by
Damien F. Mackey
“Because
Elihu really is providing us with truth and revelation. ….
Elihu
is on the scene to resolve the dispute, chastising both prior
groups
and
offering the correct theological perspective”.
Stan Rock
Previously I
have proposed – following others – that young Elihu of the Book of Job was both
wise and prophetically inclined:
Young
Elihu in the Book of Job corrects the ‘wisdom’ of the aged
(5) Young Elihu in
the Book of Job corrects the ‘wisdom’ of the aged
and that:
Elihu
a contemporary of the prophet Ezekiel
(5) Elihu a
contemporary of the prophet Ezekiel
May
even, potentially, have been Ezekiel.
Here I take up what Stan
Rock has to say about young Elihu (2014)
Christus Victor:
Existentialism Faces Eternity
Elihu, the Forgotten
Prophet of Job
The Book of Job is one of
the most important of the entire Bible, and is a prerequisite to all
discussions of Christian theology, particularly theodicy.
Unfortunately, two
erroneous interpretations of Job’s theses are by far the most popular.
Job the Hero: The Sunday
School Interpretation
In Sunday School as a
child, the Book of Job was presented to me as the story of:
- Satan’s
challenge to God,
- Job’s
suffering as a result,
- Job
courageously refusing to curse God through the suffering,
- and
God rewarding that fortitude with recompense and a happy ending.
This is the
story of Job in the shallow end of the Christian pool. ….
Bad Friends: The “No
Heroes” Interpretation
The other popular
“take-away” from Job is that when someone is suffering, words only make things
worse, and each person who talked to Job was wrong.
Job’s friends Eliphaz,
Zophar, and Bildad are indeed rebuked, in the end, by God himself. And Job’s
complaints against his friends would seem to serve such a thesis.
Ravi Zacharias wrote in
his recent book, “Why Suffering? Finding Meaning and Comfort When Life
Doesn’t Make Sense”:
“[A ‘negative reality’
emerged in] the colossal failure of [Job’s] friends. They were at their
best when they took time out of their own lives just to be with him, saying
nothing. The moment they began to give their own observations for why Job was suffering
and offer their suggestions for remedying his situation, Job’s pain
intensified. To be loved and feel cared about is what someone who is hurting
needs from friends.”
Zacharias sees the problem
of Job’s friends remedied only by God’s ultimate arrival:
“So the failure we see in
the story of Job is the failure of friendship. Then comes the answer of God.
God’s answer was not propositional, but relational. And that is what Job most
needed. He simply needed to know that God was with him through his ordeal …
that God had not abandoned him.”
The Problems With These
Interpretations
The
former interpretation accounts for Job chapters 1, chapter 2 verses 1
through 10, and chapter 42 verses 10 through 16. As such, it is missing
about 40 chapters of content.
The latter interpretation
has completely jettisoned the most overlooked prophet in the Old
Testament: Elihu.
An Overview of Job
Job’s 42 chapters contain
the following:
- An introduction to
Job’s predicament.
- Job arguing with
friends Eliphaz, Zophar, and Bildad about whether Job is righteous vs.
whether God is just.
- Elihu arguing against
both Job and Job’s 3 friends.
- The Storm of God
arriving and boasting of His transcendent power, wisdom, and justice.
- The conclusion: Job
repents, God rebukes Job’s 3 friends (not Elihu), and Job is
given recompense (as far as it can be called that).
Notice how much material
Elihu provides, material never thereafter rebutted, left to be punctuated by
God himself. Isn’t it odd that he is so often forgotten, bundled as “just
another friend” alongside Eliphaz, Zophar, and Bildad?
Elihu as Prophet
Elihu is not a shy
character. He’s a young upstart, and makes no apologies about the wisdom he
brings to the table:
“I thought, ‘Age should
speak; advanced years should teach wisdom.’ But it is the spirit in a person,
the breath of the Almighty, that gives them understanding. It is not only the
old who are wise, not only the aged who understand what is right. … My
words come from an upright heart; my lips sincerely speak what I know. The
Spirit of God has made me; the breath of the Almighty gives me
life. … Be silent, [Job,] and I will teach you
wisdom. … Hear my words, you wise men [Eliphaz, Zophar, Bildad];
listen to me, you men of learning. … So listen to me, you men of
understanding. … If you have understanding, hear this; listen to what I
say.”
