The Hidden Light and the Fear of God Text: Job 37:21-24
Introduction: The End of the Argument
We come now to the end of Elihu's discourse, which serves as the overture to the grand symphony of God's own speech from the whirlwind. For thirty-seven chapters, we have been in the thick of human reasoning about suffering. We have heard the well-meaning but utterly wrong-headed counsel of Job's friends, and we have heard Job's own agonized, and at times sinful, protests. They have all been trying to get their minds around God, to fit Him into their syllogisms, to make His providence tidy and predictable. Eliphaz, Bildad, and Zophar tried to do this by asserting a rigid and simplistic formula: you suffer, therefore you have sinned grievously. Job, knowing this was not the whole story, teetered on the edge of a different formula: I have not sinned grievously, therefore God is unjust to allow this suffering.
Both sides are attempting to reason from man up to God. They are standing on the earth, trying to measure the heavens with a six-inch ruler. Elihu, for all his youthful zeal, has been trying to correct this. He has been pointing away from Job and his friends to the majesty of God displayed in creation. And here, in these final verses, he brings his argument to its crescendo. He is essentially telling them all to be quiet and look up. He is setting the stage for God Himself by declaring that the final answer is not an explanation that we can master, but a Person before whom we must bow. The problem with all their arguments is that they thought God was someone to be figured out. Elihu concludes by telling them that God is someone to be feared.
This is a message our own generation desperately needs to hear. We live in an age that has no category for fearsome majesty. Our God is a therapeutic God, a manageable God, a God who is our co-pilot. We want a God who fits into our self-help books and our political agendas. We are comfortable with a God we can find, a God whose justice can be audited by our standards. But the God of the Bible, the God who is about to speak to Job, is not that God. He is the God whose light is at times too bright to see, whose majesty is terrible, and who cannot be "found out" by our searching. The proper response to this God is not a knowing nod, but a holy terror that is the beginning of all wisdom.
The Text
"So now men do not see the light which is bright in the skies; But the wind has passed and cleared them. Out of the north comes golden splendor; Around God is fearsome majesty. The Almighty, we cannot find Him; He is exalted in power And He will not afflict justice and abundant righteousness. Therefore men fear Him; He does not regard any who are wise of heart.”
(Job 37:21-24 LSB)
The Blinding Light of God's Presence (v. 21)
Elihu begins with a metaphor from nature that points to a spiritual reality.
"So now men do not see the light which is bright in the skies; But the wind has passed and cleared them." (Job 37:21)
The illustration is simple. After a storm, the clouds are thick and heavy, obscuring the sun. You know the sun is there, you know its light is brilliant, but you cannot see it directly. Then a wind comes, a powerful gust, and it sweeps the clouds away, revealing the blinding, glorious light that was there all along. Men cannot stare at the sun in its full strength; it is too bright. It is a created thing, and yet it is too much for our eyes.
Elihu is arguing from the lesser to the greater. If we cannot handle the glory of a material star that God made, how do we think we can possibly handle the uncreated glory of God Himself? The clouds of our affliction, our confusion, and our limited understanding obscure the reality of God's sovereign purposes. We are like men staring at the cloud cover, complaining about the darkness, all the while a light of unbearable brightness is shining just behind it. Job and his friends have been staring at the clouds of Job's suffering. Elihu says a wind is coming, the very wind from which God will speak, to blow all the clouds of their vain arguments away.
This is a fundamental principle of revelation. God must accommodate Himself to us. He veils His glory so that we are not consumed. He spoke to Moses from a cloud. He led Israel by a pillar of cloud. And ultimately, He veiled His glory in the incarnation of Jesus Christ. John tells us "we have seen his glory, glory as of the only Son from the Father" (John 1:14). But even this was a veiled glory. When Peter, James, and John saw just a glimpse of that unveiled glory on the Mount of Transfiguration, they were terrified and fell on their faces. God's glory is not safe for unaided, sinful man. The light is always bright, but we cannot always see it.
Fearsome Majesty (v. 22)
The metaphor of light leads to a direct statement about the nature of God.
"Out of the north comes golden splendor; Around God is fearsome majesty." (Job 37:22 LSB)
In the ancient world, the north was often seen as the direction of the divine throne, a place of mystery and power. Elihu sees the clearing storm, the golden light breaking through from the north, and he sees a picture of the court of the heavenly King. The "golden splendor" is the reflected glory of the one who sits on the throne.
And what is the nature of this King? Around Him is "fearsome majesty." The Hebrew is terrible, or awesome, majesty. This is not the kind of majesty that makes you feel warm and fuzzy. This is a majesty that makes you tremble. It is the kind of majesty that made Isaiah cry out, "Woe is me! For I am lost; for I am a man of unclean lips... for my eyes have seen the King, the LORD of hosts!" (Isaiah 6:5). It is the kind of majesty that made the Apostle John, who had leaned on Jesus' breast at the last supper, fall at His feet as though dead (Revelation 1:17).
