Our local town had the dubious honour of being selected for Oprah’s Million Dollar Neighbourhood reality show. The show is based on the premise that it will encourage and teach people how to get out of debt. The first show of the season is designed to reveal just how bad people’s finances are. Houses are about to be lost, hoarders are revealed, extreme shopping habits are exposed, etc. Watching this, the temptation for me was to self-righteously ask, “How could they?”

This is a chapter of utter despair! Job is now mocked by the homeless rejects of society, perhaps criminals, driven into the desert to scratch out an existence in the parched land. The young men whose parents showed him deference in the last chapter now make up jokes and songs to taunt him. They attack him physically. He is overwhelmed by terror. Everything that gave meaning to life in chapter 29 has vanished.

When I was in Scotland, working on this chapter, I saw a BBC program on the tomb of Kha and Meryt in Egypt. In it was found a papyrus which listed 42 sins, which the dead person would swear that he had not committed. There is a picture of his heart being weighed in scales. I was amazed, because the idea of a checklist of sins, which the “accused” either confessed or denied, is so similar to Job’s protestations in this chapter.

Job has finished. He has laid his case, like a defendant in a lawsuit, before God. He now waits for God to answer.

But still there is no answer.

When we analyze a situation, our judgments are often partly right and partly wrong. In this passage Elihu gets at least one thing exactly right – God is just and loves justice. But that truth is what creates the tension in the Book of Job, since Job believes God has denied him justice (vs 5-6). Elihu insists that God cannot do evil or anything that is unjust (vs 10-12). Even more significantly, Elihu argues that God is the one who brings about justice (v 17), yet Job is accusing this God of doing wrong.

Elihu asks Job to think about his behaviour, good and bad. How does it affect God? Elihu asserts that God doesn’t benefit at all if we are righteous, nor does he suffer at all if we sin. He argues that we never put God in our debt by doing good things, and neither do we harm him when we do wicked things.

When my 19-year-old son passed away after a yearlong battle with leukemia, there weren’t many I could turn to. Not everyone could relate to my pain. I felt alone in the land of the living. I didn’t need trite answers or scripture remedies or quick fixes to heal my pain. Rather, I needed someone to come alongside me who would listen to me without condemning me for my raw emotions.