Job33:27

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.

In Job 33:16-18 and 23-28 it sounds like Elihu is saying the right things pertaining to God’s graciousness, yet at the end of the book, God told the other three friends to ask Job to pray for them, but He totally ignored Elihu. God did not pat him on the back and tell him he got it right. Why was Elihu’s correct presentation of God’s grace (at least in this short section) discounted?

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, at the end of the book, God ignored Elihu. His actions belayed 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 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 both a heart change and a mental change).

At the end of Job (42:7-9), God told Eliphaz, Bildad and Zophar to go to Job, offer sacrifices and ask Job to pray for them; Elihu is conspicuously absent from that invitation. God would have invited him too if He saw in him the germ of repentance. Like the Pharisees, he was closest in thought, but oh, so far away in heart. The other three were simply 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.