Job 8:4 Commentary and Bible Study

Job’s sons died because of sin, Bildad bluntly declares. He knows how to hit the raw nerve. It is God’s doing, and it is just. He suggests that Job has lost his children because he is wicked, and because they were wicked. The righteous find comfort in the fact that their loved ones have died in the Lord and therefore do not grieve as others, but Bildad here tries to remove this comfort. Though Job’s children were taken away, he still remembered his care for their spiritual welfare, his prayers for them from the time of their birth, and his concern that they might have sinned and cursed God in their hearts which led him to regularly offer up burnt offerings for each of them. By insisting that Job’s children have been taken away in their wickedness, Bildad makes void all this fatherly concern, saying it was useless and that Job’s children are now all lost. These words would have cut Job to the quick. Not only is Job a hypocrite, but so are all his children. Job is certain to follow them to hell if he does not repent promptly. He offers recovery to Job, but it is on these cruel terms – terms which require Job to admit his hypocrisy and accept his theology of works and rewards in this life. Job must swallow this bitter pill if he is to find relief. If Job would only repent, he would be relieved. Bildad slips into this trial the idea that these are acts of God, not in the sense that God is sovereign, but in that God is acting against Job. He tries to take away Job’s greatest source of comfort – that he is loved by God.Bildad is against Job. He is sure he is right and not for a moment will he consider that there may be more to this than he understands. The hurt of his words lies in the fact that there is sufficient truth in them to trouble Job. He claims to be on the side of God and to be defending God’s person against accusation levelled by Job, and yet he is holding a distorted version of the truth, so that in fact there is nothing right about his conclusions, implications, and applications to Job. Bildad knows the solution, or so he thinks. Let Job only turn back to God and humble himself and stop pretending that he does not know what he has done wrong. Let him make a clean breast of his hypocrisy and God will receive him. This solution suits Bildad’s view of himself as a righteous man, and allows him to make this comparison with Job. God does not delay from answering his saints immediately they call on his name if they call in a right frame of mind, says Bildad. The evidence that you are corrupt within is that you are not answered. But reality, as the reader has been told, was that God had allowed this trial to test Job, and it would come to an end only once it had run its course. Part of the trial was that Job was to continue for a time with no answer from the Lord as to why he was suffering so greatly. He must exercise patience and faith and continue to hold onto the goodness of God with very little visible to support that faith..