Job 8:1-3 Then answered Bildad the Shuhite, and said,… Bildad grasps at once, as we say, the nettle. He is quite sure that he has the key to the secret of the distribution among mankind of misery and happiness. It is a very simple solution. It is the doctrine that untimely death, sickness, adversity in every form, are alike signs of God's anger; that they visit mankind with unerring discrimination; are all what we call "judgments"; are penalties, i.e., or chastisements, meant either simply to vindicate the broken law, or else to warn and reclaim the sinner. And so, in what we feel to be harsh and unfeeling terms, he applies at once this principle, like unsparing cautery, to the wounds of his friend. Bildad tries to overwhelm the restless and presumptuous audacity of Job with a hoard of maxims and metaphors drawn from the storehouse of the "wisdom of the ancients." He puts them forward in a form that may remind us for a moment of the Book of Proverbs. "As the tall bulrush or the soaring reed grass dies down faster than it shot up, when water is withdrawn, so falls and withers the short-lived prosperity of the forgetters of God. The spider's web, frailest of tenements, is the world-old type of the hopes which the ungodly builds." The second friend is emphasising what the first had hinted. "There are no mysteries at all, no puzzles in human life," the friends say. "Suffering is, in each and every case, the consequence of ill-doing. God's righteousness is absolute. It is to be seen at every turn in the experience of life. All this impatient, fretful, writhing under, or at the sight of pain and loss, is a sign of something morally wrong, of want of faith in Divine justice. Believe this, Job; act on it, and all thy troubles will be over; God will be once more thy friend — till then He cannot be." (Dean Bradley.) Parallel Verses KJV: Then answered Bildad the Shuhite, and said, |
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