Background Scripture: Job 1 – 3

Lesson 12    February 19, 2022

Key Verse

Then Bildad the Shuhite responded, “How long will you say these things, and the words of your mouth be a mighty wind?

Job 8:1-2

INTRODUCTION

Our Lesson Study highlights the danger of incomplete theology which contains half-truths, which makes this theology more dangerous than outright lies and distortions.

It is very difficult for believers to understand and appreciate that they have a limited knowledge of God, who He is, and how He thinks. He has revealed a lot of things about Him and that is sufficient to meet our needs for the knowledge that He has revealed is quite appropriate for our frail unlimited understanding. But the disconcerting reality for human beings is that there is still a lot more that we have to learn about the Lord God Almighty and the way He manages the world.

We have to be very careful therefore when we make judgments. One writer warns us therefore:

“Saints who are vehemently jealous for the divine honor are often intensely unkind as well as unfair to their fellow men. Bildad was as cruel toward Job as he was courageous in behalf of God”.

Therefore, as a result

“Beware of sentencing those to perdition concerning whom God has not declared his mind. Bildad manifestly had no doubt as to the fate of Job’s children”.

It is therefore absolutely necessary for us to study the Scriptures and look at how God deals with different people in varying situations.

We know that the Lord God Almighty is a God of judgment, but we also know that he is a God of mercy, kindness, compassion, and love. Because of this we know that He is the only being that has the wisdom, the right, and the power to make decisions which includes how to teach human beings about the reality of life, and how they should live, and what they should not do. His actions pull us up and make us aware that our judgments are always going to be faulty and we cannot step out of the bounds of the direction of the Holy Spirit. We have to be humble and understand that we will not always know or understand what is going on around us. We thus have to live in total dependence on the guidance of the Holy Spirit without inserting ourselves into many of the processes that are occurring as if we know everything.

The basis on how to live is the fundamental understanding that God is a God of love and compassion but He is also a God of Judgment, and as the Creator and owner of all things including all human beings He has the right to do what is best in His sight for His sight is much better than ours. His knowledge is much more complete ours.

He has to manage the entire world and He knows where every single atom is located at every moment in the past, the present, or the future. He knows everything that is going on in man and in the material world even before it came into existence, and so He has to track all of these things.

God therefore is a God that is so omniscient, or knowledgeable, and so understanding, that we can hardly understand some of what happens in the real world. But we have to trust that God is righteous and holy and will always do things that are absolutely best for His creation, for creation and all in it belongs to Him.

This is made clear by the prophets especially the prophet Isaiah.

In this case we see that the presuppositions, hypotheses, or understandings by the friends of Job that Job was not pure and upright and had a good conscience toward God were false and based on incomplete information about what was happening.

The logic of Job’s friends was that God can do no wrong, which is in fact a good position. They accepted, and Job did as well, that rightness is being like God and wrongness as one writer said is being unlike God. So one writer now looks at the conclusion that is drawn by this logic:

“Can God be unlike himself?” The answer is “No”. God cannot be unlike himself; God cannot do wrong. So Bildad moves on from that basic premise to draw a logical conclusion for Job: “if your children have sinned against him he has delivered them into the power of their transgression. When your children died, Job, on that tragic day when the tornado blew down the house and killed them all, you can only conclude it was because they did something terribly wrong”. Bildad is following through with the line of argument that all three of these friends pursue, that God punishes all wrong; therefore any tragedy is the result of some definite and perhaps hidden sin”.

We see this same kind of logic which pervaded all throughout Israel and throughout all the pagan world. Even Jesus’ disciples, for they asked the question when it came to the issue of issue of a blind man, Who did sin this man or his parents that he was born blind?

In this Study we will see that much of what the friends of Job is quite true and on a certain level we cannot find anything wrong specifically in what they are saying for we know that the experiences of the past tell us that God blesses those who turn to Him and He rebukes and punishes those who turn away from Him.

But believers are to be very careful in their judgments for they do not know everything that is happening. This is not to say that they are not required to make assessments for they are required to do that. They must not cast their pearls before swine for the swine will destroy the pearls and then turn around and destroy them. But there are limits to what we can do. We are warned that vengeance belongs to God and He will repay.

The Book of Job is a fascinating, gripping, epic drama, that tells us of a real, actual, living man. Some however believe that no such man existed and that a poetic genius created him, put him in certain circumstances in order to discuss certain troubling questions that face humanity.

