Elihu seems to stand forth as the very type of young, ardent, imaginative, quasi-inspired genius; he is the mouthpiece of the young age, the young school, which always vehemently protests its power to solve the questions which well-nigh strangle each successive generation, and which the elder wisdom practically abandons in despair. But Elihu stands far in advance of the aged ones in his discernment of the real nature of the necessity with which the aged patriarch was struggling. He knew that a mediator, a qualified interpreter of God, was the one solution of the problem, and in his short-sighted wisdom he offered himself. But, alas! an archangel had been a daysman wholly insufficient. But Elihu had laid hold of a mighty truth when he handled the subject of mediation, and he deals with it in an altogether masterly way.
In discussing the subject unfolded in the text, we notice:
I. That the words "mediation" and "intercession" present fundamentally the same idea a coming between to bridge over a gulf or to avert a stroke.
II. Intercession rests on the fact that there is a complete humanity in God. That humanity in God is the intercession. It is God who intercedes with God. He is "the brightness of the Father's glory, and the express image of His substance," who is the Daysman between us; and all this fulness of human pity and compassion was already in the Father when He sent Him forth.
III. There was a Divine necessity that God should be self-revealed as the Mediator, that this most Godlike form of God should take shape and appear in our world. There were depths of the Divine nature, secret things of the Divine counsels, which no material creation was full enough or rich enough to draw forth into expression. All the compassion, the tenderness, the patient love, which bore the God-Man through that path the only possible end of which was Calvary, were there in the Father, yearning for expression. It was this in God which the Lord came to make known. There is a Mediator, "one Mediator between God and man," that God may declare Himself as Mediator.
J. Baldwin Brown, Christian World Pulpit,vol. ix., pp. 392, 406.
References: Job 33:6; Job 33:7. H. Melvill, Penny Pulpit,No. 2217. Job 33:12; Job 33:13. S. Pearson, Homiletic Quarterly,vol. iii., p. 405.Job 33:23; Job 33:24. Spurgeon, Sermons,vol. xv., No. 905.