Commentary on the Book of Job part ninety seven

                                     Job 35:1-16

In Job 35:1-3, Elihu concluded that Job had adopted a false theory about God. Elihu could not believe that God personally cared about any human. Elihu believed in a God of righteousness and wrath, but not a God of Love and compassion. For these reasons, Elihu became very angry with Job because Job had claimed that God had given him a Redeemer who had brought him into a state of grace with a loving God. Elihu blasted what he thought to be Job's false theory, and he determined that Job must have come to believe that he was more righteous than God.

In verse three, Elihu demonstrated that he completely misunderstood Job's search for the truth about God. God had put into Job's mind the idea that he should search for a personal relationship with a loving God as Job displayed in Job 21:15. But Elihu thought that the searching questions that God had given Job were empty because Elihu thought that Job could gain no advantage by imagining himself to be cleansed of his sins by God. In Elihu's mind, God did not care about a personal relationship with any human.

In Job 35:4-14, Elihu provided Job with his own description of the nature of God. Elihu rebuked Job's claim that God had brought Job into a personal relationship with Him. Elihu contended that God cares nothing about the individual wickedness or righteousness of any individual. Although individual wickedness hurts others, and their righteousness helps others; God does not give "songs in the night" which means He does not care about fellowship with individual humans. According to verses 11-13, God has given man intelligence, but He does not care about man's pride and vanity which are common Biblical words for evil.

In verse 14, Elihu deliberately mocked Job's claim that he would see God by saying that Job claimed he would not see God. Elihu admitted that he believed God makes judgments and that Job should trust in His judgments, but Elihu wanted Job to understand that God would never pardon him.

In verse 15, Elihu described the kind of judgments he believed God makes. In Elihu's mind, God does get angry with evil, but He does not go to extremes in His judgments which means He judges in a very dispassionate way. To Elihu, God judges like a very disinterested judge who does not particularly care about the grievances of the criminal's victims or the evil within the criminal, but he sentences the criminal to prison only because he cares about the chaos that crime causes in civilization. In a similar way, Elihu believed God punished evil in order to protect His creations from chaos, not because He cared about any person.