The Scriptures however, tell us that he was a real man and the prophet Ezekiel in chapter 14:14-20 names him, along with Noah and Daniel, as one of the three great men of Scripture. The book of James also speaks of his patience and steadfast endurance.

But this is in essence a very strange book in Scripture. We know that God knows what is going on and the angels know what is going on. Satan himself knows what is going on. But none of the men in this drama know what is happening. They do not know why Job is being afflicted.

It is interesting to note that there is no reference in Job’s friends to Satan. And we can ask, Why did they did not understand that Satan works all kinds of terrible things for they must have known what happened in the Garden of Eden. So we have to consider why the existence of Satan is so shrouded in the story. Did Satan manage to hide himself so well from them, from these early days of human history?

Why does Satan succeed in hiding himself from us in our modern times?

Is it important for us to look at his tracks and from them see what we can find out about his existence and what we have to do to resist him?

Now we should remember that there is the clear doctrine in Scripture about the sovereignty of God. Note therefore that there is really no contest between God and Satan. Satan can say what he wants and do what he wants but really it amounts to nothing, except for the fact that he can do great damage to us human beings because our parents brought sin into the world.

But we have to be careful therefore and not be foolish and join with others on disrespecting Satan and think that we can so easily beat him as some like to tell others. In fact the way they behave it seems as if they are really on Satan’s side by giving false information about him.

Note that though Job had difficulty in understanding God he stood his ground and in fact defeated Satan.

The clear lesson therefore is that we must know that we have a great enemy, who though he is great and powerful, well experienced in bringing powerful temptations to us, and is sneaky and deceptive, he has limitations, and we can stand our ground and resist him quite successfully.

We simply have to learn to study the Scriptures, pray without ceasing, trust totally in God and in the guidance of the Holy Spirit. Our power to resist Satan does not come from inside us but it comes from God. And in fact, we know that angels of God encamp around them that fear God and delivers them. So let us remember those teachings in Scripture.

The Book is also considered by some to be one of the oldest in the Scriptures. Some believe Job lived in the patriarchal age before the time of Abraham.  Some believe he lived at the same time as Moses, while others in the time of the Judges, or the time of David, or the time of Solomon, or even during the time of the Babylonian captivity.

The problem is that the Text does not identify the author and the Jews and their Rabbinic tradition does not even attempt to identify an author, except to suggest that the writer must have lived before Moses.

Its style is definitely not that of Moses and while Moses used the name Yahweh often, Job uses other names for God common to Semitic peoples, names such as Eloah or Elohim, and Shaddai, the latter name used thirty-one times in Job as opposed to 16 times in the rest of the Old Testament.

There is much speculation about who wrote it, with some believing he wrote it himself, others that one of his visiting friends wrote it, others that Moses wrote it, still others that Solomon wrote it, or that Isaiah or Ezra wrote it, and so on.

The things that happen in the book are generally placed in the patriarchal age.  It does not like the rest of the Scriptures,

give references to historical events, but we have certain clues as to the time period in which it was set.

-The tone is definitely Aramaic,

-Job uses Arabic words unlike Moses,

• The cultural background is unfamiliar and does not sound much like that of the Hebrews,
• -They seem to be a clan-family organization headed by the father, which would fit the time of Abraham or before
• The father who heads the family acts as a Priest
• The references to the nomadic way of life points to an early date
• The land of Uz where Job is said to have lived is generally thought to be located in Southern Arabia and as well one of Job’s friends Eliphaz came from Teman in Edom, while Elihu came from northeastern Arabia.
• The lifestyle and having a new family at such a late age and other things suggest patriarchal longevity.
• The kind of references to animal life suggest a time early in the age of man. References seem to suggest dinosaurs coexisting with man.

There is speculation about his nationality, whether or not he was Arab, Egyptian, Syrian, an Israelite, or Idumean.

Conservative scholarship, both Jewish and Christian however regard the book as unquestionably canonical and locate its events in the very  early period of man’s history.

The book is about a man who “feared God”, something that the Scriptures tell us is the beginning of wisdom, and which is another designation or name for true religion.  It can be classified as Wisdom literature, dealing with the same philosophical questions as similar literature and containing immense poetic skills in its approach to these questions.

