Untitled Sermon (81)
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Even though the answer is rhetorical, it is not enough for Bildad. In the unkindest cut of all, he stabs at the heart of Job by citing the death of his children as indisputable evidence of their sin and incontrovertible proof of God’s justice. Feelings do not count with Bildad. While ignoring Job’s suffering, he does not hesitate to play upon his guilt.
Even if Job’s children had died because of their sin, Bildad’s vengeance on behalf of God is inexcusable. He knows that Job’s children are his point of vulnerability. In the prologue, we learned that Job himself was “blameless,” but he made regular sacrifices for his children, who enjoyed the luxury of his wealth, just in case they “sinned and cursed God in their hearts” (1:5). By coincidence, Job’s children were partying together when they were killed by a tornado. Had they sinned or were they sinning when the wild wind struck them? Job does not know and it is too late to offer a sacrifice for them.
Bildad has no doubt. Rubbing fresh salt in a raw wound, he pronounces the verdict that Job’s children died for their sins as proof that God’s justice operates on a straight line and without a twist.
An employee whom I recommended for dismissal refused to shake my hand or speak to me. His actions hurt, but I reasoned that the broken relationship was part of the price for executive responsibility. Then, my daughter, who knew nothing about the incident, met the man on the street. A cheery “hello” received a stony stare of disdain. When my daughter asked me, “What’s wrong with him?” my smoldering hurt flamed into white-hot rage. In that moment, I could have wiped him from the face of the earth and taken my chances in hell. Only distance kept me from a face-to-face encounter in which I would demand an apology from him for letting his hate for me spill over onto my innocent children. Only Job’s proverbial patience, his weakened condition, or his own self-doubts must have kept him from stopping Bildad in his verbal tracks and screaming, “Attack me if you will, but leave my children out of this.”
Gratuitously, Bildad speeds on to the flip side of the formula. If Job would earnestly seek God and if Job were pure and upright, God would restore him to a prosperity that would make his past wealth and reputation look like a “small beginning” (8:7). The use of the conditional term “if” reveals Bildad’s basic assumption. Job has not “earnestly” sought God and Job is not “pure and upright.” Bildad has no alternative for these assumptions. If God’s justice works according to His formula, Job must repent of his sins.
Does God Refuse to Speak to Man?
Job’s plaintive cry, “How long?” echoes back across the chasm that separates him from a silent God. His plea is the heart cry of those who suffer in every generation. There comes a time when any answer from God—whether healing or death—is good. God’s will can be handled more easily than His silence.
Of course, Bildad has the ready answer. God has spoken through the wisdom of the ages as discovered by the fathers (v. 8). Whereas Eliphaz invoked the authority of personal revelation through a midnight vision to attest the doctrine of “cash-register” justice, Bildad rests his case on tradition. If Fiddler On the Roof had been written four thousand years ago, Bildad might have asked Job to sing Tevye’s famous song “Tradition,” about the papa and his never-ending struggle to make a living, feed a wife and children, and say his daily prayers—the reward for which gives him the right as master of the house to have the final word at home. The papa, the papa—tradition! tradition!
Bildad also believes that God’s “final word” has been given to the fathers through tradition.
His position is not to be despised. God does speak through tradition. Without tradition, a society lacks continuity and stability. Education, for example, has the responsibility to transmit the cultural heritage from generation to generation. Yet, today the knowledge and values of the past are despised or confused so that educators cannot agree on a “common core” of learning which every student should experience. Like the Athenians whom the apostle Paul chided from Mars Hill, we are “intellectual seedpickers” who spend our time “in nothing else but either to tell or to hear some new thing” (Acts 17:21).
Fads and crazes are now moving through our society in shorter and shorter cycles because of the mass media. The hula hoop, for instance, lasted nine months in the early 1950s. Today, the fad would be gone in six or eight weeks! If our fads and crazes were limited to hula hoops, we could laugh them off. Sad to say, the same faddish cycle affects ideas as well as issues, values as well as tastes, and people as well as things in our society. Tradition deserves a modern hearing.
Bildad misuses tradition. Not only does he make it the weapon to bludgeon Job, but he sets it in concrete to harden in order to prove his case. Picking up on Job’s poetic despair, “My days are swifter than a weaver’s shuttle” (7:6), Bildad leaps to the conclusion that “we were born yesterday, and know nothing” (8:9). Therefore, he says, let tradition teach us.
