Job 33:18 Commentary and Bible Study

The interventions of God that Elihu describes are remedial; they are intended to check his children when they turn in a direction which will otherwise lead to destruction. The word ‘pit’ means any trap in which animals are caught but here is obviously a reference to the grave since it is parallel to the loss of life by the sword. and especially the abode of the lost after death. As always the Scripture does not portray the believer’s state as beyond all danger in this life. He is certainly kept perfectly safe by God, but nothing can change the fact that sin leads to death. The safeguards that God puts in place for his children to keep any of them from being lost deter them from the road to destruction. They do this by arguments that appeal to their intelligent and enlightened understanding. We must play a part in our own safekeeping for it would be madness for a human soul to have no concern for its own spiritual protection. Therefore the means that God uses to preserve us do not bypass a man’s understanding but appeal to his need for self-protection. This is not going to be realistic unless the individual has a perception of real danger and real enemies that threaten the soul. Nor is it necessary for there to be some genuine believers that fall in order for this perception to remain alive, for it is enough that some who seemed to be true believers, but who were never truly ‘of us’, have fallen away; it is enough for us to fear lest the same thing happen to us. The gentle voice of conscience is always at work in every action we perform and this is God’s universal means of restraining us. If this is ignored, God is yet determined to keep us back from the pit and he has other means of speaking to the soul which are more forceful. These means help us to avoid an irrecoverable fall which is tantamount to the loss of salvation, represented by Elihu as perishing by the sword.