Elihu's Vindication (2/2): Job 35-37

Call to Worship

We are called tonight to worship properly and reverently to the Lord. As it is written, the beginning of wisdom is in the reverence of the Lord our God, and as James, brother of Jesus, writes,

James 4:12–14 “There is only one Lawgiver and Judge, the One who is able to save and to destroy; but who are you who judge your neighbor? Come now, you who say, “Today or tomorrow we will go to such and such a city, and spend a year there and engage in business and make a profit.” Yet you do not know what your life will be like tomorrow. You are just a vapor that appears for a little while and then vanishes away.”

Lord’s Prayer and Absolution

Our Father who is in heaven, Hallowed be Your name. Your kingdom come. Your will be done, On earth as it is in heaven. Give us this day our daily bread. And forgive us our debts, as we also have forgiven our debtors. And do not lead us into temptation, but deliver us from evil. 

Almighty God have mercy on us, forgive us all your sins through our Lord Jesus Christ, strengthen us in all goodness, and by the power of the Holy Spirit keep us in eternal life.

For yours is the kingdom and the power and the glory forever. In the name of the Father, who creates, and of the Son, who redeems, and of the Holy Spirit, who sanctifies and purifies us before You, Amen.

Sermon

At the start of our series on these Middle Joban sections, I spoke of the three spheres of existence of Kierkegaard (and added a fourth), i.e., the main ways in which many live their lives, or more fundamentally, their beings as humans thrown into the world. In its three-fold progression, I spoke of, first the aesthetic, or, as Paul would phrase those who preach against Christ, whose “god is their appetite… [who] only think about their life on this earth.” I compared this to the sensationalism of Bildad, who urges Job to admit he’s gravely betrayed God (which we know is not true) in order to get his things back. The second, the ethical, is of that who claims to the right and wrong of man. This sphere is encapsulated in Zophar’s claim to understand Godly morality, when in reality he’s preaching an Zopharian morality. Or, moreso, a matured ethicality. The third, last discussed, was of the rational, best embodied by Eliphaz, who seeks to reason God from what he’s read or been told about God, without realizing that God’s definition is that being that cannot be brought out by us into being. It is God alone who works and wills. A purely aesthetic God would not deprive one of pure bliss. A purely ethical God would not allow “bad” to happen to one. A purely rational God would not allow himself to go against the dictums innate in all men. But God isn’t one who can be described as such, there’s a rich history of apophatic theology, or rightly phrased, negative theology, where God is what he isn’t. We don’t start with a list of traits to expand our knowledge of God. But God, as Creator, is faced with many traits, and those that delimit God or attribute to him known human traits are rejected. God’s titles in Scripture are perfect forms, outside the guise of human intervention. Concepts like love, justice, peace, and hope cannot, in their entirety, be defined by men. According to one early Christian scholar, “The negative way stresses God's absolute transcendence and unknowability in such a way that we cannot say anything about the divine essence because God is so totally beyond being.” Now, before we turn to the final sphere of existence, let me share a quick story,

The famous psychoanalyst Carl Jung, near the end of his life, suffered into a somber depression, where he wrote a work titled An Answer to Job. He claims as soon as it was complete, he felt a vitality again, the drive to keep moving. The story of Job held him back, terrified him, until he dealt with it head-on. But his conclusions are even more terrifying: he concludes that God wronged Job, not by permissibility, but by actively encouraging Job’s suffering. That Job is, then, the antitype of Christ. God wronged man, such that, Christ must make right. This inverts the orthodox notion, clear in Scripture, that Christ died for our sins. I reject this, and I think a close reading of our figure in which we continue to delve into today would do the same.

Elihu is not perfect, but very likely teaches orthodox—i.e., true—teaching. But neither is Job perfect, and this is what Elihu points out. We read Elihu as messenger, mediator, and rebuker last week, and these themes continue as our final 3 chapters focus on a sharp rebuke of Job and defense of God. You see, what Elihu represents is the highest sphere of existence, the path of personal commitment and faith, often involving a “leap of faith” beyond reason, ethics, and aesthetics, towards an embrace in the relationship to God. Luckily, this embrace is open to all. We are no longer ruled by passion (the hot-temperedness of Job’s earlier interlocutors), which are subject to great fault; we are no longer ruled by societal regulations (like those that mocked Job in his poem about his present state), which are subject to the rule of the mob, who seek only to catalyze and coagulate our brokennesses by deceit and false freedom. That is, we are not a slave to our flesh, and we are not a slave to man. We have become free from all else so that we may embrace God. Kierkegaard famously said, “faith is immediacy after reflection.” Job reflected, and a pinnacle of faith and reminder speaks to him, “purifying” him in one sense, before he comes face to face with the Divine.

