Year 2, Day 102: Job 8

Bildad: Not All Bad

Bildad’s advice seems great.  And I’m going to give Bildad a ton of credit here.  He does give some incredible spiritual advice.  As I read through Bildad’s words I kept finding myself nodding in agreement and saying, “Yep, there’s truth in that.”  So I really do tip my hat to him in being a person who seems to be able to absorb an incredible amount of wisdom into his life.

For example, can God pervert justice?  Certainly not!  And who can argue with Bildad when he talks about the importance of pleading for mercy and trying to live an upright life?  How many of us can argue that in the grand scheme of things each of our lives is anything but a shadow?  Is it not true that the hope of the godless perishes?  Does not the person who forgets God ultimately experience a withering?

You see, Bildad has taken some incredible truth here and spit it forth to Job.  He has given some really great advice.  None of those things can really be argued against.  They shouldn’t be argued against.  They’re all spiritually sound pieces of advice!

Lie: Prosperity Equals Righteousness

However, Bildad is also guilty of the same offense as Eliphaz.  Although they begin in great wisdom, they do not end in great wisdom.  Bildad takes great wisdom and uses it to put God in his box.  Bildad takes circumstantial wisdom and applies it to God in some sort of demonstration of universal truth.  Let’s take another look at some of the things Bildad asserts.

Bildad seems to be telling Job that if he is pure and upright that God will rouse Himself and restore Job.  Now, that seems like truth because we want it to be true.  It even seems like truth about Job!  After all, does not Job restore Job at the end of this book? 

However, we need to remember that God restores Job on His merit and for His glory, not as some “earned reward” that Job truly deserves.  Yes, God does care for those who are faithful to Him.  Yes, God will raise all of His faithful to eternal life in the end.  Those promises are God’s promises and are all true.  But God does not promise that if we are righteous and upright that we will prosper from the perspective of the world.  God is not interested in making His servants the most glorious people in the world. 

That’s a really hard pill for us to swallow – because human beings are inherently selfish.  We know this is a really hard pill to swallow because Eliphaz and Bildad have both now stumbled upon this incorrect theological assertion!  Human beings want to believe in a God that will prosper us from the perspective of this world.  We want to believe that if we are righteous we will be have a great name and a great life.  Perhaps more importantly, we want this to be true so that we can look at a person’s prosperity and judge their character.

God will prosper us.  However, He will cause us to prosper spiritually, not materialistically.  God is not interested in equating righteousness with worldly prosperity.  Neither should we be interested in that same pursuit.

Lie: God Does Not Associate With Evildoers

Towards the end of his speech, Bildad makes another theological mistake.  He says that “God will not take the hand of evildoers.”  I find this to be another shallow truth that we all want to believe.  But it isn’t true at all.

As a simple demonstration, let me ask a simple question.  Which one of us was righteous on our own merit when God came to us and offered the free gift of salvation?  When God took my hand, he took the hand of an evildoer.  For me to claim anything else is to deny my true being.  My nature is sin, my flesh is corrupt.  When God came to me, He took a corrupt sinner and grabbed my hand to lead me into His righteousness.

Maybe you’d like an even stronger case of this.  Think of King Nebuchadnezzar of the Babylonians.  Did not God take Nebuchadnezzar’s hand – the hand of a “pagan” – and lead Nebuchadnezzar against His own people to teach them a lesson?  Were not God’s people led into captivity under Nebuchadnezzar under God’s hand?  Now, I’m not claiming that Nebuchadnezzar stopped being evil and found salvation with God.  That’s between him and God and not for me to judge – although there are more than a few validating pieces of scripture to at least consider the claim.  But regardless of the matter of salvation, certainly God took Nebuchadnezzar’s hand and accomplished His will through an enemy.

To claim that God only pays attention to the upright and God cannot work through an evildoer is shallow faith.  It puts God into our box.  It creates an evaluation tool that ends up giving false results.  It actually leads to a “prosperity Gospel,” in which we assume that God loves most those people who have a “good life” according to the stuff they have and the trouble-free life they live.  That’s just simply not the way God thinks.  God blesses those He blesses.  He lavishes blessing upon the just and the unjust.  That is what God says about Himself.  To say that God loves the prosperous and the peaceful the most denies the closeness that God has had with most of His servants throughout the scope of His Word!

Reflections Into The Present

As we go through Job, I am really beginning to get a sense of just how important it is for me to continue to be cautious about giving “spiritual advice.”  Yes, I do it all the time.  I’m not saying we should stop giving advice, but I think we need to be careful about the advice we give.  If we cannot know the mind of God, we should be careful giving absolute advice as Eliphaz gave earlier and Bildad gives here.

I am in another cliché mood today, so I am going to examine the cliché: “Where there is smoke, there’s fire.”  Let me say that I do believe that in the right context this cliché demonstrates great truth.  However, it is simply a human understanding, so it is prone to failing.  I guess that’s my whole point today with Blidad, too.

Where there is smoke, there is usually fire.  If I sin, I will reap the consequences.  That’s Bildad’s point.  On the other hand, just because I am reaping negative consequences doesn’t automatically mean that the consequences are from my own sin.  In other words, just because I am living in “smoke” does not mean that the smoke is from my own fire.  This is where Bildad makes his first mistake.  Job’s living in smoke, but the fire isn’t his.

We need to be careful of people who present a “one plus one equals two” kind of theology.  Life is never that simple or that straightforward.  One plus one might equal two.  But as I learned in physics class when I had to learn vector math, one plus one can actually equal any result between zero and two (including zero and two).  Dealing with spirituality demands the same kind of flexibility in obtaining truth. 

Truth is almost always simple in its understanding.  But truth is rarely simple in its application.  This is what allows people to start with sound theology and end up giving spiritually unsound advice.

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