Commentary on the Book of Job part one hundred nine

                                    Job 42:1-17

In Job 42:7-10, God spoke to Eliphaz and his two friends through Job and informed them that He was angry with them because they had sought to know Him through their own feeble reasoning and had not sought His revelations as Job had. God then commanded Eliphaz, Bildad, and Zophar to go to Job and offer a burnt offering and God would accept them but not to the higher degree that He had accepted Job. The blood sacrifices of the Old Testament symbolize salvation by grace through faith, the sins of the believer having been washed away by the shed blood of Christ. But the burnt offering sacrifices symbolize the fact that God will use His consuming fire to provide a lesser form of salvation for the rest of humanity by separating and purifying His living image in them that He had created them to be from their total evil in them which He will cast into the lake of fire. God can never lose anything He has ever created. Ecclesiastes 3:14; Exodus 29:14; Matthew 3:11-12; I Corinthians 3:11-15; John 5:28-29; Revelation 20:5; Revelation 20:11-15; Revelation 21:5; Revelation 22:11-12.

Great significance attaches to the fact that God left Elihu out of the burnt offering that He had Job make for his three friends. Possibly, God meant for Elihu to be a symbol of the total evil in man which equates to an absolute rejection of God. Elihu had maintained that God was far away and not much interested in mankind. This belief amounted to a complete rejection of God's Love and a desire to get rid of God. Elihu had become religious but self-righteous. He felt no need to humble himself to God. He had become allied with Satan. Elihu had become symbolic of the total evil in man that Christ will cast into the lake of fire in the end of the world. Matthew 12:31-32; Revelation 20:11-15.

But apart from the fact that God used Elihu to be a symbol of spiritual death itself, Elihu was still a human being who possessed a living image of God within him created by God. In the end of the world, Christ will recover and recreate His good image in Elihu just as He will with every human He has ever created. Luke 20:38; Revelation 20:5; Genesis 1:31.