Job 34:33-37: in context

Elihu, the young man who has appointed himself to set Job straight, is in full flow here, and he says something that should stop us. Having decided that Job speaks without knowledge and that his words lack wisdom, Elihu declares: I wish that Job were tried to the very end, because he answers like a wicked man. Sit with that. Elihu is looking at a man who has already lost his children, his health, and everything he owns, a man scraping his sores with a piece of pottery, and he wishes his suffering would go on longer, be pushed all the way to the limit, so that Job would be fully exposed and Elihu's judgment of him vindicated. He wants more affliction heaped on the afflicted, to prove himself right.

Elihu is confident he has Job figured out, and Scripture leaves his confidence looking presumptuous, a young man certain he can read the heart of a suffering man he does not understand. But the uglier thing is the wish itself: the desire to see someone's hardship continue and intensify so that it confirms our verdict on them. It is a cruelty that hides easily inside a sense of being right. Under the cover of they are getting what they deserve, or this will teach them, sits a genuine wish for another person's suffering to run its full course, for the sake of our own being proved correct.

That is an impulse worth hunting for in myself, because it can be very well concealed. When I have decided someone is in the wrong, there can be a quiet part of me that does not merely accept their hardship but half-wishes it would deepen, that wants to see them tried to the end so that my judgment of them stands. Elihu said it out loud. Is there someone whose suffering I am secretly glad to see continue because it vindicates my verdict on them, and what would mercy, rather than the wish to be proved right, look like toward them instead?