Justice

Turning to our Scripture readings, what we find in Elihu is a response to many of the topics discussed throughout the book. Remember, Elihu tells us he’s been attentively listening, holding himself back until he no longer could. And on his second turn to rebuking Job’s demeanor, he begins as such,

Job 35:2–3 Do you think this is according to justice? / Do you say, ‘My righteousness is more than God’s’? / For you say, ‘What advantage will it be to You? / What profit will I have, more than if I had sinned?’

Brothers and sisters, hear the word not just from Elihu’s mouth, but from the trembling edge of human reason. “Do you think this is according to justice?” he asks Job—piercing not just his argument, but the very heart of our mortal pride. Job, in his agony, does not curse God, no—but he does begin to weigh his suffering against his righteousness, as though God’s justice were a scale, and his own piety the counterbalance. This is not open rebellion, but it is the quiet voice of absurd expectation, the hope that the cosmos might make sense on our terms. Elihu speaks, then, against that very confrontation. He reminds Job—and us—that God’s justice is not a transaction. It cannot be earned, bargained, or quantified. It is not a ledger. It is a mystery, apophatic and vast, as Kierkegaard would say, “a leap into the absurd,” not a climb to understanding. Job stands at the cliff’s edge, daring to demand an answer that no man is owed. And Elihu, perhaps harshly but rightly, warns: such an answer, if it came, would burn more than it would heal. For divine justice is not merely unknown—it is unknowable, and it does not answer to us.

Job 35:5–8 Look at the heavens and see; / And behold the clouds—they are higher than you./ If you have sinned, what do you accomplish against Him? / And if your transgressions are many, what do you do to Him? / If you are righteous, what do you give to Him, / Or what does He receive from your hand? / Your wickedness is for a man like yourself, / And your righteousness is for a son of man.”

Look to the heavens, Elihu cries, and see—behold the clouds, far above you. In these words is a thunderous reminder of the chasm between Creator and creature. “If you have sinned, what do you accomplish against Him?” he asks—not with cynicism, but with clarity. God is not shaped by our virtue, nor diminished by our wickedness. His being is self-contained, unshaken by our flailing. This is the rupture that undoes all human attempts to bind God within our frameworks—be they aesthetic, ethical, or rational. As Sartre once noted, “Existence precedes essence,” but in the divine economy, God is essence itself, existence itself, utterly independent of our projections. Our good deeds do not add to Him, nor do our failures subtract. This is the terrifying and liberating truth that Elihu speaks: we cannot control God. We cannot bargain with Him, cannot twist His arm with piety, cannot hold Him hostage with suffering. And this dismantles our illusion of leverage, for even the best of us gives nothing to God that God did not first give. As the Lord Himself will later declare with overwhelming finality: “Who has given to Me, that I should repay him?” (Job 41:11). God is not in our debt. He is the uncaused Cause, the I AM, and our righteousness—like our wickedness—belongs only to the world of men.

Divine Silence

Job 35:9–10 ““Because of the multitude of oppressions they cry out; They cry for help because of the arm of the mighty. “But no one says, ‘Where is God my Maker, Who gives songs in the night,”

“There is a cry,” Elihu says, “that rises from the multitude of oppressions”—but listen closely: it is not always a cry for God. It is often a cry for escape, for relief, for the arm of power to lift the burden. This is the dilemma of the human heart in pain. It yearns not for the presence of the Maker, but for the absence of suffering. We cry out, but not, “Where is God my Maker?” We cry, “Where is my justice? Where is my answer?” This is the existential temptation: to mistake comfort for meaning, to believe that the goodness of God must be proven by the absence of suffering. But Elihu points us to something deeper. He calls us to a faith that does not merely want deliverance, but wants the Deliverer Himself. As Kierkegaard writes, “Faith is the highest passion in a human being,” and that passion must pass through despair. True faith dares to sing songs in the night, to love the God who does not explain Himself, to bow not to the logic of comfort but to the mystery of majesty. True faith is that noble and authentic response to the absurd world we experience, whether that be in truth or perception. So when at last God speaks, He offers no answers—only Himself. No defense, only presence. And it is enough. The storm clouds roll, and out of them comes not justification, but glory. This is what Job—and we—must learn: that multiplying words without knowledge can never summon truth. Only awe. Only surrender. Only God.

