Job 36:16

This is just what the book of Job teaches. Elihu explains God's ways in chapter 33:17-30. In chapter 36:7 he speaks directly of a righteous man: "He does not withdraw His eyes from the righteous." Yet He chastens them for their sins, and Elihu warns Job not to fight against God. If he had bowed in heart, God would have delivered him from his affliction (v. 16). Since God was dealing with him this way, Elihu warns him to take care that he is not cut off from the earth (v. 12). Yet Job was the godliest man on all the earth, but he needed correction as he was beginning to think well of himself.

He delivers the afflicted by His affliction, and He uncovers their ear by trouble. You too He lures out of the jaws of distress. He brings you into a wide place with no narrowness in it, and your table set with rich abundance.

Why then affliction? These "righteous" are the objects of God's care, yet at times they are "bound in fetters, held in cords of affliction." Is that a contradiction of what Elihu had just said? To Job it had been. He failed to see the possibilities of evil in his own heart — a pride as real a transgression as the shocking evils the friends falsely charged against him. God's object was to lay bare to man the hidden evil of his heart, to open his ear to His warnings and to turn him from pride.

Suppose Job had not been crushed and resentful about this test. Then, Elihu assures him, God would have brought him out of his distresses "into a broad place where there is no restraint" (v.16). Job had not completely failed the test, as hypocrites and others had, for God was still testing him. But his own idea (or wrong idea) of judgment and justice held his blessing back (v.17).

In the afflictions of the righteous He shows love and kindness, not His wrath and displeasure. He wants to instruct them by suffering. If they listen and learn the lesson, they will spend their days in prosperity, and end their life on earth in peace and pleasantness... He would have led Job out into a broad place. But if Job keeps up the argument of the wicked — reasoning and pleading as they do, charging God falsely — then let him beware.

Tribulation works patience, because it breaks my will. I kick against the tribulation if I do not see the key to it. A naughty child, put in the corner, knows very well that his father would not put him there if he did not need it. So with us, the Lord puts us in the corner, and there we must stay till He lets us out. I get the experience of God's faithful love, for I am sure He would not put me there if I did not need it. "He does not withdraw His eyes from the righteous." He is always watching for their good. In Job 33 it is inward things that have to be corrected; it is correcting a disposition, to turn a man away from his own purpose. In Job 36 it is actual failure, discipline for definite faults.