Our modern evangelical sensibilities have largely lost this. We have domesticated God. We have made Him approachable in a way that strips Him of His terror. We want a friend, a buddy, but we have forgotten that He is a consuming fire. The fear of the Lord is not an optional extra for the spiritually sensitive. It is the beginning of wisdom. Without this fearsome majesty, our worship becomes sentimental, our evangelism becomes a sales pitch, and our understanding of sin becomes trivial. Why would we need a bloody cross to approach a God who is merely a cosmic teddy bear? It is only when we grasp that around God is a fearsome, terrible, holy majesty that we begin to understand the breathtaking grace of the gospel that allows us to approach Him at all.
The Unsearchable and Just God (v. 23)
Elihu now drives home the central problem with the entire debate that has preceded him.
"The Almighty, we cannot find Him; He is exalted in power And He will not afflict justice and abundant righteousness." (Job 37:23 LSB)
Here is the great Creator/creature distinction in its stark reality. "The Almighty, we cannot find Him." This does not mean we cannot know Him at all. He has revealed Himself. But it means we cannot find Him out by our own searching. We cannot corner Him with our logic. We cannot put Him in the dock and cross-examine Him. He is, as Paul would later say, the one "who dwells in unapproachable light, whom no one has ever seen or can see" (1 Timothy 6:16). Job's great error was demanding that God appear and give an account of Himself, as though God were a defendant and Job the prosecuting attorney. Elihu says this is a category error of infinite proportions. We do not find Him; He finds us.
And why can we not find Him out? Because "He is exalted in power." His power is not just a greater degree of our power. It is of an entirely different kind. His power is the power to speak worlds into existence. Our power is the power to rearrange what He has already made. There is no comparison. To think our finite minds can comprehend His infinite ways is like a child with a bucket and spade thinking he can empty the ocean.
But this incomprehensible power is not arbitrary or capricious. It is not the brute force of a pagan deity. Elihu immediately qualifies it: "And He will not afflict justice and abundant righteousness." The word "afflict" here means to bend or pervert. God will not, because He cannot, bend justice. His power is always exercised in perfect harmony with His righteous character. This is the central truth that Job's friends misapplied and that Job himself was beginning to doubt. The friends said, "Because God is just, your suffering must be a direct punishment for a specific sin." Job was tempted to say, "Because my suffering is not a direct punishment for a specific sin, God must be unjust." Elihu says both are wrong. The premise you must hold to, even when you cannot see how it works, is that the unsearchable God is also the unswervingly just God. You must trust His character when you cannot trace His hand.
The Only Sane Response (v. 24)
Given everything he has just said, Elihu draws the only logical, sane, and righteous conclusion.
"Therefore men fear Him; He does not regard any who are wise of heart.” (Job 37:24 LSB)
The "therefore" connects it all. Because His glory is a blinding light, because His majesty is fearsome, because He is unsearchable in His power and perfect in His justice, what is the proper response for man? It is to fear Him. This is not the cowering fear of a slave before a tyrant. This is the awe-filled, reverent, trembling submission of a creature before his infinitely glorious and good Creator. It is the fear that drives out all other fears. If you fear God rightly, you will fear nothing and no one else. If you do not fear God, you will be a slave to a thousand other fears, the fear of man, the fear of failure, the fear of death.
And then comes the final, devastating blow to all human pride: "He does not regard any who are wise of heart." This does not mean God despises true wisdom. He is the source of all wisdom. It means He has no regard for those who are wise in their own estimation. He pays no attention to the proud, the arrogant, the self-proclaimed intellectual who thinks he can sit in judgment upon God. This is a direct rebuke to Job and his three friends. They all, in their own way, were being "wise of heart." They thought their own understanding was sufficient to explain the ways of God. Elihu says that this kind of pride is precisely what makes a man invisible to God. God resists the proud, but He gives grace to the humble (James 4:6). The man who comes to God with his own wisdom will be sent away empty. The man who comes to God in humble fear, confessing his ignorance, is the one who will receive wisdom.
Conclusion: Before the Whirlwind
Elihu's speech is the silence before the storm. He has cleared the courtroom of all the petty human arguments. He has pointed to the veiled, blinding light. He has declared the fearsome majesty of the Almighty. He has affirmed His unsearchable wisdom and His perfect justice. And he has called men to the only response that makes any sense: fear and humility.
This is the posture we must all take before God. The world tells you to be wise in your own heart, to trust your feelings, to be the captain of your own soul. The Bible tells you that this is the path to being utterly disregarded by God. The gospel does not come to us as a helpful suggestion for self-improvement. It comes as a thunderclap, a whirlwind that overturns all our pretensions to wisdom and righteousness.
The cross of Jesus Christ is the ultimate display of this fearsome majesty and unsearchable wisdom. At the cross, we see a light so bright it is darkness. We see the unsearchable God found by men and hung on a tree. We see power so exalted that it submits to weakness. And we see justice and righteousness so abundant that it can absorb the full wrath of God against sin, and yet provide a fountain of mercy for sinners.
How do we respond to this? We respond as Job is about to. We put our hands over our mouths. We repent of being "wise of heart." And we fear the God who loved us enough to endure the whirlwind of His own wrath for us. Therefore, let us fear Him. For in that holy fear, and only there, is true wisdom, true freedom, and true life to be found.