Week 33 – Elihu and the Cookies of Truth
Job 31-35
We have a Life Group that meets in our home every week. They are our people. We know each other. Know our weaknesses and struggles. We speak in beautiful candor. We pray and laugh and cry and eat cookies and meditate on the Word together. We watch each other’s kids so we can connect as couples and hold our marriages together. We carry each other’s furniture when we move. We live life together.
For eight years we met on Thursday. But as kids that were in their mamma’s belly became kids that played softball and swam on teams, and played in concerts, Thursday became a bit tricky. So, we switched to Wednesday. One would think that moving one weekday earlier would be easy, a lateral move at worst, but it’s been weird. Like wearing your underwear backwards. Sure, the legs go through the same holes, but something just feels off. Every time we meet, I keep thinking the next day is Friday, but it isn’t. We’ve been on the new schedule for a few months now and I said just yesterday, “Have a good Friday!” when people were leaving. Ridiculous. I sounded like Miracle Max waving at the trio of heroes in The Princess Bride, standing at the threshold of our home, waving and yelling, “Have fun storming the castle!”
Change is hard. We are people of habit. Creatures of rhythm. We’re diurnal – awake in the daylight, asleep at night, and when we flip that system, things get weird. Ask anyone who has ever worked a swing shift. Or had a newborn. Or gotten really sick or been really sad. Rhythms matter. Every other creature in nature knows this. We’re the only ones silly enough to try and live life out of rhythm. Granted, we don’t worship rhythms. At least we’re not supposed to. I guess some of us probably do. We tend to get rigid, inflexible, especially as we get older. And we get grumpy when humans upset our rhythms because we’ve worked all these years to create good ones. And when we forget that love always eclipses routine, we need a gentle reminder that it will all be ok and that, mostly likely, we can return to those rhythms that make us feel normal.
Job, of course, was as out of sync as a human can get. All those rhythms he had created in his life – rising early to offer sacrifices for his children, being a father to the needy, treating widows with kindness that made their hearts sing, dispensing wisdom at the city gate, gentle spring rains causing seeds of hope to awaken into blossom – all of that was gone. Scorched down to the root. Replaced with new rhythms: The scraping of broken pottery across broken skin, the cruel quiet of insomnia, the wailing wordless groans of his own shattered spirit, the staccato accusations of his friends a battering ram against the collapsing gate of his heart.
Job gives his closing argument in chapter 31. He maintains his integrity before all this calamity with the quiet grammar of consequence:
If I have been an adulterer, then let another man have my wife.
If I have ignored the poor and the needy or hurt the vulnerable, then let my arms fall out of their sockets.
If I loved money or worshipped nature, then judge me.
If I failed to show mercy or practice hospitality, or hidden my sin in my heart then, please, please, let God Almighty answer me! I will sign my own indictment! Give me my day in court. Just let me stand before God and ask Him, “Why? Why, God, did You do this?”
With cold finality the chapter simply concludes:
The words of Job are ended.
It would seem a good place to end the book. Or at least to have God show up and tell everyone what’s going on. But there is a fourth friend, Elihu the Buzite, who has been silent for 31 chapters. The Buzites were descended from Nahor, brother of Abraham , so they are in the same family tree, but they are not the people of the Promise. Not Jews. They are outside the covenant, outside the land. Why does this matter?
Because suffering is universal. It doesn’t matter where you are or what you believe or how blessed or cursed you feel. Michael Stipe is right: Everybody hurts sometimes. Job is in the Jewish Bible, but it’s not just for Jewish people. The truth we wrestle with in this book is the truth every hurting person needs to hear. Everyone needs to see what a righteous man does when his life collapses in on itself because everyone suffers. Everyone. As my cousin Coral has so sagely told me, “No one gets through life unscathed.” It doesn’t happen. Everyone hurts. Everyone has scars. Even Elihu.
And Elihu has had enough. He is angry at Job and angry at his friends. With Job, because he sought to justify himself before God and no one can do that. Not ever. And with Job’s trio of abominable counselors because they could not solve the problem yet were quick to condemn the man who suffered it. They had entered the labyrinth of suffering, that mysterious maze where all wander and none arrive, and they strained to scale the impossible walls, to map out the mystery. But they lacked the vision to find their way. Like a man trying to trace out a thousand light years into the cosmos with his naked eye, they were outmatched by the enormity. In their frustration, they forgot mercy, and turned their anger on their friend.
Imagine these five fellows sitting around engaging in this epic debate. They are not in a lecture hall. They are in a smoldering dump. Elihu has sat and listened while Job lamented and his friends moved from the silent ministry of presence to disagreeing with Job to wrestling with the inescapable problem of suffering and finally degrading into making up accusations against their friend just so they could make sense of it all. Elihu is the youngest man there. And in ancient near eastern culture, age means wisdom. Age means honor. So he sat and listened and waited to see if these four men, some of them quite old, have the answers to life’s most difficult question:
Why do we suffer?
But that is not the real question. They narrow it down, tighter, closing in on us to this:
Why do the righteous suffer?
That is the dilemma the wise old men couldn’t solve. But even that is not the real question, because we as the reader have the whole story. The view from the ash heap is obscured. But we see behind the curtain to the question beneath the questions:
Can we trust God when we suffer?
But even that doesn’t go deep enough, because the book is even bigger than suffering. Yes, Job suffers. Incomprehensible suffering. But that suffering is the pain caused by the cancer. There is a problem even deeper, and like a cancer, it begins at the cellular level.
But we’re not there yet.
Elihu is still wading through the swamp of suffering. We get stuck there when people are hurting. Get pulled down into the mire. It makes it hard to think, hard to see past their pain. It’s good to sit patiently in someone’s pain. But we can’t stay there. We can’t stay silent forever while people turn the threads of grief in their weary fingers and begin to weave them into a tapestry of lies. Elihu has to say something and he reminds us,
“Far be it from God to do wickedness and from the Almighty to do wrong…and will you condemn the righteous Mighty One?”
Suffering does not give us the right to judge God. It gives us the right to feel those things, but not to remake God in our image. Not to accuse God of evil. Job has gone too far. Elihu has been patient. But if you’ve ever been around a truly despondent person, eventually they get to the point where they need someone to speak in love and lead them back to the light of truth.
No one likes to hear that when they’re hurting. But it’s what we’re called to do as believers. In love, help each other move and call each other out. Sometimes we do that poorly. But sometimes, even when we’re hurting, we need someone to tell us, “Hey. I love you. That’s enough. Here’s a cookie. And here’s the truth.” And then we need them to gently lead us back to God.
Because that’s where this story is going.
God is coming to the ash heap and He is not bringing cookies.