This was a man who was genuinely committed to his God.  Four synonyms are brought together by the writer to describe Job’s piety and spiritual maturity in the strongest possible fashion.

It is stated:

1. His whole heart was bent toward God and to what was good;
2. He strongly loved and was very careful in always showing that he was well disposed to his fellow men;
3. In thought and action he was unswerving in conforming to that which was right;
4. Since he feared God, his entire actions were motivated by the fear of God, which is the beginning principle of wisdom;
5. He kept himself away from evil, and anything that was opposed to God, or was proscribed by God.

He was described as ‘perfect’, that is, ‘blameless’, ‘upright’, from the root word meaning “to be straight” or to “go straight”.

This description of course does not mean that Job was sinless. They add up to mean that he was a man of consistent integrity, was  dedicated to walk in reverence and was quite aware of his sins, (see 7:20 and 13:26).

He was aware that sin had its root in the human heart (see verse 5), and the need to frequently make atonement for the sins of his family by the stipulated sacrifices and a fresh rededication to God.

He was the Head or Priest of his family and behaved befitting in this role, taking the initiative in showing his fatherly love and concern for his children and performing his religious duties in the right way.

In addition to all this, Job was described as very prosperous, with a large household and great possessions, so that in wealth, prosperity, and reputation, he was without equal among the Eastern tribes. Even with this great prosperity, he still obeyed God fervently, resolutely, and reverently. God had indeed blessed him.

For him, this matter of “cursing God in the heart” was something to be feared and avoided at all costs. Ultimately he was put to the test on this matter of whether he would ever curse God in his heart.

Note carefully that here was a man of God going about his private business, completely unaware that the attention of God was about to focus on him in a special way and that, as one writer puts it:

“He has become the battleground for a conflict between God and Satan in which God is planning to pull the rug out from under Satan and to reveal him as the phony that he is. Job is that battleground, and Satan immediately moves in with shock troops”.

This book strips away the fog through which we view life, taking away the illusions and delusions of life, and show us what life is really like.

Here in the book of Job we see a man, a player to whom God has ‘tossed the football’ and immediately at whom the well-trained and powerful team of evil, the devil and his angels rush, directing all their energies and focus in their attack on him.

Job is no longer sitting safely on the bench, or at home watching the televised game and enjoying it, but though he does not know it and is completely unaware of events unfolding around him, he is now thrust into the centre of a very heated and dangerous game of true reality, where he is now the direct and specific target of the enemy.

Let us understand that this Book is talking about us. 

THE PURPOSES OF THE BOOK

1. It shows that God is worthy to be loved even if one does not consider the material blessings He provides.
2. It explains that God may allow suffering in order to purify and strengthen a person in Godliness.
3. It most strongly emphasizes that man is unable to view life from God’s vast perspective.  Behind the thoughts and ways of God are considerations and issues that are too complicated and deep for us to understand and appreciate.  The issues of life that God deals with, the breath of understanding, vision and power are outside our scope.  But we note that God knows what is best for us and our ultimate good and for His own glory.
4. It enables us to examine and learn about the Justice of God when He treats or allows the righteous to suffer.
5. It clearly shows Satan and the Evil angels that when God blesses the righteous, which He often does, this does not in all cases hinder the development of true righteousness.
6. It shows the true nature of Satan, his disrespect of, low opinion of, destructive intentions and unbelievable hatred for men.
7. It shows how men wrestle with affliction, even though affliction often defies human explanation.
8. It shows that the righteous often undergo the bitterest agony of body and spirit, even though they are well aware of having lived an upright life.  Despite that affliction they can remain steadfast and ultimately experience happier life to the glory of God the Father.
9. We must see in this book that human wisdom is not able and has completely failed to delve properly and successfully into the mystery of human suffering.

Often, we face trouble, temptations and pressures in our lives and we must understand what we are into.  We are into a war with the powers of darkness, a never-ending combat against very powerful forces

We must understand that when there are many adverse circumstances facing us, or hostile people (sometimes they might even be old friends), and we are continually being invited to get involved with attractive but deadly and destructive things, to act contrary to the teaching of the Word of God, pressured to lose our faith, be impatient and angry, or to compromise with the world; we are often and almost always in an identical position to Job. Our pressures are growing and the attacks more insistent as we approach the end of time.

