Job 8:21

Bildad is the second of Job’s three friends to answer him, after Eliphaz (Job 8). He leans on the wisdom handed down from the fathers and on pictures from nature, such as the papyrus and the reed that wither when the water is gone, to show how quickly the wicked fall. His argument runs in a straight line. God does not pervert justice (Job 8:3). Job’s children died, so they must have sinned (Job 8:4). Job should therefore seek God earnestly and make his supplication to the Almighty (Job 8:5), and if he is pure and upright, God will restore him and make his habitation prosperous (Job 8:6). Verse 20 states the principle behind all of this, and verses 21 and 22 paint the happy ending Bildad holds out in Job 8:5–7.

The book is set in the land of Uz, generally taken to be in the time of the patriarchs, before the law of Moses was given. The wise men of the east in that day, Bildad among them, held that God’s justice could be seen plainly in this life. Health, wealth and standing were read as marks of his favour, and sickness and loss as his punishment for sin. That is why the three friends held so firmly to Job’s guilt. It was the only way their view of the world could account for what had happened to him.

The reader knows what Bildad does not. The book opens by calling Job “perfect and upright, and one that feared God, and eschewed evil” (Job 1:1), and God himself says of him that there is none like him in the earth, “a perfect and an upright man” (Job 1:8, Job 2:3). The first two chapters (Job 1, Job 2) show that Job’s suffering was something God allowed to come on a blameless man. So when Bildad says that God will not cast away a perfect man, every word stands, and yet he is speaking to the very man the words describe while hinting that Job cannot be one.

The word for perfect is tâm, an adjective from the root tamam, meaning complete, perfect, plain or upright. A tâm man is sincere and whole-hearted toward God and toward other people, a man of integrity whose conduct matches his faith and who is free of hypocrisy and deceit. It describes blamelessness of character, which is a different thing from sinless perfection.

It is the same word the book uses of Job in Job 1:1. Bildad uses it as a test that Job is failing, on the reasoning that a truly tâm man would be prospering. The whole book answers him with a man who is tâm and suffers all the same.

Bildad begins with “Behold”, calling Job to look at something he treats as beyond dispute. To cast away, mâʼaç, is to reject, spurn or despise, with the scorn of someone turning his back on what he finds worthless. The second line answers the first. The verb translated help, châzaq, means to fasten upon or take hold, to be strong, and to make strong, strengthen, encourage or make firm, and so to uphold. The evil doers are those who do râʻaʻ, the Hebrew verb for doing evil. The two lines balance each other in the manner of a wisdom saying, which gives the verse its settled, authoritative sound. God holds up the blameless, and he leaves the wicked without his strength.

Both halves are true of God. He has no pleasure in wickedness, and evil shall not dwell with him (Psalm 5:4–6). He tries the righteous, and his soul hates the wicked (Psalm 11:5–7). And he keeps hold of those who are his, as Job’s own story shows, since God kept Job through every trial.

Verse 21 runs on from verse 20 with “Till”, and it gives the joy Bildad promises to the upright. God is the one who gives it, and Bildad is right about that much. The verb mâlêʼ means to fill or to be full, and the picture is of a mouth so full of laughter that grief has no room left. Laughing is sᵉchôwq, from the verb śāḥaq, to laugh. The noun can mean mirth, sport or sometimes scorn, and beside “rejoicing” it is glad laughter. Rejoicing is tᵉrûwʻâh, a loud shout or clamor, used for an acclamation of joy, for a battle-cry and especially for the blast of trumpets as an alarm. Here it is the shout of joy.

Mouth and lips together stand for the whole person’s voice, and the second line repeats the first in other words to make the joy complete. Job’s mouth had been full of lament and groaning as he sat among the ashes, and Bildad pictures that same mouth laughing and shouting aloud. In his world a mouth filled with laughter was the plainest sign of a life restored and of God’s favour.

