Job 33:29

Job 33:15-22. He shows God using the plough — of a dream, of a striking providence, of bodily pain or sickness — to break up that hard, unbroken ground. And that is still the work today. Job 33:23-24. The sower comes after the ploughman. The seed is the Gospel. God provides the ransom, and deliverance comes to the sinner… Job 33:29-30. Elihu tells Job these are samples of God's way in saving souls.

Nor does God speak only once to a man, but "twice, in fact three times," for we are poor listeners, and God is concerned deeply that souls should be brought back from the Pit — delivered from the negative horror of being without God, and instead given the positive blessing of being "enlightened with the light of life."

Look! God does all this twice, three times, with man, to bring back his soul from corruption, that he may be enlightened with the light of life.

shachath, "a pit, a pitfall to entrap animals," place of doom and corruption. Job 33:18, 24, 28, 30.

We are the objects of His deep, tender, and unchanging love; but we are also the subjects of His wise moral government. His dealings with us are varied. They are sometimes preventive; sometimes corrective; always instructive. We may be set on some course of our own that would end in moral ruin. He steps in and turns us back from it. He smashes our castles in the air, scatters our golden dreams, and breaks into many a favourite plan we had set our hearts on — a plan that would have destroyed us. "Behold, God does all these things, twice, three times, with a man, to bring back his soul from the pit, to be enlightened with the light of the living."

This is not a doctrine of how grace wakes sinners from the sleep of death. It is a lifelike sketch of His detailed ways. He uses sickness and sorrow, and dreams or visions. Above all, He uses people who come with the light of God to deal with a man's conscience. All this comes out vividly, and so does the effect it produces — "to bring back his soul from the pit, to be enlightened with the light of the living." It speaks to the point so powerfully that we know how often preachers still make it a favourite theme when they bring the gospel to those who are not converted.

Elihu said this before God gave the law through Moses, yet even then he assures Job that God worked these things often with man. Therefore the gospel of God's grace has always been the way God meets man's need. The simplicity of this is beautiful, and Job could have no objection to it.