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:

“Some religions, like Judaism have made many contributions to the civilised world. Others have been much less involved in Western progress. As [historian Rodney] Stark and others have demonstrated, only those religions that have had a place for reason and logic have had a real impact on science, progress and technology. The Judeo-Christian worldview certainly gives reason a good run. Thus important thinkers such as Alfred North Whitehead and Robert Oppenheimer – neither of them Christian – have argued that modern science could not have developed were it not for the Christian worldview that provided the soil from which it arose. The greatest achievements of Western civilisation are mainly, but not completely, the results of the Judeo-Christian mindset.” 

To speak of Western civilisation is to speak about Christian civilisation to a very large degree. Without Christianity (and the Judaism that preceded it), the West as we know it today would simply not exist. One of the most recent commentators to make this case is Tucker Carlson. A few weeks ago he gave a speech on how Western civilisation is under attack.
He emphasised how the secular left is really at war with Christianity itself. As he said in part: “Why are they doing this? The goal is to overthrow Western civilization. What is Western civilization? It’s Christian civilization. That’s what it is.”
Entire libraries are filled with the volumes documenting how so much of the West is the product of Christianity. Some months ago, I listed twenty top books on how Christianity made our world. It included titles such as How Christianity Changed the World and What if Jesus Had Never Been Born? That piece is found here.
Christianity and Science
Simply looking at the arena of science is enough to show any unbiased observer what a remarkable contribution Christians have made here. Even non-Christians have acknowledged all this. For example, Rabbi Daniel Lapin, in America’s Real War (Multnomah, 1999) put it this way:
“Well over 90 percent of all the scientific discoveries of the past thousand years have been made in nations where Christianity is the prevailing religion. Virtually every major discovery in physics, medicine, chemistry, mathematics, electricity, nuclear physics, mechanics and just about everything else has taken place in Christian countries.”
And consider this stunning remark by the atheist blogger Tim O’Neill from a decade ago:
It’s not hard to kick this nonsense to pieces, especially since the people presenting it know next to nothing about history and have simply picked up these strange ideas from websites and popular books. The assertions collapse as soon as you hit them with hard evidence. I love to totally stump these propagators by asking them to present me with the name of one – just one – scientist burned, persecuted, or oppressed for their science in the Middle Ages. They always fail to come up with any. They usually try to crowbar Galileo back into the Middle Ages, which is amusing considering he was a contemporary of Descartes. When asked why they have failed to produce any such scientists given the Church was apparently so busily oppressing them, they often resort to claiming that the Evil Old Church did such a good job of oppression that everyone was too scared to practice science. By the time I produce a laundry list of Medieval scientists – like Albertus Magnus, Robert Grosseteste, Roger Bacon, John Peckham, Duns Scotus, Thomas Bradwardine, Walter Burley, William Heytesbury, Richard Swineshead, John Dumbleton, Richard of Wallingford, Nicholas Oresme, Jean Buridan and Nicholas of Cusa – and ask why these men were happily pursuing science in the Middle Ages without molestation from the Church, my opponents usually scratch their heads in puzzlement at what just went wrong. http://www.strangenotions.com/gods-philosophers/
Of interest, this excerpt was taken from a book review he had penned. I happen to have the book, and it could easily have been included in my top 20 listing (along with many others). I refer to the very important volume God’s Philosophers: How the Medieval World Laid the Foundations of Modern Science by James Hannam, (Icon Books, 2010). It was released in America as The Genesis of Science: How the Christian Middle Ages Launched the Scientific Revolution (Regnery, 2011).
There is so much that can be said about this crucial volume. Perhaps the best I can do here is simply quote from it, hoping that will encourage you to get a copy. In his introduction he says this:
Popular opinion, journalistic cliché, and misinformed historians notwithstanding, recent research has shown that the Middle Ages was a period of enormous advances in science, technology and culture. The compass, paper, printing, stirrups, and gunpowder all appeared in western Europe between 500 and 1500 AD. True, these inventions originated in the Far East, but Europeans developed them to a far higher degree than had been the case elsewhere….
Meanwhile, the people of medieval Europe invented spectacles, the mechanical clock, the windmill, and the blast furnace by themselves.
Read More
Related Posts:

In textbooks, sermons, and classrooms, salvation is often conceived of as the reception of something Christ has acquired for us rather than as the reception of the living Christ. In other words, salvation is described as a gift to be apprehended rather than the apprehension of the Giver himself. To put it yet another way, the gospel is portrayed as the offer of a depersonalized benefit (e.g., grace, justification, or eternal life) rather than the offer of the very person of Christ (who is himself the grace of God, our justification, and our eternal life).4

Personal Union with Christ
In far too many evangelical expressions of the gospel, the saving work of Christ has been so distanced from his person that the notion of a saving personal union with the incarnate, crucified, resurrected, living Jesus strikes us as rather outlandish. We are content, more often than not, to refer to the “atoning work of Christ” or the “work of Christ on the cross” as the basis for our salvation. Yet, as important as such expressions are for a robust evangelical soteriology (the study of salvation), we are in dire need of the reminder that Christ’s saving work is of no benefit to us unless we are joined to the living Savior whose work it is. When we entertain the notion—consciously or not, intentionally or not—that we can be saved by the work of Christ apart from being joined to him personally, we are deepening a fissure that, left unrepaired, will continue to move us away from our biblically faithful theological heritage.
The sixteenth-century Protestant Reformer John Calvin insisted that we must never separate the work of Christ from his person if we wish to understand the nature of salvation. However much we may rightly extol and magnify the saving work of Christ on our behalf, however highly we may esteem what he accomplished in his life, death, resurrection, and ascension, we will have missed what is utterly essential to this good news if we fail to understand that our salvation has to do with his very person. The saving work of Christ is not to be thought of as abstracted from the living person of Christ.
Calvin’s way of expressing this is striking and emphatic:
First, we must understand that as long as Christ remains outside of us, and we are separated from him, all that he has suffered and done for the salvation of the human race remains useless and of no value to us. Therefore, to share in what he has received from the Father, he had to become ours and to dwell within us . . . for, as I have said, all that he possesses is nothing to us until we grow into one body with him.1
If Calvin’s insistence on the intensely relational aspect of salvation—the personal indwelling of Christ—seems somewhat foreign to us, it may be because contemporary evangelical soteriology2 has largely lost sight of a profound mystery that lies at the heart of the gospel, a mystery that the apostle Paul describes as “Christ in you, the hope of glory” (Col. 1:27). The mysterious reality of our union with Jesus Christ, by which he dwells in us and we in him, is so utterly essential to the gospel that to obscure it inevitably leads to an obscuring of the gospel itself. For a number of reasons, contemporary evangelical theology has routinely failed to incorporate this mystery into the heart of its soteriological understanding.
Read More
Related Posts: