¹ He intends to respond differently than the others, and I think he succeeds, at least in a small part.


The theme of his speech is creation, and the sum of what he says is this: "If you can't understand the physical universe—the creation—how do you expect to understand the Creator?" The same sort of reasoning appears in the theophany, where God essentially says to Job (I paraphrase Swindoll's paraphrase), "Until you can run the physical universe, don't tell me how to run the moral universe."

If we cannot discern God's purposes in creation, how are we to discern his purposes in how he deals with us on a moral level? Elihu's logic seems to be essentially that God is just whether we understand his righteousness or not.

We are left with a bit of a bad taste in our mouths here, because the answer doesn't mean that there's less suffering to be had, and in fact doesn't provide us with any real good reason for it. The fortunate end of the story is that the inscrutable appears; in the words of Schaeffer, "He is there, and he is not silent." To understand God and his purposes, he must reveal them to us.

Job got a whirlwind (which appears, it seems, as abruptly as Elihu did), and we have Christ, the ultimate revelation of God to humanity.


In a somewhat tangential vein, Elihu explores the nature of justice in his discussion, too. He looks at righteousness as though it is something that obligates others; for example, he says to Job, "If you are righteous, what do you give to him? Or what does he receive from your hand?" (35.7).

In some respects, I think this is a reasonable way to look at God's righteousness. His righteousness (and his ability to execute justice) obligates us to meet a perfect standard. We see the same in the law given in the Old Testament. The righteousness of the lawgiver obligates the receiver.

But this doesn't work in reverse—the righteousness of the receiver doesn't obligate the lawgiver. Job doesn't obligate God by living a life of integrity.² This essentially hamstrings Job's claim that God has violated his justice; Elihu rightly accuses him of condemning God to justify himself.

We are left, I think, with the understanding that there's an absolute standard of righteousness, and that Job is not the one setting it. To accuse God of perverting justice is to say that one understands justice better than God—a claim we may debunk as easily as Elihu did.


[1] I guess some feel that Elihu is a pre-incarnate manifestation of Christ. I don't see any particular reason to promote or doubt this line of thinking, though his self-assigned role as an intermediary between Job and God implies at least a typological connection.

[2] This is yet another argument for the deity of Christ. Only God's righteousness obligates others; a mere man living a perfect life wouldn't obligate God at all.