When Righteousness Feels Pointless
What’s Job 35 about?
Elihu tackles Job’s complaint that being righteous doesn’t seem to pay off, arguing that God is so transcendent that our righteousness or wickedness doesn’t actually benefit or harm him. It’s a brutal but necessary reality check about why we choose to follow God in the first place.
The Full Context
We’re deep in the middle of Elihu’s speeches now – this young upstart who appeared out of nowhere after Job’s three friends had exhausted their theological ammunition. While Eliphaz, Bildad, and Zophar kept hammering Job with “you must have sinned,” Elihu takes a different approach. He’s been listening to everything, and in Job 32, he basically said, “You’re all wrong, and I’m going to tell you why.” Chapter 35 is his response to something Job said way back in Job 7:20 and again in Job 35:3 – essentially, “What’s the point of being righteous if God doesn’t reward me for it?”
Elihu’s tackling one of the most honest questions anyone who’s tried to live faithfully has asked: “Does it actually matter?” This isn’t abstract theology – it’s the question that keeps people up at 2 AM when they’re wondering why their God-fearing neighbor just got diagnosed with cancer while their dishonest coworker got promoted. Elihu’s about to give an answer that’s both humbling and liberating, though it might not be the answer Job (or we) wanted to hear.
What the Ancient Words Tell Us
The Hebrew word that kicks off this whole discussion is tsadaq – “to be righteous” or “to be in the right.” When Job uses it in verse 2, he’s not just talking about moral behavior; he’s talking about being vindicated, being proven right before God and man. It’s the same root word used in legal contexts when someone is declared innocent in court.
Grammar Geeks
The phrase in verse 3 that asks “What advantage is it to you?” uses the Hebrew yiskon-leka, which literally means “what does it settle/establish for you?” Job isn’t just asking about benefits – he’s questioning whether righteousness actually establishes anything meaningful in the cosmic order.
But here’s where Elihu gets clever with his response. In verses 6-7, he uses a fascinating grammatical construction. When he says “If you sin, what do you accomplish against him?” the Hebrew verb pa’alta (you accomplish/do) is in a form that emphasizes the futility of the action. It’s like saying “What could you possibly accomplish?” with heavy sarcasm.
The word for “transcendent” or “high” that Elihu uses for God in verse 5 is gavoah – it’s not just talking about physical height, but about being unreachably superior. It’s the same word used to describe mountains that are so high they seem to touch the heavens.
What Would the Original Audience Have Heard?
Ancient Near Eastern cultures were deeply transactional in their view of the divine. You did good things, the gods rewarded you. You messed up, they punished you. It was cosmic bookkeeping, and everyone understood the system. Egyptian wisdom literature, Mesopotamian prayers, even popular Israelite thinking often operated on this principle.
So when Job complained that his righteousness wasn’t paying off, the original audience would have immediately recognized the crisis he was facing. This wasn’t just personal frustration – it was a fundamental challenge to how they understood the universe worked.
Did You Know?
Ancient Mesopotamian texts like the “Babylonian Theodicy” wrestle with identical questions to Job. One line reads: “Those who neglect the god go the way of prosperity, while those who pray to the goddess are impoverished and dispossessed.” Even 4,000 years ago, people were asking, “What’s the point?”
But Elihu’s response would have been shocking. By arguing that God is so transcendent that human actions don’t affect him, he’s essentially saying the whole transactional system is based on a false premise. God doesn’t need our righteousness, and he’s not diminished by our wickedness. This wasn’t just theology – it was revolutionary thinking.
The audience would also have caught Elihu’s subtle reference to creation imagery. When he talks about God being “higher than the heavens” and “what can you do,” he’s echoing the language of Psalm 139:8 and the creation accounts. He’s reminding them that the God who spoke the universe into existence operates on a completely different level than human moral calculations.
But Wait… Why Did Elihu…?
Here’s something genuinely puzzling: Why does Elihu seem so harsh toward people crying out for justice? In verses 12-13, he basically says God doesn’t answer because people are proud and their cries are empty. That seems pretty cold, especially coming right after he’s argued that God is transcendent and doesn’t need anything from us.
Wait, That’s Strange…
Elihu argues that God doesn’t answer “the cry of the afflicted” because of their pride (verse 12), but earlier he said God is too high to be affected by human actions anyway. If God is truly transcendent, why would human pride matter at all? It’s like saying someone is too important to notice you, but also too offended by your attitude to help you.
The tension here might be intentional. Elihu could be showing that even his own theology has rough edges – that trying to explain God’s ways with human logic always hits walls. Or he might be distinguishing between genuine cries for help and demands for vindication based on our own sense of entitlement.
The Hebrew word for “pride” here is ga’own, which can mean arrogance but also “majesty” or “excellence.” Maybe Elihu is saying that when we cry out to God based on our own sense of righteousness – “I deserve better because I’m good” – we’re missing the point entirely.
Wrestling with the Text
This chapter forces us to confront an uncomfortable truth: maybe we’ve been doing righteousness for the wrong reasons all along. If God doesn’t need our goodness and isn’t diminished by our failures, then why choose righteousness at all?
Elihu’s answer is both humbling and freeing. We don’t do right to benefit God or to earn cosmic rewards. We do right because that’s what it means to be human in God’s world. It’s like asking “What’s the point of breathing?” The point isn’t to benefit your lungs – it’s to be alive.
“God’s transcendence doesn’t make our choices meaningless; it makes them authentically ours.”
But this raises another question: if God doesn’t need our righteousness, does that mean our moral choices don’t matter? Elihu would say they matter enormously – just not in the way we thought. They don’t change God, but they change us and our world.
Think about it this way: when you choose honesty over deception, you’re not doing God a favor. You’re participating in the kind of reality God designed – a reality where truth has power, where integrity shapes communities, where righteousness creates flourishing. The benefit isn’t to God; it’s to the fabric of creation itself.
How This Changes Everything
Once you really absorb what Elihu is saying, it revolutionizes why you choose to follow God. You’re not trying to impress an insecure deity who needs validation. You’re not earning points in some cosmic reward system. You’re aligning yourself with the deepest truth about reality itself.
This is incredibly liberating for anyone who’s ever felt like their faith was just an exhausting attempt to stay on God’s good side. God doesn’t have a “good side” and “bad side” that you need to navigate. God is transcendent, complete, perfect – which means your relationship with him can be based on love and truth rather than fear and transaction.
It also means that when bad things happen to good people – which they will – it’s not because the system is broken. The system was never what we thought it was. Righteousness doesn’t guarantee a trouble-free life because righteousness was never about earning trouble-free lives. It’s about being truly human in God’s world.
Did You Know?
The concept Elihu presents here – God’s transcendence making him immune to human influence – shows up in later Jewish and Christian theology as “divine impassibility.” It’s the idea that God doesn’t change or suffer because of what we do, which paradoxically allows him to love us with perfect consistency.
For Job, this message was probably both maddening and necessary. Maddening because it didn’t answer his immediate question about why he was suffering. Necessary because it freed him from the crushing weight of thinking that his suffering meant God was angry with him or that his righteousness had been pointless.
Key Takeaway
God’s transcendence doesn’t diminish the importance of our choices – it liberates them from the burden of trying to manipulate divine favor and allows them to be expressions of authentic love and truth.
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