NOTES for Job 34:1-37
Like Job's friends, Elihu is outraged that Job has questioned the justice of God's judgments. To Elihu, Job's words about life's injustice, and about suffering and death being the lot of both the righteous and the lawless, sound blasphemous. Elihu himself, then, finds life in this world justly ordered. Life is ordered as it should be and God is just, Elihu maintains. The lawless and the wicked will not escape God's wrath; the very order of the world is such that the lawless perish and die suddenly.
The speculative nature of this argument is obvious. Job's lament that people suffer and perish regardless of guilt is based on his actual perception of what is happening around him. Human perception itself, our understanding of what is good and what is bad, may be distorted—but within the limits of his own vision, Job is honest. Elihu, meanwhile, tries in a roundabout way to say the same thing as Job's friends: in this life the righteous do not suffer, and if someone does suffer, that person is not righteous. The Gospel, which contains what is most important in biblical revelation, says precisely the opposite.
The question, it seems, is not whether God is just; here, as far as we can judge, Elihu is right, and the path of lawlessness does not lead a person to life. The world in which humanity lives is distorted by sin and does not correspond to the Creator's design. Elihu is therefore only partly right: in this life God's righteous judgment upon the lawless is distorted, and the world is more hostile to the righteous. John the Evangelist will later write in his First Epistle: ‘Do not love the world or the things in the world. If anyone loves the world, the Father's love is not in him. For everything in the world—the lust of the flesh, the lust of the eyes, and the pride of life—is not from the Father but from this world’ (1 John 2:15–16). The characters in the Book of Job are certain that everything in the world comes from God, and so suffering without guilt seems utterly impossible to them. But whereas Elihu and Job's friends try to dispute the obvious, the author of the book gives Job himself a position that is deeper and more honest before God.
Yet the author is not only a prophet but also a literary genius, and so the Elihu of his book is a portrait drawn from life. Century after century, religious circles produce such figures, people who are satisfied with their own lives. For that reason alone they are ready to justify the existing order of things and invent justifications for God, who supposedly accepts it.