Can your wealth or all your mighty effort keep you from distress?
Parallel translations
- WEB Would your wealth sustain you in distress, or all the might of your strength?
- KJV Will he esteem thy riches? no, not gold, nor all the forces of strength.
- NKJV Will your riches, Or all the mighty forces, Keep you from distress?
- NASB “Will your cry for help keep you from distress, Or all the exertions of your strength?
- NLT Could all your wealth or all your mighty efforts keep you from distress?
Scripture taken from the New King James Version®. Copyright © 1982 by Thomas Nelson. Used by permission. All rights reserved.
Scripture quotations taken from the (NASB®) New American Standard Bible®, Copyright © 1960, 1971, 1977, 1995, 2020 by The Lockman Foundation. Used by permission. All rights reserved. lockman.org
Scripture quotations are taken from the Holy Bible, New Living Translation, copyright © 1996, 2004, 2015 by Tyndale House Foundation. Used by permission of Tyndale House Publishers, Carol Stream, Illinois 60188. All rights reserved.
Quick answer
Elihu asks whether Job's wealth or strength could sustain him in distress. Earthly resources cannot save in the day of trouble.
Overview
Elihu confronts the futility of trusting riches or human strength to deliver from distress. No amount of wealth or might can ransom a life before God (Ps. 49:6-8). The verse exposes the inadequacy of all earthly security and directs the heart to seek refuge in God alone, whose saving help is found supremely in Christ, the only ransom for sinners.
Cross-references & the web
Cross-references · 10
- Prov 11:4Riches are worthless in the day of wrath, but righteousness brings deliverance from death.
- Prov 11:21Be assured that the wicked will not go unpunished, but the offspring of the righteous will escape.
- Isa 37:36Then the angel of the LORD went out and struck down 185,000 men in the camp of the Assyrians. When the people got up the next morning, there were all the dead bodies!
- Job 9:13God does not restrain His anger; the helpers of Rahab cower beneath Him.
- Ps 33:16–17No king is saved by his vast army; no warrior is delivered by his great strength.
- Isa 2:20In that day men will cast away to the moles and bats their idols of silver and gold—the idols they made to worship.
- Prov 10:2Ill-gotten treasures profit nothing, but righteousness brings deliverance from death.
- Zeph 1:18Neither their silver nor their gold will be able to deliver them on the Day of the LORD’s wrath. The whole earth will be consumed by the fire of His jealousy.” For indeed, He will make a sudden end of all who dwell on the earth.
- Jas 5:3Your gold and silver are corroded. Their corrosion will testify against you and consume your flesh like fire. You have hoarded treasure in the last days.
- Job 34:20They die in an instant, in the middle of the night. The people convulse and pass away; the mighty are removed without human hand.
Themes, concepts, people & topics
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Hebrew/Greek interlinear, word definitions, and cross-references for this verse.
Christ at the center
Job's cry for a mediator who can lay his hand on both God and man, and his confidence that 'my Redeemer lives' and will stand on the earth, reaches forward to Jesus the living Redeemer.
How Job 36:19 points to him is part of the one story that runs through all Scripture — meet Jesus at the heart of the web, or follow a trail that traces him from Genesis to Revelation.
Original language
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