All this, and God does
not rebuke him like he rebukes everyone else.
Why?
Because Elihu really
is providing us with truth and revelation.
He really is confronting
Job, Eliphaz, Zophar, and Bildad and correcting their bad theology.
“Bear with me a little
longer and I will show you that there is more to be said on God’s
behalf. I get my knowledge from afar; I will ascribe justice to
my Maker. Be assured that my words are not false; one who has perfect
knowledge is with you.”
This isn’t some joke.
This is prophecy.
Elihu is on the scene
to resolve the dispute, chastising both prior
groups and offering the correct theological perspective.
Job’s Lamentation Theology
The calamity that befalls
Job — and for which God is superordinately responsible (he deliberately gave
permission to Satan here, after all) — prompts Job to regret the day he was
born. He claims personal righteousness, and thus his misfortunes must be indicative
(given that superordinate responsibility) of injustice in God, given that
justice means, “He repays everyone for what they have done; he brings on them
what their conduct deserves (Job 34).”
Job laments the fact that
he cannot approach God personally with the case for his innocence; he yearns to
do so! His friends aren’t “buying” that case, but Job surmises that a
person lives that could vindicate him.
Job doesn’t relax God’s
classical attributes. He fully endorses God’s omnipotence and superordinate
responsibility (Job 12), as well as his cosmic wisdom (Job 28).
As such, Job’s theodicean
solution — his “lamentation theology” — is to indict God’s benevolence.
“There is no justice,” Job
says.
The Karmic Folk Theology
of Eliphaz, Zophar, & Bildad
Eliphaz, Zophar, and
Bildad have different emphases, but repeat some similar themes, and since are
all rebuked, can be treated as a group.
Their argument is as
follows: Since God is just (“He repays everyone for what they have done”) and
superordinately responsible for what happens to a person, then if something bad
happens to a person, it must be in response to something that person has done.
Eliphaz articulates this “common sense” karmic folk theology:
“Who, being innocent, has
ever perished? Where were the upright ever destroyed? As I have observed, those
who plow evil and those who sow trouble reap it.”
Bildad, for example, jumps
to the conclusion that Job’s sons must have been sinners, too:
“Does God pervert justice?
Does the Almighty pervert what is right? When your children sinned against him,
he gave them over to the penalty of their sin.”
Every time Job insists
that he’s innocent, his friends go the opposite direction: Job must be super
wicked, and trying to hide it. Zophar says:
“Though evil is sweet in
[a wicked man’s] mouth, and he hides it under his tongue… [it] will turn sour
in his stomach [and] become the venom of serpents within him.”
As Job proves adamant in
his own defense, his friend Bildad retreats to that classic “catch-all”
of total depravity: As a human, you are so beneath God that you are a
worthless maggot and deserve whatever happens to you.
“How then can a mortal be
righteous before God? How can one born of woman be pure? If even the moon is
not bright and the stars are not pure in his eyes, how much less a mortal, who
is but a maggot; a human being, who is only a worm!”
Eliphaz weaves a
powerful figure: A wealthy man, portly and happy, brought down to shriveling,
sickly misery.
Elihu’s Rejection of Job’s
Lamentation Theology
First, Elihu sees it
within human capacity to discern God’s justice in the abstract, even if we
don’t know how it plays out day-by-day. He rejects the idea that God’s goodness
and justice are completely inscrutable, as if something without human-appreciable
meaning.
“For the ear tests words
as the tongue tastes food. Let us discern for ourselves what is right; let us
learn together what is good.”
Elihu further defines
justice (“He repays everyone for what they have done”) and rejects the notion
that God would pervert justice.
So, Elihu joins
Eliphaz, Zophar, and Bildad against Job’s claim of innocence.
“His eyes are on the ways
of mortals; he sees their every step. … Should God then reward you on your
terms, when you refuse to repent? … [We all agree that] Job speaks without
knowledge; his words lack insight. Oh, that Job might be tested to the utmost for
answering like a wicked man! To his sin he adds rebellion; scornfully he claps
his hands among us and multiplies his words against God.”
