Job 8:20-22
‘Behold, God will not cast away a perfect man! Neither will He help evil-doers! While He fills your mouth with laughing, and your lips with rejoicing — they that hate you, shall be clothed with shame; and the dwelling-place of the wicked shall come to nought!’ Job 8:20-22.
Bildad again augurs a happy and a brilliant future for Job. As did God in Job 1:1, Bildad too here calls Job ‘perfect’ (Job 8:10 cf. 9:20f).
God indeed ultimately helps those whom He regards as perfect. But He does not help or take evil-doers by the hand. He does not help them, in the way He indeed stands ready to help His Own.
Job is here assured that God would yet fill his mouth with laughter, and his lips with rejoicing. He is told those who hate him, would be ashamed. And that the dwelling-place of the wicked would be nullified.
Thus Job should know that his friends were not among his haters. And that his friends regarded him quite differently to those whom they regarded as his haters.
Bildad comforted Job with God’s promises. Here he gives the insuperable truth of the permanent divine righteousness, which would be a great comfort to Job. If he continued to trust the Lord, all good and joy would come to him!
Bildad defended the justice of God. For the Lord indeed never swerves from doing whatever is right.
Bildad rightly used this truth, when he promised a glorious outcome to Job’s suffering as a substantial proof that God was not dealing unjustly toward him. For God does not act hostilely toward the godly, neither does He promote the evil-doer.
So Job’s friends really regarded Job as a pious man. Other men did so, too. And Bildad clearly saw that mankind everywhere perceives that a Moral Law governs the universe.
But unfortunately, he did not also see that this is not the only principle by which God operates. Nor does God not have also other purposes in His ways — such as promoting His almightiness and His sovereignty too over all of His creatures.
It is true that nothing God sends to man proceeds from injustice. But it is not true that everything He sends to him proceeds only from His justice. For Bildad, however, there were no mysteries in God’s ways with men!
Yet there was one truth Job and his friends all agreed on. That truth should have comforted Job then, and us today even in the aches of old age — God will not cast away a perfect man!