For Bildad himself, the retreat into tradition is a backward step in faith development. Job’s questions dare him to critical thinking and personal reflection. They also threaten him with new information that does not fit into his formula of faith. Yet, there is no other way to grow in faith development. Bildad has the opportunity to move to the advanced level of individuative-reflective faith as a person who is capable of critical thinking, independent reflection, and dialectical reasoning. Even the next level of conjunctive faith opens before him if he could have moved with Job to a faith position that “integrates self-identity with a comprehensive world view in order to see the order, coherence, and meaning of life in order to serve and be served.” Alas, Bildad rejects these options and regresses back to synthetic-conventional faith, which Fowler defines as an “adolescent faith which conforms to the tradition of the community.” Bildad is a puppet through whom the fathers speak and tradition pulls the strings. A person with a borrowed faith can only mouth platitudes when the Jordan rises in the land of peace to test one’s faith and when horses replace footmen in the race of life (Jer. 12:5).
Does God Make the Innocent Suffer?
Job dared to ask God, “Have I sinned?” (7:20). If he is innocent and still suffers, Bildad’s case is lost. Bildad is not dumb. He knows that Job has the reputation for being “blameless.” Therefore, he employs the tactic of admitting that his protagonist appears to be innocent. From that position, Bildad lets the wisdom of the fathers speak through three ancient parables. The first is the Parable of the Papyrus. If the reed grows up overnight without water, it has the appearance of a fresh and lively green shoot. But before the day is out, its lack of water is revealed when it withers and dies under the rays of the scorching sun. Bildad points a finger at Job and says, “So are the paths of all who forget God” (8:13). In a vivid picture, Bildad indicts Job for letting his righteousness go to his head and losing contact with his spiritual source. Job’s innocence is “style without substance.”
Tradition speaks again through the Parable of the Spider’s Web. Bildad compares Job’s self-confidence in claiming his innocence with the frailty of the spider’s web. In its own dimensions, it appears to be strong and secure. But if a man leans on it, it does not stand, and if a man depends on it, it does not endure (vv. 14–15).
Charlie Brown, the lovable, round-headed, round-eyed, and round-mouthed character of the Peanuts comic strip, invariably snags his kite in a tree. It symbolizes the scandal of the Cross of Christ which foils our human ambitions. Then, Charlie Brown has a flash of insight. While the tree continues to snarl his kite, he remembers that it also serves as a shade from the sun, a covering from the rain, and, when life is most disappointing, Charlie says, “It is very good to lean against.”
In contrast with that strong tree of faith, Bildad likens Job’s faith to the spider’s web. If you lean on it, it will fall, and if you count on it, it will fail. At best, according to Bildad, Job’s claim of innocence is “self-confidence without security.”
Bildad draws a third word picture from the wisdom of the ages in the Parable of the Gourd. Although the New King James Version simply says, “He grows green in the sun,” other translations, such as the New International Version, add the qualifier “He is like a well-watered plant in the sunshine” (8:16). Biologists will identify the plant of the parable as a gourd whose roots snake along the ground in search of nooks in the rocks and crannies in the stone (v. 17). Although described as “green,” “well-watered,” and “luscious” in its prime, the gourd leaves no permanent roots in the ground when it dies. Thus, through the parable, Bildad refutes Job’s belief that God will miss him when he is gone (7:21). Like the gourd that prospers in its season and then dies without leaving a trace of its existence, Bildad envisions Job’s end when God will deny that He ever saw him (8:18). This indictment foreshadows the final judgment when God will pronounce the sentence on religious pretenders, “I never knew you; depart from Me” (Matt. 7:23). Daring to put similar words into God’s mouth, Bildad concludes his parable with the warning to Job,
If he is destroyed from his place,
Then it will deny him, saying,
“I have not seen you” (8:18).
According to Bildad, Job has “prosperity without permanence.”
Bildad the simplifier has an answer for everything. Admitting that he cannot refute Job’s claim of innocence, he uses three parables to press home the only other conclusion that his doctrine of God’s justice will permit: Job is guilty of secret sins! On the surface, he says, Job appears to be innocent because of his reputation, his self-confidence, and his prosperity. Now, the moment of truth has come. Job’s suffering is positive proof that he has been living behind a facade. Like the Pharisees of Jesus’ time, his life is a whited sepulcher, spotless on the outside, but inside it is full of dead men’s bones. With his faith cemented in place by tradition, Bildad can come to no other conclusion.