“I have something yet to say on God’s behalf.”

Job 36:2

The one humorous character in the tragedy of Job is Elihu. Job, the sufferer is pathetic in his sorrow and pain. The three elderly friends who come to comfort Job are majestic as they sit speechless in their seven days’ silence before the appalling horror of their friend’s despairing condition. But Elihu, the pompous youth, who intrudes himself into the situation and delivers right off his lengthy, pedantic speeches, is a comic character. “Endless Elihu” one Biblical commentator calls him, and remarks: “No wonder the book of Job has forty long chapters since it contains a condensed summary of four speeches by Elihu.” (Halford E. Luccock)

Boastfully charging down on Job in frontal attack, Elihu is the typical youth in rebellion against the authority of age. He vows he is so filled with wisdom, like goat-skins bloated with fermenting wine, that he is bursting to utter truth. He makes proud promises to fetch knowledge from afar and apply it to Job’s distressing condition, but the lengthy material of his speeches later heard does not bear out the promise of novelty and wisdom which he has given.

Yet, for us, there’s something of a challenge in this Elihu, ridiculous, pompous figure though he is, as he steps forth and says at the beginning of his fourth and last speech: “I have something yet to say on God’s behalf.” Yes, there is a text for all of us.

With all his folly and unfeeling, Elihu at least perceived this much, that God needs an advocate, and this is more than lots of us seem to have realized. There is always something preposterous about a mere human being posing as God’s advocate. Why should the Eternal Creator and Ultimate Judge of the universe need one of His small creatures to plead in His behalf? What could anyone say to add to the already apparent glory and grandeur of God? Cannot everyone see the golden glow of the autumn and look up at the vast sweep of the starry sky? Do we not all automatically know that we cannot of ourselves produce life, nor heal our bodies when illness and crippling come?

Paul the Apostle, as he became God’s advocate, was made to feel that his preaching was foolishness when he tried to speak in God’s behalf to the Greeks. Noah’s neighbors laughed at the queer old man’s advocacy of God as he vexed his righteous soul over the sins of his generation. When a comedy team in the theatre was ludicrously taking off a lecturer, someone was heard to remark, above the ripple of laughter at the slow grotesque manner of the actor’s speech: “Why, he sounds like a Presbyterian preacher.”

Yes, there’s always something preposterous, ridiculous in a mere man’s presuming to speak for God — the great, eternal, omnipotent, unknowable One. Surely every person who dares to put a foot into a pulpit is overwhelmed at the thought of it. And yet, there’s nothing God needs more on His green earth than little people, who like Elihu, will stand up and say: “I have something yet to say on God’s behalf.” We’ve seen in the last half-century a militant, godless communism sweep like a forest fire over the face of the earth. Not since the time the Turk was threatening Christian Europe in the 17th century and the armies of Islam stood at the gates of Vienna had the Christian faith been so attacked, undermined, and spoken against.

And a silent, subtle secularization of our whole culture has been steadily stripping every mark of God from our common life. Our pre-occupation with the surface sensations of sex — in literature, entertainment, and even scientific research — as though bedding were all married people thought of, and there were no living to be made, nor spiritual and practical problems of home and family ever to be considered by husband and wife. As if the church had not known, long before Freud and Kinsey, that sex is one of the greatest motivating factors in human behavior and so ranged it round with the sanctities of Christian marriage and the ideal of godly homes that the race should be ennobled, rather than demoralized and mongrelized! The great contest of our time is this battle between a materialistic, secular view of life and a spiritual one.

And as if not content with doing everything possible to reduce our own American life to the least common denominator of average, animal man, we seem to have launched a worldwide campaign to dilute and pollute the spiritual climate of the whole world. A series of studies on the Taste of the Common Man in the United States revealed that because of our near world monopoly of the modern miracles of communication — radio, TV, movies, communication satellites — we have seized a greedy and gluttonous share of influencing peoples. What couldn’t we do with these same instruments had we a different quality of soul? Not that every TV show and movie should grind out soft organ music and sermonettes, but that the minds of people should be enlightened and the souls of people inspired and their hands set to deeds of brotherhood, charity, and mercy. God not need an advocate now?

The late George Buttrick, gifted author, teacher, and preacher, told of “two friends who were disillusioned with religion and life. One of them had a dream and reported it to his friend. ‘I thought,’ he said, ‘that I saw you standing on a hilltop, and we, a great host of us, were crowded around waiting eagerly for what you might say. We could see your lips framing the word, but no sound came. We tried to help you by calling out the word your lips were shaping, but we also were dumb! And the word was –’ … What was the word? There is a missing word. In lack of it our little loyalties of home, business, nation, and church, are like the stones of an arch, without the keystone; the stones fall and break on each other and the human spirit finds no door. What is the missing word? ‘We tried to help you,’ said the man describing his dream, ‘by calling the word your lips were shaping, but we also were dumb; and that word was … GOD.’” (G. Buttrick — Prayer)

Yes, God needs His advocates now, preposterous though the role may seem — men and women who like Elihu will stand up wherever they are and say: “I have something yet to say on God’s behalf.”

