Job 36:1

ELIHU’S FOURTH AND LAST DISCOURSE, chapters 36, 37.

1. Elihu also proceeded Elihu has thus far made the same number of addresses as each of the three friends, with the exception of Zophar. Jewish commentators have remarked that he might properly have stopped here, but the penitent silence of Job encourages him to proceed. Thus far his object has been to correct several errors and misapprehensions into which Job had fallen; he now proposes to take a more specific view of the object of divine chastisement. God’s infinite nature, his almightiness, he says, manifests itself in caring more particularly for the righteous. Because of their like moral nature, he subjects all human beings to discipline, that the precious may be separated from the vile. Suffering develops character: the good it makes better, the bad, worse: until, at last, the latter die prematurely the death of the most abandoned. Thus it appears that the general course of God’s providence declares for righteousness. Therefore, if Job heed not the divine visitation, he has reason to deprecate the divine wrath, whose angry mutterings he may already hear in the distant cloud, (Job 36:18.) This leads Elihu to speak of the power of God in nature, whose beneficence, no less displayed than his justice, declares him not only a righteous, but a gracious governor of the world. A peculiarity of this and of the other speeches of Elihu, Delitzsch notices, namely, that “they demand of Job penitential submission, not by accusing him of coarse, common sins, as the three have done, but because even the best of men suffer for hidden moral defects, which must be perceived by them, lest they perish on their account. Elihu here does for Job just what, in Bunyan, the man in the interpreter’s house does when he sweeps the room, so that Christian had been almost choked with the dust that flew about.”

THE PROVIDENCE OF GOD IS INDEED INCOMPREHENSIBLE, EVEN AS JOB HAD URGED; BUT ITS GENERAL TENDENCIES ARE UNMISTAKABLY DISCLOSED IN THE PRESENT, THOUGH PARTIAL, MUNDANE SCHEME, 36, 37.

“There is a point within man on which suffering rests its base, sin; there is a point within God, indicated by all his works, from which it comes as source, goodness; the two together sufficiently explain it [suffering] and general Providence for man’s life here below.” A.B. Davidson.