Job 35:15–16 ““And now, because He has not visited in His anger, Nor has He acknowledged transgression well, So Job opens his mouth emptily; He multiplies words without knowledge.””

Elihu speaks now with a solemn warning, one sharpened by love: “Because He has not visited in His anger… Job opens his mouth emptily.” Here, Elihu confronts the soul’s desperate urge to explain what it cannot endure. God’s silence, he says, is not abandonment. The stillness of heaven is not evidence of injustice, nor is the delay of judgment a failure of righteousness. In this, Elihu strikes at the heart of the absurdity of Jobs “torment.” For it is precisely when the silence grows thickest that we are tempted to fill the void with our own words, to construct meaning where we ought to receive mystery. But better, says Elihu, is the silence of faith than the babble of presumption. Better to wait than to accuse. Better to trust than to theorize. Job, in his anguish, has begun to speak beyond what he knows—to press charges against the Almighty without understanding the courtroom in which he stands. And Elihu’s rebuke is not condemnation but mercy: a call to pull back before the line is crossed, before the whirlwind comes. For when God does appear, He does not validate Job’s arguments—He overwhelms them. And so this final word from Elihu is not to shame Job, but to protect him, to remind him—and us—that humility before the silence of God is not weakness, but wisdom.

Power of God

Job 36:2–3 ““Wait for me a little, and I will show you That there is yet more to be said in God’s behalf. “I will fetch my knowledge from afar, And I will ascribe righteousness to my Maker.”

“Wait for me a little,” Elihu pleads—not out of vanity, but because what he bears is not his own. “I will speak on God’s behalf,” he says, humbly yet boldly, positioning himself not as the Judge but as a witness. He is not the voice of the whirlwind, but the whisper that prepares the soul to meet it. Like a forerunner in the wilderness, Elihu readies Job to receive what reflection alone cannot offer. He is clay speaking of the Creator, a man pointing beyond himself. And here, in this moment, we glimpse the paradox that runs through the heart of faith: that it demands reflection, and yet, in the end, surpasses it. Faith, said Kierkegaard, is not the product of reason but the leap beyond it—"immediacy after reflection." Job has reflected deeply, agonizingly, but now the time for argument ends. Now comes listening. For Elihu's call is not to debate, but to behold. To stop multiplying questions and begin to yield to the higher righteousness of the Maker. He does not dismiss Job’s pain, but he lifts Job’s gaze, away from himself, away from the ash heap and toward the heavens, where the answer will not be a syllogism, but a storm.

Job 36:6–7 ““He does not keep the wicked alive, But gives justice to the afflicted. “He does not withdraw His eyes from the righteous; But with kings on the throne He has seated them forever, and they are exalted.”

Elihu declares with unwavering conviction: God’s justice is not absent, even when hidden. “He does not keep the wicked alive,” he proclaims, “but gives justice to the afflicted.” This is not naïve optimism—it is defiant faith in the face of pain. Job has cried out from the wreckage of his life, wondering if righteousness counts for anything. But Elihu responds: affliction is not abandonment. Suffering is not divine neglect. The eye of God does not blink, does not wander, does not close in weariness. “He does not withdraw His eyes from the righteous.” Though His presence is veiled, His gaze remains fixed. Even kings are seated and sustained by His sovereign will—how much more, then, the lowly who cry out in trust? Elihu’s words find their echo in Christ’s own voice centuries later: “Are not two sparrows sold for a penny? And yet not one of them falls to the ground apart from your Father.” (Matt. 10:29). The same God who watches the flight of the sparrow watches the collapse of the righteous. This is the scandalous hope of the afflicted: that even when the world caves in, they are not unseen. God’s justice may not follow our timing or our logic, but it is never asleep. It lives, it sees, and it will—when the fullness of time comes—answer.

Job 36:15 ““He delivers the afflicted in their affliction, And opens their ear in time of oppression.”

