Job 32:17

I also will show mine opinion.

The spirit and message of Elihu

This is the beginning of Elihu’s declaration. It is quite a new voice. We have heard nothing like this before. So startling indeed is the tone of Elihu’s voice that some have questioned whether iris speech really forms part of the original poem, or has been added by some later hand. We deal with it as we find it here. It is none the less welcome to us that it is a young voice, fresh, charmful, bold, full of vitality, not wanting in the loftier music that is moral, solemn, deeply religious. It appears, too, to be an impartial voice; for Elihu says--I am no party to tiffs controversy: Job has not said anything to me or against me, and therefore I come into the conference wholly unprejudiced: but I any bound to show mine opinion: I do not speak spontaneously; I am forced to this; I cannot allow the occasion to end, though the words have been so many and the arguments so vain, without also showing what I think about the whole matter. Such a speaker is welcome. Earnest men always refresh any controversy into which they enter: and young men must speak out boldly, with characteristic freshness of thought and word; they ought to be listened to; religious questions are of infinite importance to them: sometimes they learn from their blunders; there are occasions upon which self-correction is the very best tutor. It is well for us to know what men are thinking. It is useless to be speaking to thoughts that do not exist, to inquiries that really do not excite the solicitudes of men. Better know, straightly and frankly, what men are thinking about, and what they want to be at, and address oneself to their immediate pain and necessity. Elihu will help us in this direction. There comes a time when the old way of putting things must give way to some new method. But if the old are not always wise, the young are not always complete. We live in a time of doctrinal change. There is now an opportunity for an Elihu, whose wrath is divinely kindled, to make the great progress in attempting the higher education of the soul. Elihu must come; when he does come he will be killed: but another Elihu must take his place, and go forward with the work until the enemy is tired of blood, and lets the last Elihu have a hearing. We may change forms without changing substances. Let us allow that new methods of stating old truths are perfectly legitimate. Nor let us condemn a man who resorts to novel expressions, if he do not injure the substance of the thing which he intends to reveal. Take, for example, the doctrine of prayer. The doctrine of prayer has been mocked, or misunderstood, or imperfectly stated. Every man must state this doctrine for himself. Only the individual man knows what he means by prayer. There is no generic and final definition which can be shut up within the scope of a lexicon. Who can define prayer once for all? Only the Almighty. Every suppliant knows what he means when he prays to his Father in heaven. He must not be overloaded with other men’s definitions; they will only burden his prayer; they will only stifle the music of his supplication. Suppose we say, Prayer is good in cases of sickness, but it stops short at surgery. What a wonderful thing to say--wonderful because of its emptiness and vanity. Yet how inclined we are to smile when we are told that prayer is exceedingly good in the removal of nervous or imaginary diseases, but prayer always stops short at surgery; prayer never prayed a man’s limb hack again to him when he had once lost it. As well say, Nursing is very good, but it always stops short at death. So it does; so it must. As well say, Reaping is very good, but reaping always stops short at winter. That is true, and that is right. “That which is lacking cannot be numbered.” Law must have some reasonableness, or it ceases to be law: when it loses its reasonableness it loses its dignity and the power of getting hold upon the general judgment and the personal trust of man. Even miracles themselves might be played with, turned into commonplaces, debased into familiarities utterly valueless. Prayer may and does stop short at surgery, but love itself has a point at which it stops short; the living air has a point at which it falls back, so to speak, helplessly; all the ministries of nature stop short at assignable points, saying that without assent and consent and cooperation on the other side no miracle can be done. In all these cases consider reasonableness and law, and the necessity of boundary and fixture in the education and culture of mankind. Then again, others would deprive prayer of what many have considered to be an essential feature. In order to maintain what doctrine of prayer they may have, they are only too glad to eviscerate it of the element of petition. They are not unwilling to have aspiration, a species of poetical communion with the invisible, but they would complete a great work of evacuation in the direction of request, petition, solicitation; they would dismiss the beggar from the altar, and admit only the poetic contemplatist, or the spiritual enthusiast, or the mystic communicant. For this I see no reason. I hold to the old doctrine of “Ask, and ye shall receive: ye have not, because ye ask not: if any man lack wisdom, let him ask of God.” That there may be abuses in the direction of solicitation is obvious; but we must never give up the reality; because it can be abused. (Joseph Parker, D. D.)