Job CCCVI

 Job 33:23-28, “If there is a messenger for him, a mediator, one among a thousand, to show man His uprightness, then He is gracious to him, and says, ‘deliver him from going down to the Pit; I have found a ransom’; His flesh shall be young like a child’s, he shall return to the days of his youth. He shall pray to God, and He will delight in him, he shall see His face with joy, for He restores to man His righteousness. Then he looks at men and says, ‘I have sinned and perverted what was right, and it did not profit me.’ He will redeem his soul from going to the Pit, and his life shall see the light.”

If you get the sneaky feeling that you’ve met Elihu before, you’re not alone. The reason for this is that you’ve likely run across an Elihu type in your life, as I have, because they are more common than one might think. Elihu was the type of individual who, no matter the situation or circumstance, had the ability to make it all about himself. He was the star of his own show, and everyone around him was an extra.

If a typhoon devastates an entire region, the Elihu type will bemoan the fact that their flight might get delayed or diverted. Never mind that thousands of people are missing and presumed dead, or that an entire nation is without power for going on two weeks; your plans got ruined, you were inconvenienced by having to wait in an airport for two extra hours, and that was the real tragedy.

Elihu took what was happening to Job, and you guessed it, made it all about himself, and how Job was lucky, or at least should feel lucky, because God had sent him along to act as mediator, and by Elihu’s very presence, his selfless act of standing in for Job, he would be spared from the Pit if he would only confess and admit to having sinned and perverted what was right.

In his hubris, Elihu saw himself as one in a thousand, and if he’d had a say in the matter, the book would have been called the Book of Elihu rather than the Book of Job. Job was auxiliary, as far as Elihu was concerned, and the real story here was the selflessness Elihu exhibited by being willing to mediate between Job and God.

Even at the pinnacle of his success, Job never made it about himself. He didn’t go fishing for accolades or seek the praise of men; he didn’t see himself above the need to have a true and abiding relationship with God, nor did he forego the time he spent in God’s presence.

By the time the story of Job begins to unfold, his children were already grown, each in their own houses, yet, even then, Job would send and sanctify his children once the days of feasting had run their course, and offer burnt offerings according to the number of them all.

He understood that everything was dependent on God, His good pleasure, and His sovereign will. For some, once they “make it,” whatever that entails and however that plays out in their minds, God becomes less relevant, less necessary, less important, because their desire was never to have intimacy with God but to succeed, to outshine their competition, and to reach their earthly goals. Not so with Job. By any metric, he’d made it. He was the greatest of all the people of the East, yet that did not dampen his desire to be in God’s presence and walk uprightly.

It’s not as though Job was secretive about his desire for God, nor about his relationship with the Almighty. By his own admission, Elihu had overheard the back-and-forth between Job and his three friends, had witnessed Job’s repeated insistence that he had not done wickedness and that God remained his singular priority and pursuit, but Elihu refused to believe him.

If Job had lived his life incongruent with the will and plan of God up until that point, not only would God not have singled him out as blameless and upright, but there would have been enough evidence to point to and rightly call him a liar to his face when he claimed innocence. He was well known enough that, had he done something wicked, it would have been discovered no matter how hard he tried to hide it.

Job wasn’t trying to save face or claim innocence when he knew himself to be guilty; he wasn’t trying to get off on a technicality, asking what the definition of wickedness was; he knew that he knew himself to be one who feared the Lord, and was not reticent in saying it.

Anyone who seeks to judge others before they judge themselves is not acting out of love, kindness, or righteous indignation, but a desire to elevate themselves and highlight their own perceived righteousness.

There are a few things that are offputting about Elihu and his approach of Job, but for me, worse than any other, it is the prism through which he saw Job, from an elevated position, thinking himself righteous and within his rights to pass judgment on a man who had, up until this time, denied all the accusations leveled against him, and conducted himself in such a manner as to make those who had been arguing with him have no retort or counterargument.

Elihu might have been a fresh face on the scene; he may have seen himself as superior since Job’s friends were, in his words, very old, but when he opened his mouth to speak, we soon realize he was the worst of the lot. Say what you will about Job’s three friends, but none of them had the temerity to appoint themselves as mediators between Job and God as Elihu had.

As the adage goes, respect isn’t given; it’s earned, and although Job’s friends had earned his respect by traveling to him in his time of need, Elihu had done no such thing. He saw an opportunity to exalt himself, and he took it, thinking it would be an easy thing given Job’s state. What Elihu hadn’t counted on was that it wasn’t any man who was Job’s defender but God, and when God is your defender, no matter what men might say, you will continue to stand firm and resolute.         

With love in Christ,

Michael Boldea, Jr.