Year 5, Day 112: Job 18

Theological Commentary: Click Here

Discipleship Focus: Authority

• Authority: Our calling.  This comes from God as king.  Because He calls us as His representatives, He gives us authority to go and do His will.

When we are doing God’s will, we act under God’s authority.  When we speak with God’s blessing, we actually speak with His words.  When God is our king, we get access to His authority and the power that comes through it.

However, when we don’t have God as our king, we speak with our own power and our own authority.

Look at how Bildad ends this chapter.  “Thus is the place of him who knows not God.”  In other words, Bildad is judging Job and saying that job is miserable because he doesn’t really know God.  Bildad is saying that people whose lives are destroyed must be far from God.

Who is Bildad to make this claim?  Certainly Bildad is not speaking with the authority of God!  After all, while Job is not perfect we can absolutely say that this problem began because Job was righteous, not unrighteous.  Job’s problem is not his distance from God.  This actually came about because of Job’s closeness to God.

Bildad just doesn’t speak with the authority of God.  These aren’t God’s words.  This isn’t a display of God’s power.  This is a display of Bildad stepping out on his own authority and actually making a mess of things.

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