Scripture Daily

Context No. 1733 of 4322 · Job

Context · Reflection

Job 36:1-16: in context

1Elihu also continued, and said, 2“Bear with me a little, and I will show you; for I still have something to say on God’s behalf. 3I will get my knowledge from afar, and will ascribe righteousness to my Maker. 4For truly my words are not false. One who is perfect in knowledge is with you. 5“Behold, God is mighty, and doesn’t despise anyone. He is mighty in strength of understanding. 6He doesn’t preserve the life of the wicked, but gives justice to the afflicted. 7He doesn’t withdraw his eyes from the righteous, but with kings on the throne, he sets them forever, and they are exalted. 8If they are bound in fetters, and are taken in the cords of afflictions, 9then he shows them their work, and their transgressions, that they have behaved themselves proudly. 10He also opens their ears to instruction, and commands that they return from iniquity. 11If they listen and serve him, they will spend their days in prosperity, and their years in pleasures. 12But if they don’t listen, they will perish by the sword; they will die without knowledge. 13“But those who are godless in heart lay up anger. They don’t cry for help when he binds them. 14They die in youth. Their life perishes among the unclean. 15He delivers the afflicted by their affliction, and opens their ear in oppression. 16Yes, he would have allured you out of distress, into a wide place, where there is no restriction. That which is set on your table would be full of fatness.

Elihu, the young man who speaks after Job's three friends, continues his defense of God's ways. God is great, he says, and does not despise anyone; he gives justice to the afflicted and does not turn his eyes from the righteous. And Elihu describes how God deals with people through hardship: when they are bound in affliction, he shows them their faults, opens their ears to instruction, and calls them to turn from sin. He delivers the afflicted by their affliction, Elihu says, and opens their ear in oppression.

Amid Elihu's words is a striking idea about the purpose suffering can serve: he opens their ear in oppression; he delivers the afflicted by their affliction. Elihu is not saying, as Job's other friends did, that all suffering is punishment for particular sin; his point is subtler. It is that God can use affliction to get through to us, to open ears that comfort had closed. When life is easy, we often do not listen; we are self-sufficient, distracted, deaf to God, hearing no need to change. And sometimes it is only in affliction, when we are brought low and our usual props are knocked away, that our ears are finally opened, that we begin to hear what we could not hear in our comfort. God, Elihu suggests, can use the very hardship that pains us to reach us, opening our ear in oppression, teaching us in the school of affliction what prosperity never could. This is not a tidy explanation of all suffering, and we should not offer it glibly to those in pain. But it holds a truth worth pondering for our own hard times: that affliction, bitter as it is, can be the means by which God gets our attention, opens our ears, and turns us back to him. The suffering is real; but it need not be pointless. In the hands of a God who does not despise us, even our afflictions can open ears that comfort had stopped, and become, strange to say, a kind of deliverance, drawing us out of a deafness we did not know we were in.

When affliction comes, can I ask whether God may be using it to open ears that my comfort had closed, to reach me and teach me what ease never could, and rather than only wishing the hardship away, listen for what it may be opening in me that prosperity kept shut?

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