25 Then Bildad the Shuhite answered and said:
2 “Dominion and fear are with God;1
he makes peace in his high heaven.
3 Is there any number to his armies?
Upon whom does his light not arise?
4 How then can man be in the right before God?
How can he who is born of woman be pure?
5 Behold, even the moon is not bright,
and the stars are not pure in his eyes;
6 how much less man, who is a maggot,
and the son of man, who is a worm!”
Section Overview
In what might seem like a short but straightforward systematic theology lecture—God is good and great; man is bad and not so great—Bildad is actually ridiculing Job’s preposterous notion that he can stand before God, give his testimony, and then have the Holy One find him wholly spotless. The first part of Bildad’s rebuttal (Job 25:1–3) is that God is good and great, or, in more theological terms, majestic, mighty, and holy. The second part of the rebuttal (vv. 4–6) follows an a fortiori argument (from the stronger to the weaker): if the bright celestial lights (the stronger) are not perfectly pure in God’s eyes, then how can mere mortals (the weaker) be found right before his sight? Man is too bad and small to stand before a good and great God.
Section Outline
Response
Right lesson. Wrong audience. Bildad is right that God is great and humans are depraved and that we all are therefore guilty and not innocent in his eyes (Ps. 14:1–3; Rom. 3:10–12). However, what Job needs to hear is the hope of vindication for the righteous. He needs to know that God is just and that he will act justly. We might also add that he needs to hear more about the possibility of mediation with God through an advocate. In other words, he needs to hear the gospel. As Blaise Pascal put it: “Knowing God without knowing our own wretchedness makes for pride. Knowing our own wretchedness without knowing God makes for despair. Knowing Jesus Christ strikes the balance because he shows us both God and our own wretchedness.”119
So, again, from the friends’ counsel we learn the lesson of the danger of saying the right thing to the wrong person. We need prudence and wisdom when applying biblical doctrines. What we say is not more important than to whom we are saying it. But we also need to learn another lesson: the danger of twisting a biblical truth too far. What do we make of “Bildad’s maggot theology,” as Longman cleverly labels it?120 Are we really maggots and worms in God’s sight and according to his design? While God’s people can act wormlike (Israel is called “you worm” in Isa. 41:14), we must remember, as Longman points out, that God created human beings with unique grandeur, with “a special and dignified relationship with God.”121 Read Genesis 1–2 and Psalm 8. We are the highest achievement of creation: made in God’s image, made to rule over the rest of creation, made good, and crowned with glory and honor.