We will often face people who look at the situation of the righteous and wonder if a person with a great reputation could suffer such awful and devastating misfortune. They shake when they considered that their own security is in peril because of the possibility that the same thing could happen to them.

These people will fight hard to make the righteous believe that it is their grievous un-confessed sins that make sense of the disaster they are facing. But all they are doing is trying to establish their own sense of security.

Men will develop all kinds of unbiblical but certainly attractive doctrines that material blessings mean it is God that is blessing you and that you are with Him, even when you are openly breaking His commandments.  They will tell you the converse, that the absence of material blessings means that God is not on your side, then they advocate the solution that you pay them tithes and offerings to solve the problem.

This is of course all chicanery and lying. Yes, we should pay our tributes to God and we should obey Him, but the kind of guarantees that the flesh seeks is really not available.

Job does not know what is happening, and he views events in his life from his viewpoint, a view that God does not really want him to have.  One writer advises us:

“We are given this because we too are not permitted this viewpoint in times of trial.  We do not know what is going on behind the scenes in our lives, with all our pressures and trials. We do not know what has transpired between Satan and God about us, but we are given this reassurance that something does happen, and that we are being subjected to a test.  This is very revealing and very important.”

In order to teach us what true wisdom is like, God has pulled away the veil from the invisible angelic world and shown us the royal court of the Sovereign Lord God, where He sits on his throne surrounded by His servants, who report to him on their activities.

This is a most impressive scene, similar to John’s description in Revelation 4.

These angels, according to Job 28:4-7, are the earliest beginnings of creation, before the material world and man was created. They reflect the glory of God and surround God in His eternal glory and they are the instruments of God in His rule over the universe.  They are the holy ones, heavenly spirits and they go about in the universe and among men.  They are called the ‘sons of God’ and God directly created them.

Note that they are different from us men, for unlike Adam they were not given authority to procreate and multiply and produce others like themselves.  That is a bad no-no for angels.

It appears that there are trillions of them, countless numbers, direct creations of God and they have a hierarchy and they have their role and work, and from time to time present themselves before God to give a report of their activities.

Clearly then we are taught that God is in absolute and total control of this one universe, which for God is just one place.

The Adversary, this is what the word ‘Satan’ means, was once like these holy ones, but he withdrew himself from the love of God, was captivated by self-love, and became, though he was allowed to for a time retain his beautiful and glorious form, forever the enemy of God.

He comes among the servants of God, to oppose and treat God with enmity, since he is now totally evil.  He has access to God even though he is obviously still fallen.  He is not excluded from the presence of God.

There are many people who read books that tell them that Satan is bound in Hell.  He is burning in some furnace. The Bible tells us that that is not true, that is just idle and satanic speculation designed to confuse and trick us.  When Satan and his demons come to us, they are not going to smell of smoke, except they think that we can be easily frightened by that kind of antics.  They generally come disguised as ‘angels of light’ and bringing attractive but badly flawed messages.  So be warned.

Note in all this however that though he was evil, he must serve God, for God makes even evil minister to fulfill His purpose of salvation. Satan, though the Adversary, is absolutely subordinate to God along with all other beings, whether they are visible or invisible.

Remember that though Satan is fallen, for now God has not excluded him from His presence , and he still has access to God.

We learn from this that Satan, our vicious and implacable enemy, is not the equivalent of God, for God is in control of all things. No being, including Satan, can go beyond or operate beyond God’s word and in His will.

Therefore do not make the mistake of elevating Satan’s conflict with God as a conflict between equals. They are not equal. Satan’s fight against God is not a great controversy or a great fight. He is simply wasting his time, trying to destroy human beings that want to serve God, while he awaits his destruction and his eternal punishment in the Lake of Fire.

Do not follow him and join him in that Lake of Fire.

Clearly then we also learn that God is not a ‘heavenly bellboy’ ready to run at our command.  God is certainly in charge and always will be in charge and we must deal with Him as He wishes. It is not our will but His will that must be done.

As we read we realize that this is a strange ‘battle’ that is shaping up, for one side must get permission from the other side before it can attack. Satan asks God for permission, for he is always ready to bring our testing, but it is God that permits it.

Obviously, it is not really a ‘battle’ or a ‘war’.  It is simply a test, a rigorous test of Job’s faith that now follows.