The same picture runs through Scripture. When the LORD turned again the captivity of Zion, “Then was our mouth filled with laughter, and our tongue with singing” (Psalm 126:2). God promises through Jeremiah, “I will turn their mourning into joy” (Jeremiah 31:13), and David sings that “weeping may endure for a night, but joy cometh in the morning” (Psalm 30:5). The book of Job ends with exactly such a reversal, as God restores Job’s fortunes and family (Job 42). Bildad’s picture came true, by God’s grace and for reasons Bildad never understood.

Bildad closes with the other side of his picture. “They that hate thee” are Job’s enemies, and Bildad promises that once Job is restored, the disgrace will fall on those who set themselves against him. To be clothed, lâbash, is to put on a garment, and the word is used both literally and figuratively. Shame, bôsheth, is the feeling of disgrace, the condition of it, and even its cause. Together the words picture shame wrapped around a person like clothing, covering him where everyone can see, and taking away his honour.

The second line widens from Job’s enemies to the wicked and all they have built. Their dwelling place, ʼôhel, stands for more than a house: it is their household with all their security, wealth, power and family line. It “shall come to nought”. The word ʼayin means nothing, a thing that does not exist, and it is the Hebrew word generally used for “not”, so Bildad says plainly that the home of the wicked will be nothing. This is the counterpart of his promise in Job 8:6 that God will make the habitation of the upright prosperous.

Scripture speaks the same way about the end of the wicked. “Fret not thyself because of evildoers” (Psalm 37:1–2), David writes, “for they shall soon be cut down like the grass” (Psalm 37:2), and the whole psalm sets the brief prosperity of the wicked beside the lasting inheritance of the righteous (Psalm 37). Asaph, after his envy of the wicked, says to God, “Surely thou didst set them in slippery places: thou castedst them down into destruction” (Psalm 73:18–19). Proverbs says that “the righteousness of the perfect shall direct his way: but the wicked shall fall by his own wickedness” (Proverbs 11:5). Evil will have its day and then be ended, and God will vindicate those who are his. Bildad’s mistake was the timing and the target. He expected God’s justice to show at once on the surface of every life, and he held this verse over Job as a warning of what awaited him if he refused to repent.

Bildad says that God will not cast away a perfect man. Jesus is the one man wholly without sin, “Who did no sin, neither was guile found in his mouth” (1 Peter 2:22), “the Lamb of God, which taketh away the sin of the world” (John 1:29). Yet he was rejected and suffered on the cross. God “hath made him to be sin for us, who knew no sin; that we might be made the righteousness of God in him” (2 Corinthians 5:21). Here the puzzle of Job’s story is answered: the innocent one suffered for the guilty. We who were evil doers by nature are helped, reconciled to God and counted righteous in Christ, because “God commendeth his love toward us, in that, while we were yet sinners, Christ died for us” (Romans 5:8). God gives no strength to evildoers in their evil, and in Christ he makes a way for them to be changed and to receive his help.

The joy of verse 21 is found in him too, given as a gift of grace through his death and resurrection and received by faith. He turns mourning into dancing (Psalm 30:11), and he told his disciples, “your sorrow shall be turned into joy” (John 16:20), and “your joy no man taketh from you” (John 16:22).

The shame of verse 22 falls in the end on sin, death and the devil. On the cross Christ bore the shame, and there “having spoiled principalities and powers, he made a shew of them openly, triumphing over them in it” (Colossians 2:15). The kingdom of darkness comes to nought, and God sets up “a kingdom, which shall never be destroyed” (Daniel 2:44). Those who hate God and his Anointed will be clothed with shame, and the righteous will be vindicated forever.

Bildad came to comfort a friend and ended by accusing him. Much of what he said was true, and he did real harm by using it to explain Job’s pain. When someone we love is suffering, our first thought can be to look for a cause, some sin they must have committed. The book of Job warns us against that judgment, which misrepresents God and deepens the hurt of the one who suffers.

We can say to the suffering what Bildad got right: God is just, he keeps hold of his own, and he is able to fill a grieving mouth with laughing. We can say it with compassion and patience, and leave the reasons with God, whose ways are higher than ours. And in our own trials we can trust that God is at work even when we cannot see how, for the joy he promises rests on Christ and his grace, and our own record has no part in earning it.