His strength is famished, and calamity is ready for his stumbling.
Bildad speaks a second time, painting the wicked man's end: light put out, feet caught in a snare, and now hunger and ruin waiting beside a falling man. Every line of it is true of someone; the whole question of the chapter is whether it is true of Job.
The Picture in the Words
The verse holds two images. One is a strength that is starving. The other is a disaster standing by. Traps and terrors already surround the man. Here something heavier arrives.
William KellyThe trap, the snare, the cord, meet him wherever he turns; terrors alarm him on every side, and dog his footsteps. His calamity, instead of being satisfied, is hungry for more; and destruction, or a heavy load of suffering, is at his side, ready to weigh him down.
Calamity as a Crouching Beast
Translators differ over the first word of the verse: some read "strength," others "calamity." One commentator prefers "calamity," and pictures it as a starving animal waiting for its moment.
Samuel RidoutThe word here is better translated "calamity" than "strength." That calamity is pictured as a beast with hunger gnawing at it, ready to pounce on him as he falls. Surely Job had felt this in the calamities which had come upon him.
Aimed at a Sick Man
Bildad was not describing a stranger. The picture fit the sick man sitting in front of him, and it was meant to.
Leslie M. GrantBildad goes further here to speak of the disease that overtakes the one who is snared. His words are really a description of what Job was suffering at the time, but he adds to this further frightening afflictions meant to scare the poor sufferer. His strength is reduced to nothing and his destruction is close at hand.
True Words, Wrong Man
Bildad's statements about the wicked are sound in themselves. The damage lies in where he points them.
Charles StanleyBildad again takes his place in the contest. He means well, but his words are poisoned arrows. "The light of the wicked is put out." Yes, every word is perfectly true of the wicked; but how crushing to Job! Circumstances seemed to favour the charge.
Bildad ends sure that his case against Job is proved:
William KellyThe application, in his mind, is as obvious as it is mistaken; the abstract truth remains, and has its own proper place.
The Half Bildad Never Says
Behind the verse sits a rule: what a man sows, he reaps. The rule is real. Bildad only ever states half of it.
William KellyLet Job be as restless as he may, he will find out in the end that the moral government of God is as immovable as the course of the earth, or the stubborn rock. What a man sows he reaps: if evil, ruin; if good, blessing. But of the latter Bildad has not a word to say. Did he know what grace works through faith? Faith can not only remove the rock, but cast a mountain into the sea.
Where the Friends' Whole System Breaks
Bildad's mistake is not one bad sentence. It is a whole way of reading God. Measure God's righteousness by what happens to people in this life, and a suffering man must be a guilty man.
J. N. DarbyThey urge the doctrine that God's earthly government is a full measure and display of His righteousness, and of a matching righteousness in man. That doctrine proves total ignorance of what God's righteousness is, and of His ways. It also shows no real knowledge of what God is, or of man as a sinner.
What Job Answers
Job knew this hunger and ruin himself. From inside it he looked past both.
Charles StanleyIs it not astonishing that he should pass through so much, and yet have such clear light on some things? He says, "For I know that my Redeemer lives, and at the last he will stand upon the earth. And after my skin has been thus destroyed, yet in my flesh I shall see God, whom I shall see for myself, and my eyes shall behold, and not another."
Summary
- True — Every word Bildad says about the wicked is accurate. As doctrine, none of it needs correcting.
- Twisted — True words become poisoned arrows when Bildad aims them at a man whose suffering was not punishment.
- Starved — The man's strength is gone, yet his calamity still hungers, a beast waiting to pounce as he falls.
- Half — Bildad holds one half of God's government: evil reaps ruin. He never speaks the other half: what grace works through faith.
- Beyond — Job, with ruin at his side, looks past it to a living Redeemer and to seeing God with his own eyes.