We can ask ourselves why God does this, and why He challenges Satan. Consider the scene, and you will begin to understand why people of God suffer.

It is here in the presence of God and in the presence of the holy Angels that God glorifies Himself, with the Angels watching with great interest, pointing to Job as “a creation of His redemptive grace”.

When Satan admits to his satanic activity of going up-and-down looking for somebody that he can get at as 1 Peter 5:8 tells us, looking for a chink in our armor, looking for the opportunity that we give him, (see the Apostle Paul’s warning in Ephesians 4:26), God responds by issuing a challenge.

In fact, says God to Satan, despite your satanic activity, your satanic philosophy, and the corruption you have wreaked among men, there is on earth real genuine piety.

God in triumph displays His servant, fully confident that he will oppose Satan and glorify Him, proving that what God says about the elect people whom He has given to Jesus, is true.

Just remember that God might be saying the same thing about you to Satan, fully expecting that you will prove Him right by your reaction to turmoil and distress and by your consistent integrity in behaviour.

The satanic philosophy is of course that the fundamental law of life is looking after yourself and your interests first. What is in it for me? or What is it going to do for me? is the cry of all men, says Satan.

Now, this is something that we all do, for we think that when (or because) we obey God and do what is right, because it is in our best interest to do so, we think we are exercising great faith. Most of us serve God only when it is in our best interest to do so, and as long as God is blessing us, or promises to bless us. When the blessing stops, and difficulties and trials begin, we want to stop serving God. Where is He? we ask. Has God stopped listening to us? we say.

We will learn from this book that great faith, the kind of faith that God wants, is shown only when we continue to serve God, despite the fact that it is the hardest and most difficult thing to do.

The hostile Satan cannot find anything in Job’s outward behaviour to accuse him, and that was a great testimony to Job’s character and consistent integrity. So Satan put it to God that Job was devoted to Him because of calculated self-interest.

Satan was really saying in front of the Angels that Job, like him Satan, was no different but was just also a deceiver.

In doing so, he was accusing God of being naïve, and in fact probably lying by claiming that Job was His genuine son because of His redemptive grace. There was no such thing as redemptive grace for men. God had simply bribed Job to behave as if he was reverent. Job was putting on a good show because God had blessed him and protected him.  He was not really sound.

Note that Satan’s attack on the integrity of Job was basically an attack on the integrity of God.

Job was now to be given the opportunity through his trial, not so much to vindicate himself but to justify God.

Would we be able to do that? Let us examine ourselves and make sure we would be able to justify God, for the grace that He has bestowed on us.

We must not simply approach the book of Job for an answer as to why the righteous suffer, but as an answer to the need for wisdom; for true wisdom means a total consecration of self to a faithful God. This means that even if the world around us disintegrates, and we are stranded without any help or support, bewildered by our lot in life, we must absolutely continue to fear God. This is true wisdom.

One commentator pointed out that the conflict between David and Goliath was nothing in comparison to this, for in comparison to this, David and Goliath were equal matched. He states:

“How unequal the contest seems! Pre-natural knowledge and power- with the element of surprise in its favor- arrayed against a mortal! David and Goliath, in comparison, were equally matched. Yet Job’s steadfast righteousness, like David’s heroism, was only the visible index of the power of divine redemption working in and through the servant of God.  The strategy of God, like that of Elijah on Carmel, was to make it impossible for Satan to foist on the witnesses a naturalistic explanation of the wonder He was about to perform.  The overwhelming advantage God allowed Satan became, in the sequel, the measure of the devil’s ignominy and of God’s praise.”

Men, despite the presence of their sinful flesh, do not have to keep on sinning, and can resist Satan, and do not have to waver between good and evil. When we do sin, as we often do, confession of sin to God and repentance will bring forgiveness and cleansing from God.

Clearly the Bible presents Job as man at his best; sincere, moral, devoted, selfless, doing in a godly fashion godly deeds of worship, doing deeds of good and helping many people, focusing on what God wants. He does not care about wealth or want to hold on to the material things and deny God.

Through suffering he learns, and we learn a lot about the nature of God, God’s compassion, His mercy, and God’s caring and control of everything that happens around us, and His sending suffering to teach us many things about His will, that we might not have otherwise known.

THE TEXT

Job 8.

To understand chapter 8 we have to review chapter 4 and 5 and examine what the opening salvo in this attack on Job from his friends was really saying.

