BILDAD

Then Bildad the Shuhite replied:  “How long will you say such things? Your words are a blustering wind.” (8:1-2)

The cumulative weight of Job’s arguments in Chapter 7 ought to have been enough to drive the final coffin nails into his friends’ “health-and-wealth gospel.” Anyone who counts on having tangible blessings as a reward or validation for faith will in the long run be disappointed. Such blessings may be thoroughly enjoyed in this life, but not insisted upon as prerogatives of righteousness. Being a believer in the Lord is no guarantee against any sort of failure or disaster, including sickness, family breakdown, or complete mental collapse. All God guarantees is that He will be with us and that ultimately we will be saved—and there are bound to come times when even on these promises He will appear to be reneging.

Job’s views on this subject are full of depth and passion. As soon as Bildad gets a chance to speak, however, it is obvious that all of Job’s unsettling eloquence has been wasted on him. If Eliphaz strikes us as the most refined member of this group, comparatively flexible and sophisticated, then Bildad the Shuhite 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. He is the kind of person whose mind is already made up—not only on every important question but on many unimportant ones as well—and whose faith is a simple matter of sticking doggedly to the old catechism of tried-and-true answers. As he himself puts it, “Ask the former generations and find out what their fathers learned, for we were born only yesterday and know nothing” (8:8-9).

People who place such heavy reliance on tradition show that they have little in the way of a personal relationship with the Lord. Bildad implies that Job’s faith is like “relying on a spider’s web. He leans on his web, but it gives way” (8:14-15). Yet Job is not leaning on a spider’s web at all but upon the living God. The real question is: What is Bildad leaning on? Is it anything more than a carefully-constructed little cairn of precious nuggets that he picked up in “Sunday school” years before? A man like Bildad has no stomach for the sort of dubious spiritual battle in which Job is embroiled. To him Job’s complex ruminations are nothing but a load of double-talk and he tells him so outright: “Your words are a blustering wind.” But Bildad’s own bluster and rhetoric give him the lie.

Having painted such a negative portrait of Bildad, we should hasten to add that there is a danger in being too condemning of Job’s friends. Pharisee-bashing can be such entertaining sport. There is something eminently satisfying about rooting out hypocrites and throwing them to the lions; it makes the rest of us feel like such shining saints. Yet how many have gone on witch hunts only to be tainted by witchcraft themselves? And are we really so confident that we can distinguish the diehard legalist who is a dangerous enemy of true faith from the immature believer who is our brother in Christ? This is the riddle that constantly confronts us in the friends of Job and, more importantly, in the people we know who may be like them. Indeed it is the riddle that confronts us in the depths of our own souls. We step over a line into the Kingdom of God, but there is no line we can step over and suddenly be transformed into mature, loving people.

In reading Job, just as in reading any complex work of literature, the most profit is to be gained not so much from identifying ourselves strongly with one character or another, but from seeing the different characters as aspects of ourselves, as windows into our own psyches. By depicting a highly subtle form of religious hypocrisy in the friends of Job, the book helps us identify pharisaism and see it for what it is—not only in others, but in ourselves. Surely this is how Jesus’ stern warnings against the Pharisees are to be received by Christians. Not only did the Master instruct His disciples, “Leave them; they are blind guides” (Matt. 15:14), but He also told us to “be on your guard against the yeast of the Pharisees” (Luke 12:1)—that is, to be on guard against our own legalistic tendencies. If we cannot see the yeast of the Pharisees in ourselves, it may be because we are up to our eyeballs in it.

Mason, M. (2002). The Gospel According to Job: An Honest Look at Pain and Doubt from the Life of One Who Lost Everything. Crossway.