There are states of mind which even the believer is capable of falling into, which are totally self-destructive. They may arise from resentment and bitterness at the severity of our trials and their extended nature, or they may result from loss of hope that God will ever look favourably on us again and that we will be delivered. Why would we plunge ourselves into the night when the light of heaven is available to us? Perhaps because we have entered a trial; we have realised that repentance is required and tried to repent, but God has not accepted our repentance because he sees that there is still hypocrisy or sin mixed with it; he desires a great degree of sincerity from us. We do not like to be examined so closely and we reject the terms on which God will receive us as too stringent. We are not willing to let him come that close to us and to be Lord over our hearts to that extent. In other words pride has got hold of us and we have the spirit of the suicidal who in their self-pity so often cut off the nose in order to spite the face. To return to God takes a humility, which can only come from by the Spirit of God, but which is truly our own humility and our hearts must agree to it. The rebellious spirit Elihu speaks of is the spirit which says, ‘I give up; it is too hard; God is unreasonable’. It is a weakness of the mind and indicates that we are not fully submitted to the Lord. There may also be something of revenge in it, for the individual says, ‘The way of the Lord is unnecessarily hard and God is wrong to expect us to go that far and to bear that much’, whereas, as Elihu has said, deliverance could lie just around the corner if we were only to adopt the right frame of mind.
The danger is that we could be ‘cut off in [our] place’. The believer who is in a state of rebellion must not presume that the patience of God will go on putting up with his bad spirit forever. To persist even for another moment may bring unexpected and catastrophic consequences which he will not be able to handle.