We will see the dangerous attacks on Job as we look briefly at what the apparently oldest and most dignified of Job’s friends said for the principles that he relied on and used though not in themselves completely wrong really missed the mark for he did not understand what Job was suffering nor did he understand the actions of God.

He had used some principles that tried to put God in a box forcing God to operate according to the principles that he thought was the cause of every human suffering. This suffering was not external or accidental but was coming from what was deeply seated in man’s nature. The causes were internal.

The eldest of the friends that visited Job was Eliphaz and he seems to be the most sophisticated and refined of the three. He is the first to speak and he tries to answer Job’s complaints with some level of kindness but in doing so he engages in a controversy with Job who has already assumed that he has never given God any reason to afflict him and that he’s totally guiltless of any fault.

 

All his friend’s arguments and his principles were repeated in one form or another and with minor variations characterize mainly by the strength of their emotion, by the other two friends. They were not as refined and careful as Eliphaz was. In our Study we will therefore be looking at Bildad who as one writer states:

“comes across as the staunch, ramrod traditionalist, the one who sees all issues in black and white and who prides himself on his straightforward, no-nonsense approach”.

Eliphaz points out to Job that the innocent never suffer and only the wicked are afflicted. The doer of evil will reap the fruits of his own ill-doing. God rules over all the world that He created and is the judge of all men. He is the wise and holy ruler of all and He is not vindictive. Before this God all men are condemned because of divine holiness and so there can be no self-confidence and boasting for the most pure and exalted beings have to bow and are abased in the presence of the Divine One.

 

 He says that he has had a vision which gave him the lesson that you should never presume to be more wise than his maker. You should never assume innocence and righteousness in the presence of God. He seems to think that the cause of man’s suffering comes from his nature.

 

He reminded Job that he had corrected many and his former conduct was not a good contrast to his present state. He obviously was suggesting that this venerated teacher had been a hypocrite.

Satan since he had failed with his previous attacks on Job, had  reserved his heavy guns in the form of Job’s friends, who would accuse and blame him wrongfully and pull the rug out from under him, instead of supporting him and lifting him up to God.

Remember God has warned us that Satan is persistent and he will adopt new, different wiles and strategies to get us. He wanted God to let him get at Job himself.

The friends had come to comfort him, but the longer they looked at the ruined figure of their formerly respected, admired, attractive friend who now sat on an ashes heap scraping puss from his sores, the more they began to suspect that he was an hypocrite deserving of this terrible calamity.  Satan would now use them to increase Job’s torment and anguish.

Verses 1-2. Because of the position he occupies in the dialogue it is presumed that Bildad was younger than Eliphaz was and that he was older than the other friend named Zophar.

He focuses on the logic of what was being discussed in a cold, intellectual manner, expressing total confidence in the justice of God and in the idea that Job could only have suffered calamity from God as the punishment for some sin.

So his question basically is, Can God do wrong? Is there any of the holy ones that Job can turn to and expect good to come from his complaint against God?

So Bildad is quick to rebuke Job for his strong words in chapter 3 where he opened his mouth and cursed the day of his birth.

Job had asked why he did not die and said that he will be better off if his mother had not nursed him and that it would have been better if he had been left to be with the wicked who had died and ceased from troubling everybody. He had longed for this but this did not come. He had searched for it more than for hidden treasures. His groanings were poured out like water and the thing that he greatly feared has come upon him. He was not at ease and there was no quiet and he had no rest for trouble had come.

Given his philosophy Bildad was obviously frustrated with Job’s position and challenged Job as to how long he was going to keep saying the things that he was saying. Job’s words were like a strong wind that is full of bluster and strong emotion like a tempest which uses its brute force and fury to prove its point that it is strong and will resist anything that stands before it. This was quite rude and unsympathetic to Job’s suffering.

Verse 3. He was asking Job if he really thought that God could pervert judgment by what was happening. Though not a direct charge against God it could be deduced from Job’s speech by way of inference. Everyone knew that it was impossible for God to pervert judgment. God is a God of justice and so He could never pervert justice. One scholar points out that “Justice is not altogether the same thing with “judgment “. Judgment is the act, justice the principle which underlies or ought to underlies the act “.

