Scripture Daily

Context No. 100 of 4322 · Job

Context · Reflection

Job 33:1-16: in context

1“However, Job, please hear my speech, and listen to all my words. 2See now, I have opened my mouth. My tongue has spoken in my mouth. 3My words will utter the uprightness of my heart. That which my lips know they will speak sincerely. 4The Spirit of God has made me, and the breath of the Almighty gives me life. 5If you can, answer me. Set your words in order before me, and stand up. 6Behold, I am toward God even as you are. I am also formed out of the clay. 7Behold, my terror will not make you afraid, neither will my pressure be heavy on you. 8“Surely you have spoken in my hearing, I have heard the voice of your words, saying, 9‘I am clean, without disobedience. I am innocent, neither is there iniquity in me. 10Behold, he finds occasions against me. He counts me for his enemy. 11He puts my feet in the stocks. He marks all my paths.’ 12“Behold, I will answer you. In this you are not just, for God is greater than man. 13Why do you strive against him, because he doesn’t give account of any of his matters? 14For God speaks once, yes twice, though man pays no attention. 15In a dream, in a vision of the night, when deep sleep falls on men, in slumbering on the bed, 16then he opens the ears of men, and seals their instruction,

Job's three friends have run out of arguments, and a younger man named Elihu, who has been listening the whole time, breaks in. He speaks for six chapters and nobody answers him. This passage is his opening, and it is mostly about how he intends to speak.

He asks Job to listen, says his words come from an upright heart, and then makes a claim the older friends never made: I am toward God just as you are, I too was pinched off from clay. He tells Job not to fear him, that no pressure from him will be heavy. He is claiming to argue as an equal rather than from above, which is exactly what the three friends failed to do.

Then his actual point. Job has complained that God does not answer him. Elihu says God speaks in more than one way, and people do not perceive it: in a dream, in a vision of the night, when deep sleep falls, he opens their ears. The suggestion is that the answer has been arriving in a form Job was not counting as an answer. Elihu is young, long-winded, and God never rebukes him, though he never commends him either. Where have I decided I am getting no reply, when what I mean is that I have not gotten one in the form I specified?

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