After Job’s three friends run out of things to say, a younger man steps forward — Elihu, son of Barakel the Buzite, of the family of Ram. He is the only person in the book of Job with a Hebrew name, and the fourth person to give reasoning to Job’s suffering. He has waited this whole time, giving his elders the chance to speak first, out of respect (or perhaps out of fear) even though he was dying to speak. And now, with the three friends silenced and no closer to convincing Job of anything, Elihu finally lets out his anger— in one of the longest monologues in the book.
Not Letting Space for God
I am young in years, and you are old; therefore I was timid and afraid to declare my opinion to you. I said, ‘Let days speak, and many years teach wisdom.’ But it is the spirit in man, the breath of the Almighty, that makes him understand. It is not the old who are wise, nor the aged who understand what is right.
Job 32:6-9 (ESV)
Elihu’s central complaint against the three friends is that they claimed to have found wisdom, and yet none of it could refute Job. His conclusion, stated plainly, is that no man should even try and that they should let God, not a man, refute Job. We often forget that we are not meant to convince people into the fold of God through our own understanding of His ways, which are never as complete as we think they are. We get pulled into heated arguments, into these conversational traps, and end up hating the very person we were trying to bring closer to God out of what we told ourselves was love. But Elihu does not heed his own advice. He is about to do exactly what he just said no one should do.
For I am full of words; the spirit within me constrains me. Behold, my belly is like wine that has no vent; like new wineskins ready to burst. I must speak, that I may find relief; I must open my lips and answer.
Job 32:18-20 (ESV)
This is the feeling most of us know — the sense that we cannot stay quiet, that something inside us insists this is the moment to speak. We call it many things: we cannot keep quiet, this is a matter of justice, the spirit is telling me to intervene. It rarely occurs to us that it might not be God speaking at all. We claim that we are speaking on behalf of the Spirit, or on behalf of truth and fairness, when really we are just adding our own two cents to a conversation that already has enough voices in it.
What makes us think our voice is different from everyone else’s in the room?
Every one of Job’s three friends thought the very same thing — that what they were doing was toward truth, toward justice, toward reason. One of them, Eliphaz, even described meeting a spirit in the night and believing it was God, when it may well have been something else entirely. We can be pushed to disturb someone’s life by the wrong spirit and still walk away certain it was the Holy Spirit telling us to do it. The feeling of conviction is not evidence that we have walked on the chosen path but usually points to self-gratification.
But now, Job, listen to my words; pay attention to everything I say. My words come from an upright heart; my lips sincerely speak what I know. The Spirit of God has made me; the breath of the Almighty gives me life.
Job 33:1-4 (NIV)
Notice what Elihu has to add here — a guarantee. Everything I’ve said until now might have been my own opinion, but what I am about to say is from God. This is the line people reach for when they lack conviction in what they’re saying. If we truly believed and lived by the word we were speaking, we would not need to add such a line to make people listen — the light of God would shine through us on its own. We only reach for “God told me this” when we have not experienced it ourselves. If the finest athlete in the world came to coach a school team, everyone would listen, because they have seen that person bat. If a politician picked up the same bat and tried to give the same advice, people would roll their eyes.
People rarely come to us asking how we stay calm in suffering or how we continue to praise God through it; instead, they ask how we bought the house, landed the job, or managed the tax return. Their curiosity is drawn more to our visible achievements than to any closeness we may have with God, and that imbalance says less about them than it does about us—that our relationship with God is often so weak or hidden that it is not the first thing people notice or inquire about.
How to Listen to God’s Voice?
Elihu addresses Job’s complaint that God has made him an enemy, watches every step he takes, and never answers a single prayer.
For God does speak—now one way, now another—though no one perceives it. In a dream, in a vision of the night, when deep sleep falls on people as they slumber in their beds, he may speak in their ears.
Job 33:14-16 (NIV)
Does God actually still speak to people today?
We listen instantly to the voice of the deceiver without ever asking whether it’s really him. In the very same way, God is speaking a purer thought into us in parallel, but we are so preoccupied by the noise the enemy has already planted that we never notice it. The way to learn to hear it is not mysterious — read His word for yourself, sit with it in quiet, and interpret it from His perspective rather than from what everyone else says about Him. Most people never actually try this, which is why the enemy steps in and crowds their thoughts with his.
God does all these things to a man—twice, even three times— to turn back his soul from the pit, that he may be lit with the light of life.
Job 33:29-30 (ESV)
This is a very old belief, and a very persistent one — that sickness and disaster are God correcting us. Even Jesus’ own disciples assumed it. Elihu thinks that if Job would simply confess, God would heal him and restore him. The trouble is, Job already has. He confessed at the very start of his suffering and has since moved past it — but no one around him believes that he actually did it. So they ask him to do it again, in front of them, the way we make a child apologize to the neighbour a second time because we don’t quite trust they meant it the first time. That is the level of empathy on offer — not “we believe you,” but “prove it to us, and only then will we believe God is still listening to you.”
The Arrogance of Having God Figured Out
The Almighty is beyond our reach and exalted in power; in his justice and great righteousness, he does not oppress. Therefore, people revere him, for does he not have regard for all the wise in heart?
Job 37:23-24 (NIV)
Elihu began by insisting he was too young, too timid, too respectful of his elders to speak first. By the end, he is the most self-assured person in the room — describing storms and snowfall as if he has personally worked out the mechanics of God. There is a particular kind of confidence that belongs to the young and zealous, the kind that follows a cause or a person with total conviction and no cynicism at all, without yet understanding what they’ve given themselves to. It is not unlike a scientist who stumbles onto a formula for something as vast as gravity and believes the whole mystery has now been solved — except here the subject is God, a being infinitely larger than anything a formula could hold, and the confidence to think you’ve found His equation is its own kind of disrespect.
This is, in a sense, what religion so often becomes (not faith, which requires living with the unknown) a claim to have mapped the unknown. Every religion ends up saying some version of the same thing: come to us and we will teach you who God is. It functions like a hidden accountant offering to explain the tax code — follow these steps, don’t worry about understanding the system underneath, and you’ll benefit, or at least avoid being punished. Whatever confidence Elihu has in having figured this out, it is smaller than the confidence we so easily carry today, every time we say we have understood God once and for all.
We look back on what we believed ten years ago, five years ago, or ten minutes ago, and if we’re honest, we usually find someone almost as certain, and almost as wrong, as Elihu. That should be enough to keep us from doing it again. Understanding God is genuinely difficult unless His Spirit is at work within us, because we keep trying to grasp Him with our own minds instead. That does not mean we stop seeking — it is good to know Him more with each day that passes — but it does mean holding what we know loosely, since to truly know Him is not a formula to be solved but an infinite pursuit we never finish, and never should expect to.
The Jordan Valley 
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