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“Great men are not always wise: neither do the aged understand judgment. Therefore I said…I also will shew mine opinion” (Job 32:9-10).
Yesterday we spoke about the respect that is due to those who are older than we are, and who usually have more knowledge and experience than we do. However, as our verse for today shows us, this is not always so. Job’s friends really were his friends, and they thought that they were helping him. However, they had the wrong idea about what was happening to Job, and they made things worse for him, rather than helping him.
As we saw yesterday, Elihu was a younger man, but he had the mind of the Lord, and was able to be a help to both Job and his three friends. He understood that all difficulties in our lives are not punishment from the Lord, but may be for other reasons. He did not know why the Lord was allowing such awful problems in Job’s life, but he knew that it was wrong to assume that it was because Job was a wicked man.
All this is a good lesson to some of us older ones, for we are not always right. When we have said something, and younger ones ask questions, it is good for us to listen to them. A number of times in my life someone younger than I has pointed something out to me, and I had to realize that he was right, and I was wrong.
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