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Bible Notes - Tabernacle Commentaries
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Job 36:24
Comments
From this point Elihu gives Job a number of lessons from natural theology. God is at work in the world and it is man’s great privilege to be made a creature capable of appreciating such glorious works. He alone of all the creatures on earth is made in the image of God and therefore has the gift of reason and faculties to comprehend the purposes of God at least to some extent, and he alone can grasp the wonderful means which God uses to achieve his ends. But it is like gazing at a distant beautiful landscape and the detail disappears into the far horizon. It is a feature of the book that, from the start, the reader is given a greater insight into the situation than Job has. The reader wants Job to know why these things are happening to him but has to watch while he struggles to understand what is, for the duration of the trial, hidden from him. He or she sees Job fall into such a dismal conclusion because the true reason for his trial is so unexpected, but he also sees how the solution would have been for Job to trust God come what may. It would have been easier for him to do this if he had started by accepting all the attributes of God as non-negotiable truths. He should have assumed that God always has a great purpose, that he cannot be frustrated in that purpose, that he never makes use of evil means to achieve a good end, that he is more powerful than Satan, that he never abandons justice, that he works on a grand scale, and we cannot judge his works by the small part that we can see at any one time.What was hidden from Job’s sight should have been assumed by faith. He did not need to understand the precise reason for his trial, but he did need to trust God. That is the point. In the absence of a full explanation, he could still conclude that what God was doing was good and also profitable to him. We all see only a tiny part of what the Lord does and the reason he does it and what he intends to achieve by it. For the rest that we cannot see, we must trust him, because God is great and he must do his own work unaided. No creature could take over from him nor can we follow what he does. How then can we make ourselves his critics? Rather we behold his work afar off.
Application
Is it possible to miss his works? When we try to appreciate the work of a great designer, one thing we have to do is to get an idea from the start of the scale on which he is working. We do not judge a piece of music by a single disconnected dissonant note, but by all the notes played together. We do not judge an artist or a sculptor by a few brush strokes or a few chisel marks but we understand that we are to appreciate the work when it is finished. So we must understand the scale on which God works. We cannot judge what he is doing in an entire life from the events of a day or two. We will make no sense of his work if we limit it so much. The key to appreciating what he is doing is to remember that his work has eternity in view.
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