Video Transcript: The Second Act

We've been looking at the book of Job and understanding both its context here on Earth and  also in heaven. And we've recently gone through the first dramatic dialogue of the book of Job Remember again, what the structure of the book of Job is, there's this opening setting, mostly  prose in which the life circumstances of Job are described. And then at the end, chapter 42,  again, mostly prose, but very short. There's sort of an outcome and explanation of what's  going on and what transpired out of this. In between the bulk of the book of Job is found in  three dramatic dialogues. We've looked at the longest one already Job three through 31, in  which Job has had conversations with his three friends, Eliphaz, and Bildad, and Zophar, and  each of those friends have accused Job of doing some bad things somewhere and now falling  under the righteous judgment of God. Each time Job has responded by saying, yeah, got me. I don't know what I've done. You can't lay a finger on me. I've I've not done any bad things in  that manner. I don't know why this is happening to me and prayers in which Job says God, can you get me out of this situation? Why is this happening to me at least? Can you explain it?  Now we're getting into the second dramatic dialogue Job 32 through 37, just five chapters in  which things change a bit in which there's a sense in which the perspective is different, where the the approach to this difficulty of Job is changing a bit. And the key character in this is  Elihu. The outline of these speeches you can see in the outline provided is this, a new voice  enters the scene. In chapter 32, we're sort of introduced to this new voice. The free three  friends now are silent, because everything they've said, Job has rebuffed. They're probably  nursing their hurt feelings, they think we've tried to help him, he won't be helped. We can't do anything with this guy. We don't understand what's going on. Certainly, we've reached we've  said all we can say and we've reached an impasse. Enters Elihu. His name means you are my  God. Hu was the word for you in the Hebrew language. Eli means God, my God. So, my God,  you are my God. Where does he come from? Has he been sitting around for a while,  obviously, he has appraised the situation. So he's been in the room or he's been privy to the  conversations or he's come and he's gone. He understands what the conversations have had  been about. He has not said anything, because he says that it was not appropriate for him as  a younger man to speak. This is interesting in itself, because wisdom is supposed to come  through years of experience. And obviously Elihu who is younger than the three who have  tried to bring wisdom and certainly younger than Job, so he's brash in attempting to speak,  he's also giving a perspective that is not aligned with age, and the perception that wisdom  comes with age, he gives a different kind of perspective. And his summary of the situation is  that the older friends have not provided appropriate wisdom or answers to Job, and also that  Job has not necessarily responded well to them. Then he gives four speeches. And notice that  most of his speeches are directed toward Job. And notice as well that in this dramatic  dialogue, it's almost a dramatic monologue. Because Job does not answer Elihu. It is Elihu  speaking a new form of wisdom or a new understanding of things, and Job not responding to  him. In his first speech to Job, he says that God speaks through pain. Now, this may have  been hinted at a number of times in the other speeches, but more in a really negative  context. The friends all certainly said that God was speaking through the pain and suffering  Job was encountering, but they had a tendency to say that the message was a singular  message. The message was strictly that Job was being punished. The nuance that Elihu adds  here is that all of us suffer in some form in some way at some time or another. That pain is  something endemic to the human situation. precisely because we live in a compromised world in which good and evil seem to be both swirling around us. We participate in these things and  sometimes indeed, it might be that God addresses our sinfulness through specific actions of  punishment and pain, but not always says, Elihu sometimes it is simply to live in this world  that we experience bad things. I remember how Philip Yancey said at one time he was  working in his younger life with Dr. Paul Brand, and they were participating in the treatment  and care for those who had leprosy or Hansen's disease. And at one point Dr. Brand needed to get something out of a storage room that had a lock on it that had not been used frequently  and had rusted tight. So Dr. Brand attempted to turn the key in the lock, and it wouldn't  budge in been rusted solid. Much younger, Philip Yancey thought he would give it a try. And so he turned or tried to turn the key in the lock. And he too was prevented from doing so  because the pain was too great. He could not turn the key in the lock. A young boy, part of 