“He delivers the afflicted in their affliction,” Elihu says—not from affliction, but in it. Here lies one of the deepest mysteries of faith: that suffering is not always punishment, nor is it random cruelty. It is discipline. It is invitation. It is the schooling of the soul. In the furnace of affliction, the noise of comfort is silenced, and the illusions we cherish begin to melt away. What we once clung to—our control, our entitlements, even our theology—is stripped down until only the essential remains: God Himself. As Kierkegaard wrote, “Only when it is a duty to love, only then is love eternally secured against despair.” So, too, suffering becomes the moment when faith is secured not by answers, but by surrender. Affliction sharpens the ear—because in the silence of pain, the voice of God can finally be heard. Not as a response to our demands, but as a summons to awe. This is where Elihu is leading Job: out of the courtroom and into the sanctuary. For soon, God will speak—not to explain, but to unveil. “Can you command the morning?” He will ask. “Can you loose the cords of Orion?” These are not taunts. They are revelations. They remind Job—and us—that the goal is not to master the universe, but to kneel before its Maker. And in that kneeling, to be delivered.

Job 36:21 ““Be careful, do not turn to evil, For you have preferred this to affliction.”

There is a real danger: that in suffering, we will forsake the good. When affliction seems endless, the temptation is not merely despair but rebellion — to curse God and die, as Job's wife once urged. Elihu pleads with Job: prefer affliction to evil. Prefer suffering with God to sin without Him. There is no path to peace that does not pass through the cross.

Job 37:5 ““God thunders with His voice wondrously, Doing great things which we cannot comprehend.”

“God thunders with His voice wondrously,” Elihu declares, as the sky begins to churn and the air thickens with coming glory. The storm gathers—not only in the heavens, but in the text itself. Lightning flashes, the earth trembles, and Elihu’s speech swells with the tone of divinity, foreshadowing the voice that soon will speak from the whirlwind. This is not preparation for a neat theological answer. It is not a syllogism, a moral equation, or a tidy closure to Job’s anguished questions. What is coming is a theophany—a revelation that will unmake Job’s categories, not clarify them. Elihu has taken Job to the precipice, and now the clouds roll in to carry him over. “Great things which we cannot comprehend,” Elihu says, and in that phrase we hear the pulse of Isaiah’s later cry: “His ways are higher than our ways.” (Isaiah 55:9). The mystery of God does not exist to frustrate us, but to draw us out of ourselves, to dismantle the illusion that God can be reduced to our moral systems or understood on our terms. Elihu's storm is not chaos—it is majesty approaching. It is the overture to a divine encounter where words fall short, and wonder takes their place.

Job 37:14–15 ““Listen to this, O Job, Stand and consider the wonders of God. “Do you know how God establishes them, And makes the lightning of His cloud to shine?”

“Listen to this, O Job,” Elihu commands—not with rebuke, but with reverence. “Stand and consider the wonders of God.” In the heart of suffering, in the swirl of unanswered questions, Elihu does not call Job to argue or act. He calls him to be still. To stand. To behold. To contemplate. Not with a clenched fist, but with open hands. Here is the posture of true wisdom—not mastery, but humility; not control, but wonder. Elihu’s questions—“Do you know how God establishes them?”—are not meant to shame, but to silence the noise of self-assurance. He invites Job into the sacred pause, the quiet awe that precedes the storm of divine speech. For it is not in the whirlwind that wisdom begins, but in the stillness just before it. As Pascal once wrote, “All of humanity’s problems stem from man's inability to sit quietly in a room alone.” Elihu gives Job that room, that quiet—inviting him to lay down his case and simply gaze upward. Because at the edge of mystery, wisdom does not begin with answers. It begins with bowing.

Faith Beyond Understanding

Job 37:23–24 ““The Almighty—we cannot find Him; He is exalted in power And He will not do violence to justice and abundant righteousness. “Therefore men fear Him; He does not regard any who are wise of heart.””

Elihu ends his speech with a final, powerful declaration: “The Almighty—we cannot find Him.” Here, the veil is lifted just enough to reveal both the terror and the comfort that come with the knowledge of God’s exaltation. God is not absent because He is hidden, nor is He unjust because His ways elude our understanding. Rather, He is “exalted in power,” and in that exaltation lies both terror and comfort. Terror, because we are but dust before Him, finite and fragile. Comfort, because His justice and righteousness are beyond our comprehension—abundant, unshakeable, perfect. This, Elihu affirms, is why “men fear Him.” It is not a fear of wrath, but a fear rooted in awe, reverence, and the recognition that God's ways are not bound by the limited scales of human understanding. As the Proverbs remind us, "The fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom."

