Elihu re-emphasizes the gratuitous nature of what God has provided and indeed accomplished for sinners in the great transaction of redeeming his soul from hell and granting him heaven (verses 29,30). Paul affirms his operation of redemptive intervention in writing, “He has translated us out of the kingdom of darkness and transferred us into the kingdom of the Son of his love, in whom we have redemption, the forgiveness of sins” (Colossians 1:13, 14). This lifts us beyond the contemplation of what is needed that Elihu sets forth to Job and puts us in the realm of proclamation of what God has done:  “You may proclaim the excellencies of him who has called you out of darkness into his marvelous light” (1 Peter 2:9).

Complaints about pain as undeserved reveals a heart unresponsive to merciful rebuke. (33:19-22). God speaks through man’s pain that rebuke is necessary and if unheeded will bring one finally to perdition.  Physical pain is designed to show spiritual danger. When muscles ache and even bones radiate pain, when food nauseates, and physical symmetry gives way to gauntness, one should well consider that present pain is not even dimensionally related in either quality or quantity to the wrath of eternal divine anger. Man’s sin brings him near to the pit, as it were dangling over the flames of hell, in a weakened and morally susceptible condition, nothing to hinder the execution of a sentence of perdition. Pain is a merciful warning against self-righteousness, susceptibility to just infliction of punishment for sin against the infinitely righteous and just God. How shall we escape?
In 33:23-30, Elihu introduces an idea that Job himself had suggested (16:19-21) that another must arise to plead a sinner’s cause and restore him to righteousness. This ransom/mediator will be unique. He may be represented through a messenger, a faithful minister of the gospel, but he alone can accomplish the thing itself that is needed. This ransom/mediator must know the case of man and be able to declare fully and clearly what is right—“To remind a man what is right for him” (23). The ransom must be able to represent the case of God also and find before God that which will satisfy the prevailing necessity of justice in the case of a sinner. That which is found is not the worthiness of the sinner but solely the intervention of mercy to interrupt the certainty of death by the payment of a required sum in order to effect the release of the condemned. This ransom/mediator must be able to satisfy God in saying, “Deliver him from going down into the pit; I have found a ransom” (24).
The requirements of God’s goodness both in justice and mercy are served by this ransom/mediator. “But when the goodness and lovingkindness of God our Savior appeared, he saved us, not by works of righteousness which we have done, but according to his mercy” (Titus 3:4, 5). This transaction of mercy and justice through the ransom restores the almost-destroyed sinner to youthful vigor – “by the washing of regeneration and renewal of the Holy Spirit, whom he poured out on us richly” (Titus 3:5). Through the meritorious work of this ransom/mediator this once distraught person’s sin is forgiven and he is made an heir of eternal life according to the righteousness that God requires. (Job 33:26, 27). That which Elihu envisioned in this revelatory moment is described by the apostle Paul in its fulfillment, “through Jesus Christ our Savior, so that being justified by his grace” (Titus 3:6, 7). The sinner so justified finds that eternal destruction is no longer his destiny [“He has redeemed my soul from going down to the pit” (Job 33:28)] and has given the hope of eternal life [“and my life shall look upon the light”]. Paul gives Elihu’s vision of the necessary the certainty of the historically accomplished: “we might be made heirs according to the hope of eternal life” (Titus 3:7).
Elihu re-emphasizes the gratuitous nature of what God has provided and indeed accomplished for sinners in the great transaction of redeeming his soul from hell and granting him heaven (verses 29,30). Paul affirms his operation of redemptive intervention in writing, “He has translated us out of the kingdom of darkness and transferred us into the kingdom of the Son of his love, in whom we have redemption, the forgiveness of sins” (Colossians 1:13, 14). This lifts us beyond the contemplation of what is needed that Elihu sets forth to Job and puts us in the realm of proclamation of what God has done.
Read More

Related Posts:

Technology has torn through all that’s worth conserving, and it has often preferred to wear a white coat while doing so. Yet medicine and health cannot escape the human body in all its glory, frailty, and limits, and it is out from that center of moral gravity that we can build. Strictly defining medicine’s rightful authority, embracing the limits of embodiment, and building communities where we suffer together and embrace those who are suffering even to our own hurt gives us the framework we need for technology that serves human nature rather than destroys it.

