Troublesome Topic: THE ARGUMENTS OF ELIHU

The meaning of the name Elihu

The name Elihu comes from the word “EL”, which means “God or god”, the preposition “I” which means “my”, and the word “HU” which is the third person singular pronoun and means “he, it, this, or the same”. This name was used of 5 people in the Bible and is thought to have meant “He is my God.” In the case of this quasi-friend of Job, it seems to me that the name is intending to communicate “The same one is my God”, or “my God is the same as his God.” Unlike most names which are very specific, such as Elijah, which means “my God is YHVH”, this one is general “He is my God”, without specifying who “He” is. When I put together the general nature of this name with the things Elihu is recorded as saying in Job chapters 32-37, I think he did not have a close, personal relationship with the Creator God the way Job did. For the other 4 people in the Bible that bore that name, the context of their situation points to the God of the Bible being the God intended by “He”, thus the name “He is my God” made sense even though it was general; context filled in the specific detail that was missing in the name. When I apply the context to the Elihu of the book of Job, it appears to take things a different direction; the Creator God was not really his God, but he wanted people to think that He was.

The words of Elihu (summarized):  (32:1-37:24)

Job says he is innocent, yet God is inflicting him with incurable wounds. It is a contradiction. God does not do evil; He does not pervert justice. There isa direct connection between what a man does and how God treats him. God will repay a man according to what he deserves, so Job must deserve this. And God sees what everyone does, so He is able to judge justly. Job has tried to force God to accept him as righteous; this is a type of rebellion. Job says he is innocent but yet he does not understand why God is doing this to him. Just listen to me, for I have perfect knowledge. Doing right brings prosperity and contentment, doing wrong brings suffering and death. But if someone cries out to God, He will listen. Job, you should consider how great God is, fear Him, and not speak such blasphemy, for God does not oppress people unjustly.

In this abbreviated study of Job, I am making the case that Job did understand the nature of God and salvation while the others did not. We do not know when Elihu joined the others; we do not know if he sat in silence for seven days at the beginning or not.

In Job 33:16-18 and 23-28, it sounds like Elihu is close to saying the right things regarding God’s graciousness. Let me show you 33:27 as an example.

Elihu was close to being right, but God did not pat him on the back and tell him he got it right. In Job 42:7-8 God told the other three friends he was angry at them because they had not spoken the truth about Him. He told them to take sacrificial animals to Job and sacrifice them (with Job’s help), and that Job would pray for them and He would listen to Job’s prayer. The end of verse 9 says that God accepted Job’s prayer for them. Notice that God totally ignored Elihu. God would have invited him too if He saw in him a germ of repentance. But apparently, none was present.

Why was Elihu’s partially correct presentation of God’s grace rejected?

One way to look at this is that Elihu understood God and the working of God with men a little better than the other three friends, but he was arrogant, proud and self-centered. That is why God ignored Elihu. His actions revealed his true belief system – he saw it as a scale in which our good must outweigh our bad, and he was confident he was a pretty good person. He came up with his own system for weighing uprightness, one which likely emphasized outward actions and ignored the condition of the heart. Many people today still believe that God uses a scale and if our good outweighs our bad, we are okay; they are unequivocally wrong! That is not the way God works! God looks at the heart. He always has.

This reminds me of Jesus’ interactions with the Pharisees. In thought, they were so close to getting it all right, but in heart they were the furthest away of them all. Jesus came down harder on them than He did the Sadducees because they (the Pharisees) had most of the doctrinal foundation that was needed; it was their hearts that needed altering (the Sadducees needed a heart change and a mental change).

Like the Pharisees, Elihu was closest in thought, but oh so far away in heart. The other three were misinformed; Elihu was poisoned and rotten.

The rest of what Elihu said in his long speech sounded like the other friends – “God treats people by how they act.” He seems to have contradicted himself when he talked about God being gracious. This tells us that he struggled to find the balance between God’s grace and our actions; he put too much emphasis on our actions while acknowledging that God is gracious (something the other friends did not recognize at all.)

In reality, we all struggle with this balance. How much does God do for us and how much is on us to do, not to earn our salvation, because that is impossible, but to fulfill our responsibilities in this matter. Those would be things like repentance, confession, trust, faith, obedience, taking the proper actions to love others and live a holy life. In everything there is a balance between God working in our lives and us doing what Paul said in Philippians 2 :12, “work out your salvation with fear and trembling”. Oswald Chambers was fond of saying, “we must work out what God works in.”

Most of us know that entire theological systems have been built around certain positions regarding this debate. I encourage you to do your own searching in God’s word; don’t take the position of your denomination as proven fact. I am convinced that any position on one end of this spectrum or the other is most likely wrong. It is a nuanced thing, not a cut and dried thing. The better we understand the qualities of God, the better equipped we are to make our own determination on what a proper balance looks like on this topic. And then be ready to continually alter your position in small ways as you continue to learn more about who God is and how He works.

We may never find the perfect balance on this issue, but learning God’s heart will get us closer than anything else can. In the end, it is not an intellectual pursuit, it is a spiritual journey.

We are told in Job 42:8-9 that the three older friends of Job did what God told them to do and God accepted their sacrifice and did not “deal with them according to their folly”. Once again, Elihu is not mentioned, implying that he did not offer a sacrifice nor ask Job to pray for him. It appears that he remained in his sinful pride.