Job 33:19

With pain. Elihu is coming closer and closer to Job’s problem. He expresses his own comprehension of the ministry of pain. He conceives of God as being kind and loving in inflicting pain, not as a punishment but as a discipline. There seems to be a certain progression in Elihu’s discourse. First he mentions dreams, then warnings, then pain. The idea of pain as a mode of discipline was not altogether new. Eliphaz had alluded to it in ch. 5:17. Elihu, however, expanded and developed the idea as Eliphaz had not done. Regarding the discipline of affliction, see Ps. 119:67, 71, 75.