Elihu’s Rejection of
Karmic Folk Theology
But here’s
where it gets interesting.
Elihu agrees, Job has
sinned, insofar as Job arrogantly indicted God for injustice, speaking “of
things [he] did not understand”; Job’s plea, laden with such “empty
talk,” was brazen, reckless, and cheap.
But he rejects the
notion that man is a “maggot” who deserves whatever befalls him.
The transcendence of God
to man does not make man despised, but rather, makes man’s wickedness less impactful
to God:
“Look up at the heavens
and see; gaze at the clouds so high above you. If you sin, how does that affect
him? If your sins are many, what does that do to him? … Your wickedness only
affects humans like yourself.”
Instead of a “despised
mankind” narrative, Elihu crafts a narrative in which God has an instrumental
purpose for all he does:
“God is mighty, but
despises no one; he is mighty, and firm in his purpose.”
In this way, God’s justice
is comprehensible, but the intricacies of
how that justice will be made manifest are mysterious. God is not a
flayer; he’s a teacher:
“Who is a teacher like
him? Who has prescribed his ways for him, or said to him, ‘You have done
wrong’? … How great is God — beyond our understanding!”
It’s less about
“vengeance,” but instead about correction, forebearing as long as that
purpose has hope:
“He tells [the sinner]
what they have done — that they have sinned arrogantly. He makes them listen to
correction and commands them to repent of their evil.”
He recrafts Eliphaz’s tale
of the sickened man into a narrative of redemption:
“Someone may be chastened
on a bed of pain with constant distress in their bones, so that their body
finds food repulsive and their soul loathes the choicest meal. Their flesh
wastes away to nothing, and their bones, once hidden, now stick out. They draw
near to the pit, and their life to the place of the dead.
Yet if there is an angel
at their side, a messenger, one out of a thousand, sent to tell them how to be
upright, and he is gracious to that person and says to God, ‘Spare them from
going down to the pit; I have found a ransom for them — let their flesh be
renewed like a child’s; let them be restored as in the days of their youth’
— then that person can pray to God and find favor with him, they will see
God’s face and shout for joy; he will restore them to full
well-being. … God does all these things to a person — twice, even
three times — to turn them back from the pit, that the light of life may shine
on them.”
Christ as Victor
We’ve
talked before about
how the existential dilemma of Ecclesiastes — ultimate meaninglessness —
received a practical solution in Christ as conqueror of death.
In Job, we see the dilemma
of justice, where the wicked may enjoy the peace of death without their due
repayment, and where the playing-out of God’s justice may involve the
unrewarded — in life — suffering of the faithful.
Christ, as conqueror of
death, is also the final judge. The final judgment is not for
God’s edification — Elihu correctly explains that God doesn’t need to hold
a tribunal — but for ours. And through that process, all “loose ends” can be
wrapped-up entirely:
“For we must all appear
before the judgment seat of Christ, so that each of us may receive what is due
us for the things done while in the body, whether good or bad.”
Elihu as Bridge
From the Jewish Encyclopedia:
“[Elihu’s] meaning is ‘He
is my God’ [in the sense of] ‘He remains my God and does not change.’ … [His]
argument is as follows: God is the educator of mankind, who punishes only until
the sinner has atoned for his sin and recognizes his wrong-doing. Then God has
attained His object, to ‘bring back his soul from the pit, to be enlightened
with the light of the living.’
Elihu, therefore, holds a
middle ground, maintaining that God neither ‘takes away judgment,’ nor sends
suffering merely as a punishment, but acts as the educator and teacher of
mankind.”
Elihu is our “bridge” to
Christ. His is a theological response that unites justice and mercy — not
by conflating them, but by employing them as part of a single grand plan.
His is a rejection of
pure retribution and an embrace of prospective instrumentality, an exaltation
of a God who is mighty, despises no one, and is firm in his purpose.
Elihu, who heralds the
Lord Himself:
“Out
of the north he comes in golden splendor;
God
comes in awesome majesty.
The
Almighty is beyond our reach and exalted in power;
in
his justice and great righteousness, he does not oppress.”
