Job 34:21 Commentary and Bible Study

There is no evidence that escapes God’s attention. There is nothing that anyone can do to hide his actions, his words, or even his innermost secret thoughts and motives from the Lord. Where would we put them that God could not see? ‘If I say, Surely the darkness shall cover me; even the night shall be light about me. ¹² Yea, the darkness hideth not from thee; but the night shineth as the day: the darkness and the light are both alike to thee’ (Psalm 139:11-12).Sin and cover up go together. Certainly the workers of iniquity desire to hide from God for this is the instinctive response of guilty man endowed with a conscience, as Adam and Eve showed in the garden. They may believe for a time that they have succeeded, for they underestimate the infinite knowledge of the Lord. Living in darkness, they can only guess at how much the Lord knows about them, and judging him by themselves and their own limited capacities, they make themselves comfortable with the thought that he could not possibly penetrate their web of deception and so they live in self-delusion. When God finally shows them that they are naked before him and he sees both their sins and their feeble attempts to cover their sins, their world collapses, yet still they run from him. Therefore, mocking their feeble attempts and looking forward to that day when they can hide no longer, the Lord mocks their feeble attempts: ‘Enter into the rock, and hide thee in the dust, for fear of the LORD, and for the glory of his majesty’ (Isaiah 2:10).Elihu adds that it is not hard for God to judge man, nor does he have to prolong the investigation at length. Like a judge who deals with a cut and dried case where the verdict is obvious, the Lord need not prolong his investigation. This doesn’t mean that God’s investigation is superficial: he considers every work of our hands and every word from our mouths – his judgment will leave nothing uncovered – but the point is that further examination is not going to reveal something unexpectedly good in man that overturns God’s initial conclusion. He knows what man is and he is entirely right in what he says about human nature. Man wishes to bring forth a mountain of evidence in his favour and to argue to all eternity in his defence, but God dismisses all this as vanity. All evidence that he might bring has already been weighed up by the Lord and is unable to prove him righteous. Self-justification is doomed to failure, for only those whom God justifies are truly justified.