Job 36:19

The reading of verse 19 is also disputed. Our own version, like others, links it closely with what comes before — the price of a great ransom: "Will He value your riches?" and so on. Delitzsch links it instead with what follows: "Will your crying place you beyond distress, and all the efforts of strength?" This gives a consistent meaning. Job had been crying aloud to the limit of his strength, but without help. He had longed for the night of death to come upon him, as it eventually does upon all the nations of the earth. Let him be careful, and bow to affliction rather than choose the path of pride.

Had Job not already found that all his riches and all his prominence could not keep him from distress? (v.19). But he had all but wished for the night and for nothingness. Elihu urges him to change his mind about this, for the night only cuts people off where they stand (v.20).

Job, therefore, had reason for care, in case his excited feeling might stir him up against the blow, and a worse thing happen to him, where all resources fail, and the night, in which no one can work, is no comfort. It is dangerous, but very possible, to choose what is worse than affliction, or because of it.

Is there such a thing as God's wrath? Absolutely! Because this is true, Elihu tells Job to beware. God might take him away with one blow, and a large ransom would not help him avoid it. He is speaking of a ransom that Job might bring, not of the great ransom God has now provided in the gift of His beloved Son. When someone receives Him as his substitute, the ransom He accomplished on Calvary is enough to redeem the most guilty.

These "righteous" people 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 that was as real a transgression as the glaring evils his friends wrongly charged him with. 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.

Elihu's warning to Job was well timed, especially verse 21. Job shrank from the "affliction," and so turned to the "iniquity" of insisting on his own righteousness. But affliction is better than iniquity. Peter's first letter reminds us that "whoever has suffered in the flesh has ceased from sin." The early Christians could escape suffering by sinning, and so can we — if the suffering is only what may come upon us from the world, the flesh, or the devil.