the group that was living there in this hospital on these grounds came and he said can I try  and so he did. He turned the key in the lock, and he was able to unlock the door. But when he  pulled his fingers away from the key, both Paul Brand and Philip Yancey were astounded to  see that he had actually cut the flesh off his fingers down to the bone. He couldn't feel it  because he had leprosy. And because he had leprosy and his feelings were muted. He was  able to turn the key more profoundly with greater power than both Philip Brand and or Dr.  Brand and Philip Yancey, they had been stopped by the pain that was sent through their  nerves systems to their brain, stop, stop, stop, you're hurting me. He didn't have the same  network of pain control. Therefore there were no limits on how hard he would twist even to  the point of ripping the flesh off his own fingers. And that's the kind of thing that Elihu  indicates here about pain being present in our world. Sometimes certainly it comes in  response to us doing bad things and destroying other lives and needing to be punished and  being taught a lesson. But sometimes pain says Elihu is sort of the megaphone of God's voice  shouting, when we have no longer listen to God, the Creator, any longer.Elihu goes on to talk  with the three friends in his second speech, chapter 35. In our, our books, the book of Job, he  addresses the friends and says God is just and warns them not to state more than they ought, because they have over stretched the limits of what they understand righteousness to be  about. Justice includes righteousness. But Justice also begins to understand that there are  nuances of interpretation, and the need to balance everything in a particular context. And  then Elihu, who turns back to Job a couple of times in two more addresses, one in chapter 36,  and another in chapter 37, to more speeches, speech three and speech for Elihu says to Job, it does pay to serve God. But then he gets back to his main theme that God is just and kind and sovereign. And while we don't fully understand what's going on, we have the possibility of  experiencing the goodness of God in all of these things. And this is a different way of looking  at what's going on. It isn't as harsh or black and white, as the three friends tried to suggest  earlier on, that righteousness brings blessing. doing bad things brings evil and therefore Job's  changing situation is because he has done something wrong. In reality, this new thing that  enters is that the perspective of the three friends is revealed for what it is harsh, righteous,  but harsh. They certainly understand this to be a moral universe. They certainly understand  that God is in complete control. They understand that good behavior results in blessings and  bate bad behavior results in punishment. But their perspective is a very brutal and harsh  perspective. The idea that God is morally rigorous and absolute and righteousness is rigid and brittle, good comes from righteousness bad results in punishment, while Elihu shares many of  their beliefs, the idea that this is a moral universe, and that God is in complete control, and  that good behaviors generally result in blessings and bad behaviors generally brings from  punishment. Elihu or Elihu adds a deeper level of thought and development. He suggests that  God is highly relational, not merely righteously rigid, and that's an important thing. It only  needs for us to think about our own relationships with others, we want those we love to do  good. We want our children to do right. We want our spouses or our friends to be upright and  good and righteous. But we also in our loving relationships with them, are not entirely rigid, so that if there's one infraction, if there's one thing that goes wrong, if there's one thing that is  less than perfect, we immediately shun them or condemn them. And that's the highly  relational part of God's character that Elihu brings back into the picture. God is highly  relational, not merely righteously rigid. Also, in that light, evil in our world may result from  different divine intents, sometimes, certainly, as the three friends said, God brings  punishment on evil. But Elihu adds this dimension, sometimes God uses pain, in sort of a  general sense, in our compromised world, to get us to remember our dependence on God, to  get us to turn to God as the source of all good things. And this is different than being  punished. I think of things like Hurricane Katrina, that came into the southern part of the  United States, I think of things that, like when the terrorists slammed airplanes into the World  Trade Center towers, I think of time, so that tsunamis affecting Southeast Asia, those great  catastrophes, those times of great tragedy, and always we're asking, Why, why, why should  this happen? And sometimes people want to be like the three friends who say, because bad  people live in New Orleans, or because America has lost its religious foundations or because  the people in Southeast Asia worship a different god, there are all sorts of things thrown out. 

And Elihu causes us to step back from that and say, Wait a minute, wait a minute, wait a  minute. It's not always the case that A must necessarily result in B that there's a real rigorous, righteous, rigid commitment, correspondence between crime and punishment, but rather that there is a highly relational God, who in this world that is already compromised by evil  sometimes is shouting to us through the disasters that happen. Will you turn to me? Will you  turn to me? Well, you understand that I am the source of all life and good things. In other  words, while the three friends demand that Job repent, Elihu suggests that maybe Job is  telling the truth about his upright character, meaning that he has nothing specific to repent,  for. He truly does not have skeletons in his closet, he truly has not done some vile act. He  truly has not done some terrible thing in the past, but also warned Job not to become haughty or presumptuous. This means that Job needs to listen through these sufferings for the voice of God and to become much more submissive to them. And that of course, brings the next  dramatic dialogue, the dramatic dialogue in which God will speak to Job you