Verse 4.  Bildad here strikes a very low blow at his friend for he insisted that Job’s children had died as recorded in chapter 1: 19 only because they had sinned against God. God cast them away because of their transgressions. The abandonment from God had come because of the consequences of their wrongdoing. When his children died when the house was blown down and killed them all they must have been doing something terribly wrong. Bildad therefore was following the line of argument from all the three friends of Job that God punishes all wrong and therefore when a tragedy occurred it must have been the result of some definite or particular hidden sin.

Before we criticize Bildad too much we should look at their situation where they are seeing their close friend in an incredible tragic and devastating situation.

You should think about how you would react and imagine how you would feel and how you should react if one of your close friend or family got into such a situation where they seem to be dying tragically and painfully after preaching that they were strong spiritual Christians.

As well, the understanding of God that Job’s friends had was clearly not as developed as it should be for they obviously had been taught that any suffering from God came because of punishment for personal sin or the sins of their parents. What do you believe?

In addition, they do not seem to have any deep knowledge of Satan and how he operates though they might have had the best of exposure to ideas about God. Have we been taught much about God and about Satan and his activities but are we  misguided in our knowledge of Scripture? Remember that the disciples of Jesus were deficient in their understanding in that matter.

Verse 5. Just like what Eliphaz had said in chapter 5 Bildad had assumed that Job had not pleaded his cause with God. But we know that when the first set of calamities had been reported in chapter 1 and when the disease had come in chapter 2 Job has cast his care on God, and submitted himself to God without any reservation. In fact he said: The Lord gave, and the Lord has taken away; blessed be the name of the Lord.

In addition Job had said:

“What? Shall we receive good hand of God and shall we not receive evil?

We know that Job was very careful in what he said about God.

Verses 6-7. Bildad therefore challenged Job’s assertion, though not made absolutely directly, that he was just and righteous. Bildad boldly asserted that if job was pure and righteous God would have acted on his behalf and prospered him in everything that he had. Though God might have begun in a small way to blessing him he would eventually have increased abundantly.

This attitude of Bildad would certainly not have been any comfort to Job for he could have considered his words to be sarcastic. Job would have had difficulty to believe that Bildad had any expectation that God would begin to help Job in a small way and eventually restore him to prosperity. But it seems Bildad was really saying that if Job was so free of guilt as he thought then he should be confident that this situation would change and he would come out of his suffering. But if he was not confident of that it was because he was being conscious of some guilt.

Verses 8-9. Bildad pointed out to Job the long experience that men have had in the past centuries. They had been given them the accumulated wisdom in proverbs and precepts recorded since these long-lived ancient men had time to reflect and consider the events of life during their long life. These ancient men had considered and knew what human life had to offer. But in comparison to the people of the past, those who were recently born knew nothing for their days were very brief and fleeting like a shadow. They could hardly call their life reality.

Bildad was telling Job that men had known from ancient days that God’s blessing was necessary for men to prosper and if someone was cut off from the blessing of God they would simply die like a papyrus reed without water.

Verse 10. Job therefore should learn from the experience of the ancients.

Verses 20-22. Bildad encouraged Job to own up to whatever he was hiding from them and from God and maybe from himself. He was pointing Job to trusting the absolutely just God who would never forsake the righteous man and uphold the wicked man. If he trusted in God, says Bildad, God would not leave him. He will yet fill your mouth with laughing, and your lips with rejoicing”.

Then at that point, said Bildad, those that had berated him would be clothed with shame and they would not prosper in their dwelling place.

Clearly therefore we see that Bildad was pushing the point that Job was not perfect but in some sense was an evil door, and then therefore he would have to expect no relief to his suffering. The only thing he could look forward to was being cut off like the papyrus plant that when starved for water would die. He would be destroyed and forgotten. He would get no help from God but had to be content to simply die in shame.

CONCLUSION

We can rightfully accuse Bildad and his friends with being impatient, unsympathetic, uncharitable, having little kind feelings toward Job or pity for his deep distress.

But the question we should ask ourselves is, What is wrong with the arguments which sound so true, right, logical and plausible?

There was some truth in what they were saying about how God treated the wicked. But the spirit in their approach might have been wrong. They did not understand Job’s agony though they were supposed to be friends. Because Job said some extreme thing in chapter 3, his friends should not have leapt on his words and tried to analyze them without some proper understanding about his hurt. We have the same problem today especially when we are dealing with problems in marriage where we take sides with husband versus the wife, or when we are dealing with people who had been accused of criminal offenses where we jump to take sides with one or the other. This is a common problem in our society and even among believers.