But there is a second point where this character Elihu challenges us: he not only perceived that God needs an advocate, Elihu volunteered to be God’s advocate, limited though he be in capacity and preparedness. And I hope you won’t misunderstand me and think it a silly, false modesty when I say that from where I stand it looks to me like the advocate the Lord God Almighty could most easily dispense with in our time is the fellow in the pulpit.

It’s in the home and office and factory, in the sickroom and the hospital, yes, and in the back alleys and bars, where those who “yet have something to say on God’s behalf,” are most needed to speak it out.

It was in the saloon and right into the teeth of the blasphemous, drunken Saul Kane that timid Miss Bourke spoke up:

“‘Saul Kane,’ she said, ‘when next you drink

Do me the gentleness to think

That every drop of drink accursed

Makes Christ within you die of thirst,

And every dirty word you say

Is one more flint upon His way,

Another thorn about His head,

Another mock by where He tread,

Another nail, another cross,

All that you are, is that Christ’s loss.’”

And unless church on Sunday results in getting just that kind of advocate, we had just as well shut up shop; we are just playing at religion, kidding no one but ourselves. I remember a feature article in Time Magazine years back describing the transformation that had taken place in the old Adams Memorial Presbyterian Church on Manhattan. Its stained glass windows had been removed and the arched openings bricked up. An orchestra sat in the former choir and where the minister used to stand at sermon time, “a perky blonde in her stocking feet stood poised before a microphone to sing a number about a fellow who wouldn’t take his hand off her knee.” Such was the picture of the recording studio for Columbia records in what used to be the Adams Memorial Presbyterian Church.

Perhaps you would say its just the typical despairing picture of a church caught in a population shift. But I say its also the desperate picture of any church, even your church — if God’s only vocal advocate is the guy who stands in the pulpit for 30 minutes on a Sunday morning. You might as well brick up those windows now and silence the choir and organ, unless you become God’s advocate wherever you go, with the same conviction of Elihu’s testimony: “I have something yet to say on God’s behalf.”

Jesus complimented the woman who anointed his feet at Bethany with what sounds on the surface as “tepid tribute.” “She hath done what she could,” said Jesus. “Yet doing what we can is frequently the last thing we care to do. As a rule it is unexciting and unspectacular. How much more romantic is thinking of ourselves as doing what we cannot do. We sigh and think of what we might do for some fine cause with the $50,000 we do not have, instead of doing something with the $50 we do have. Many of us would prefer preaching like Billy Graham, the thing we cannot do, to teaching a Bible class, or speaking to a friend who’s not in the church about Christ, either of which we can do. To think of ourselves in fanciful daydreaming as the author of immortal books is far more thrilling and easy than to write the helpful letter we can write.” (Luccock)

You see, God’s most useful, indispensable advocate is His faithful servant who’s found at eleven o’clock on Sunday, not in the pulpit, but in the pew, and who all week long makes religion relevant to life where the clergy can never reach.

But there is a third challenge that comes to us from this fellow Elihu: Elihu, as God’s advocate, had only the wisdom of the ancient East with which to plead the cause for God, but we have the Gospel of Jesus Christ, and that’s all we need. Elihu could have been a better advocate had he a more intelligent understanding of God and realistic philosophy of life. How much more adequate, thrilling and satisfying our task! What has God’s advocate as Christ’s disciple to say? “We are ambassadors for Christ, as though God did beseech you by us: we pray you in Christ’s stead, be ye reconciled to God. For He hath made Him to be sin for us, who knew no sin; that we might be the righteousness of God in Him.”

This is the simple, straightforward message, not complicated and theologically mysterious: “Be ye reconciled to God, to a Heavenly Father’s love. It is your Father’s desire to be understood by you and His righteous will obeyed, not because He is sternly bent on having His own way, but because He wants you to have the best in this life and in eternity, and because His very nature and deepest convictions cry out for His child’s love, allegiance and service.”

Yes, God’s advocate has only to tell the old, old story of Jesus and His love.

And finally, there’s this aspect of Elihu’s serving as God’s advocate: after Elihu speaks, God Himself speaks. This is the sequence in the Job drama, and over and over again it has been the sequence in the course of human experience. However irrelevant or inadequate, pompous or preposterous, a mere man or woman’s words in defense of belief in God and obedience to His will — after God’s advocate speaks, and only after, the Eternal makes Himself heard in the counsel of man’s soul.

This is that something extra God’s servant can count on when he speaks for God. And oh, the joy of having discovered that you were taken hold of and used for something greater than your dreamed-of objective, that a work has been wrought which is more than a sum total of your talents and powers could accomplish. The testimony of God’s advocate counts in the controversy for the human soul, because after we, His advocates speak, God speaks.

No one has ever said this better than Phillips Brooks when he proclaimed it in his loveliest of Christmas carols:

“How silently, how silently

The wondrous gift is given!

So God imparts to human hearts

The blessings of His heaven.”

• Scripture Reference: Job 36:1-12 • Secondary Scripture References: n/a • Subject : What it means to be God’s advocate; Ambassadors for Christ; 659 • Special Topic: n/a • Series: n/a • Occasion: Visitation Evangelism Campaign; Baccalaureate for U.T. Medical School • First Preached: 10/18/1953 • Last Preached: 11/30/1990 • Rating: 3 • Book/Author References: Prayer, George Buttrick; Prayer, George Buttrick; , Halford Luccock