For a tech-skeptic lover of Wendell Berry, Ivan Illich, and Neil Postman, as a family physician I sure picked the wrong job. Doctors have always used various technologies for treating patients, from the ancient Egyptian prescription to fumigate the womb with incense for eye pain to today’s slightly more informed but still ineffective placebo surgeries. The human body as it has been given to us by God has all sorts of vulnerabilities — to infection, to trauma, to its processes gone awry — and technology gives us power to prevent or treat a wide variety of problems that arise from those vulnerabilities.
To make matters worse, though, nowadays doctors have admitted that they cannot know everything and so they have abandoned their pocket handbooks for databases on smartphones. A good doctor, I tell my students, looks up something new every day and books cannot be printed quickly enough to keep us all up to date. My use of WhatsApp to examine rashes or read ECGs is a bit more primitive than the systems that are evolving in highly developed contexts, but medical practitioners everywhere are finding that technology is invading every imaginable aspect of their work.
This might be tolerable if it was all beneficial, but it’s clearly not. Francis Bacon famously urged us to use science and technology to ameliorate human suffering, but now the Baconian Project has fooled us moderns into thinking that suffering ought to be optional, and we must use technology to eliminate suffering. If technology gives us the power to turn stem cells into useful organs, turn useful organs into simulacra of the opposite sex’s organs, or eliminate un-useful children before they are born, the logic of technology is that those powers ought to be used. If technology doesn’t work, as it often doesn’t, Stanley Hauerwas has suggested that doctors who are unable to ameliorate suffering effectively often feel the need to kill the sufferer.
One can find countless examples of Jon Askonas’ thesis that technological innovation bulldozes tradition throughout medicine; a new drug or device can make years of careful study and practice unnecessary. For the most part, this is a good thing: the vexatiously difficult-to-dose blood thinner warfarin was replaced by much simpler drugs about a decade ago, requiring far less expertise and work from the doctors prescribing it. Yet the existence of any new drug, device, or treatment tends to inspire a search for patients with insurance who will pay for them. Disease mongering, indication creep, overuse of fancy gadgets, and the marketing of insecurity to sell cosmetic surgery have been problems for decades, now reaching a horrifying apotheosis in the current craze of teenagers being memed into thinking that they should be chemically or surgically altered to change their gender expression.
More subtle are phenomena like antibiotics, which are one of modern medicine’s greatest gifts and thus have been terribly abused to the point where now it is an open question whether we will have any working antibiotics in fifty years. The culture that the technology of antibiotics created — desiring a pill or injection to immediately cure an infection — has made antibiotics less effective. Whenever one tries to assert the dangers of technology to human culture and flourishing, antibiotics are one of the first examples that uncritical devotees to the Baconian Project point to: So, you conservatives want to take us back to when we didn’t have penicillin? No, in fact, the revolutionary way in which we have been shaped by technology is already taking us back to the pre-antibiotic era.
Read More
Related Posts:

When suffering comes, God doesn’t leave us to cope with it in our own strength. He is with us in our suffering just as he was with Peter, James, and John. You can be sure God is with you through all your ups and downs, good days and bad. There is no struggle that will ever drive him away from you. In his presence, you will find everything you need to persevere.

On November 7, 2018, a Marine Corps veteran dressed in black and armed with a .45 caliber handgun entered a popular hangout for college students and young adults. He opened fire, killing twelve before turning the gun on himself. The Borderline Bar and Grill was two miles from my house.
The next morning, I was interviewed on radio about the tragedy. While driving home, exhausted from the discussion, I saw smoke rising from the fields near my home. The Woolsey fire had started just a few hours after the Borderline shooting, eventually burning 95,000 acres, destroying 1,643 structures, killing three people, and causing the evacuation of more than 295,000—my family included.
One question was on the minds of many that week: Why would God allow all this pain, grief, and suffering? It’s a question we all wrestle with eventually.
Suffering is a part of reality that we generally try to avoid. However, I’ve learned three important things about embracing suffering that have completely changed how I relate to God and deepened my relationship with him.
First, God uses our suffering for the good of his people. Consider Joseph’s life. After being left for dead by his brothers, he was sold into slavery, falsely accused of having an affair with Potiphar’s wife, imprisoned, and forgotten. In the final analysis, though, when he looked back on his trials and saw what God had done through them, he said, “As for you [his brothers], you meant evil against me, but God meant it for good in order to bring about this present result, to preserve many people alive” (Gen. 50:20).
Read More
Related Posts: