What is Elihu's Message
Samuel Cox, D. D. Job 37:1-13 At this also my heart trembles, and is moved out of his place.… What he really contributes to the main argument of the book is, that suffering may be medicinal, corrective, fructifying, as well as punitive. The friends had proceeded on the assumption, an assumption abundantly refuted by Job, that his calamities sprang, and only could spring from his transgressions. In their theology there was no room for any other conclusion. But, obviously, there is another interpretation of the function of adversity which needs to be discussed, if the discussion is to be complete; and this wider interpretation Elihu seeks to formulate. According to him, God may be moved to chastise men by love, as well as by anger; with a view to quicken their conscience, to instruct their thoughts, and give them a larger scope; in order to purge them, that they may bring forth more and better fruit; to rouse them from the lethargy into which, even when they are spiritually alive, they are apt to sink, and to save them from the corruption too often bred even by good customs, if these customs do not grow and change. His main contention has indeed, since his time, become the merest commonplace. But this pious commonplace was sufficiently new to Job and his friends to be startling. To them Elihu, when he contends that God often delivers the afflicted by and through their afflictions, must have seemed to be either uttering a dangerous heresy, or speaking as one who had received new light and inspiration from on high. (Samuel Cox, D. D.) Parallel Verses KJV: At this also my heart trembleth, and is moved out of his place. WEB: "Yes, at this my heart trembles, and is moved out of its place.