But the problem with the theology of these three friends was that though it was partially right it was very incomplete. They never seemed to understand that. They were very confident in what they were saying. But they did not understand that there were aspects of God and ways of God and dimensions to the Word of God that they had not yet seen.

Bildad was certainly guilty of this limited vision where he thought that the difficulty in a person’s life was always caused by sin.

Now we know that many of the difficulties and problems in our lives are caused often times by sin. But not all of the problems of life are caused by sin so it is impossible to say that these men were wrong but we can say that there are other reasons why God brings us into suffering which these men did not recognize at all. They were judging Job on the basis of rigid theology that only look at some aspects of truth but ignored others. One writer therefore looks at the hard-headed  theology and the fact that the half truths was sometimes more dangerous than a whole lie. So he states:

“I think that the most helpful things about the book of Job is that it teaches us the danger of speaking from an incomplete theology, of trying to analyze God’s workings with only a narrow understanding of how He works, and what are the causes behind His actions in human life.

This produces many of the problems we suffer with one another. We have all suffered from Job’s comforters, who come around positive they know what the problem is. They have a very rigid, theological explanation of our difficulty. And it is right, as far as it goes, but it does not go far enough.

The third thing that is wrong with these friends is that they never seem to refer to God for help for themselves in understanding Job’s problem. They never pray with job. They never ask God for help to open their minds and to illuminate their understanding so that they can help their friend.

The book is filled with prayers, but they are all the prayers of Job, crying out to God in the midst of his suffering. His friends never seem to feel the need for further illumination on the subject.

Yet you cannot find much wrong with your arguments.

What a testimony to us for the need to speak cautiously when we deal with the deep hurts and problems of life”.

We are often reminded that our God is a testing God.  Moses pointed that out to the children of Israel in Exodus 20:20,

And Moses said unto the people, Fear not: for God is come to prove you, and that his fear may be before your faces, that ye sin not;

He pointed out to them that the fear of God would keep them from sinning. The prophet Isaiah also told Israel,

Behold, I have refined thee, but not with silver; I have chosen thee in the furnace of affliction, (48:10).

The Apostle Peter also advised the suffering Christians to rejoice despite their distress by various trials. 1 Peter 1:6-7.

Moses and the Apostles gave us some good advice.  They told us to

-Follow God the Lord,

-To revere Him,

-To keep His commandments and obey Him

-To serve Him

-To hold fast to Him.

Let us not follow the renegades who are servants of Satan, for they will only destroy us. Let us realize God’s presence during the storms, and trust in the presence and power of our risen Lord.

Psalm 107 is a great Psalm. In verses 28-31 it reads

“Then they cried unto the Lord in their trouble

And he bringeth them out of their distresses.

He maketh the storm a calm

So that the waves thereof are still.

Then are they glad because they be quiet;

So he bringeth them until their desired haven.

Oh that men would praise the Lord for his goodness,

And for his wonderful works to the children of men!”

Let them exalt him also in the congregation of the people,

And praise him in the assembly of the elders.”

We can remain safe through the storms of life only if we place our faith in Jesus and cry to Him in the midst of the storm.  Only He can calm the storms and bring us to safety, protecting us through all the difficulties of life and from the attacks of the enemy of our souls.

Let us remember our covenant and maintain our integrity in the midst of our suffering.   

Job maintained his integrity and his problem was caused by the fact that he spent long dark hours searching his own heart but never being able to put his finger upon any sin that he had not already dealt with by his offerings and sacrifices to God. He knew that he was blameless and so was not aware of any evil in his life. He had accepted God’s forgiveness when he brought the sacrifices but still his torments went on. He thought maybe that the problem must be in God.

In chapter 9 in answering Bildad he showed a great understanding of God but he knew that was not enough. He knew that if God would kill him he would still trust Him. He had a great cry of hope.

So let us therefore be very careful when we approach the suffering of others.

Do not add to their suffering. Rather, pray with them.

Scripture tells us what we should do. Romans 12:15 commands:

Bless those who persecute you; bless and do not curse.

Rejoice with those who rejoice, and weep with those who weep.

Be of the same mind with one another.