Job 34:6

Elihu deals fairly with Job's statements. He either quotes his words, or gives their substance, or draws obvious conclusions from them. Job had said again and again that he was righteous, or guiltless (see Job 10:7). This is the whole burden of his complaint against God. He had said that God had taken away his justice (Job 27:2). He had said that, being innocent, he would be a liar if he confessed sin. And he had said that his wound is incurable, despite his being without transgression (Job 23:2; Job 30:23, and elsewhere).

His "right," he insisted, was to be free of these calamities, and he did not intend to say otherwise. His wound did seem incurable, but he insisted it was not caused by any transgression on his part. Verses 5 and 6 sum up Job's position, as Elihu saw it. He had not claimed to be sinless. But he did claim that no sin of his justified God in bringing such misery on him. In effect it came to this: he was right, and God was wrong.

Job implied that God had brought him down to a state beyond cure, though Job was not guilty of any transgression. However righteous Job was, it was unrighteous of him to dare to speak of God in this way.

Elihu likens such statements to the conduct of the wicked, into whose company Job, by his assertions, was putting himself. He was drinking up scorn like water. For surely if we lose faith in God's righteousness, what is left?… We can be thankful that Job's faith did not fail, despite this cloud of unbelief. But Elihu, to be faithful, had to put the point of the knife on the infected sore. That sore was more serious than his physical illness.

These spiritual affections of Job did not stop him. He turned this sense of his own integrity into a robe of self-righteousness. It hid God from him, and even hid him from himself… Elihu reproves him for this, and on the other hand explains the ways of God. He shows that God visits man and disciplines him. Then, once God has subdued and broken him down… God may act in grace and blessing, and deliver him from the evil that oppresses him.

He was certainly right in what he said when he humbled himself completely before God… Job said what was right in his last words, when he answered the Lord's appeal to him. There God brought him into His presence… Now the Lord brings to light the depths of his heart. Now he himself had got there at last. Everything else, all that was on the surface, had been judged… Job justified God at his own expense. He was no longer maintaining his righteousness, but his own nothingness in dust and ashes before God, whom he fully owns to be perfectly right.