And then, as Elihu fades into silence, the stage is set. The arguments of man—whether aesthetic, ethical, or rational—collapse into dust. All that remains is the soul, laid bare, awaiting not an answer to its many questions, but a revelation that transcends them. It is here, in this stillness, that the cloud of God’s presence gathers. And out of it, the Voice speaks—not to explain suffering, not to validate or invalidate human reasoning, but to unveil the infinite grandeur of divine justice. “Where were you when I laid the foundation of the earth?” God asks, drawing Job—and us—into a sphere far beyond human audit, far beyond the confines of reason and logic. For God’s justice is not measured by our scales. His ways are not subject to human scrutiny.

The suffering of the righteous, then, is not a failure of divine goodness, but a mystery enfolded within the infinite purposes of the Creator. And in this mystery, faith is born. In Elihu’s rebuke, we find not condemnation but preparation. A call to humility, to wonder, to trust in what we cannot see or fully understand. It is a call to step beyond aesthetics, beyond ethics, beyond reason—into the final, most sacred sphere: faith. For blessed are those who, not having seen, yet believe.

Conclusion

Take again that haunting verse from James: “You are just a vapor that appears for a little while and then vanishes away.” This is not sentiment—it is reality. It is the sobering clarity that Job, through anguish and ash, has come to accept. Before the prose restoration at the end of the book, before any outward redemption, Job is inwardly transformed. He has learned, not why he suffers, but who holds his suffering. And in that knowledge, he is stilled.

We have walked with him through the storm—through the agony of unjust pain, the torment of silence, and the collapse of every rational comfort. We have watched him cry out for answers and be met not with explanations, but with revelation. We have heard his friends try to moralize the mystery, only to be exposed as false comforters. And now, we have listened to Elihu, the unexpected prophet, the forerunner, the one who gently but firmly redirects Job’s gaze upward—not to control, not to understand, but to stand in awe.

At the heart of this series has been the absurd—Job’s suffering, Abel’s dust, Christ’s cry from the cross. “The absurd is born of this confrontation between the human need and the unreasonable silence of the world,” wrote Camus. And yet, it is into this silence that faith dares to speak. Not faith in a neatly ordered cosmos, but in a God whose justice is deeper than our comprehension, and whose presence can thunder even from the whirlwind.

Tertullian, the strange and stubborn father of paradox, declared: Credo quia absurdum—I believe because it is absurd. And perhaps that is the only place faith truly begins—not in certainty, but in surrender. The absurdity of suffering meets the absurdity of grace. A righteous man suffers without cause. Then a righteous God comes and suffers for the sake of those who caused it.

“Eli, Eli, lama sabachthani?” Even the Son of God joins the cry of Job. The incarnate Word utters the lament of forsakenness. But where Job receives a whirlwind, Christ becomes the whirlwind—absorbing the chaos, the silence, the abandonment, into Himself. At Golgotha, God answers not with words, but with wounds.

So what are we to do? When we, too, face absurdities—external wars and internal voids, injustice, despair, grief—what response can we offer? Job teaches us this: not rebellion, not resignation, but reverence. To fall silent before the mystery. To trust in the God whose justice does not always prevent suffering, but whose righteousness is so complete that even suffering is not wasted. It becomes the soil of revelation.

And so we end not with answers, but with awe. The same awe Job feels when he says, “I had heard of You by the hearing of the ear, but now my eye sees You; therefore I despise myself, and repent in dust and ashes.” The absurd becomes the place of encounter. The silence becomes the stage for God’s voice.

Faith, then, is not what explains the absurd. It is what stands beneath it. It is what looks up at the sky, like Job, like Camus, like Christ on the cross—and says: “Though He slay me, yet will I trust Him.” Amen.

Benediction

This is my last sermon on Job, and there is a high likelihood I will be taking the next week off before my next series. I thank you all for joining, I hope I’ve at least given you something to consider, and that we can all rest in our hope in Christ.

But as you depart tonight, as the Lord wills, count yourself blessed now before Him,

The Lord bless you, and keep you;

The Lord make His face shine on you,

And be gracious to you;

The Lord lift up His countenance on you,

And give you peace.’ Num. 6:24-26