Job 18:20

Bildad adds, "He shall have neither son nor nephew among his people." It is painful to see how his hard spirit takes advantage of the pitiful disaster that had wiped out the children of Job. "Nor anyone left in his dwellings. Those who come after him will be astonished at his day, as those who went before them were horrified. Surely such are the dwellings of the wicked, and this is the place of the man who does not know God." Did Bildad really think Job was such a man?

The desolation is complete. The people of the west are astounded because of his day, and the people of the east are seized with fright. Unless, with some writers old and new, we take these words as descriptions not of place but of time, and so understand them as "posterity" and "ancestors." But it is hard to see how "ancestors" could be horrified, though it is easy to think of "posterity" being astonished. The application, in his mind, is as obvious as it is mistaken. The abstract truth stands, and has its own proper place.

Bildad again takes his place in the contest (Job 18). He means well, but his words are poisoned arrows. "The light of the wicked shall be put out." Yes, every word is perfectly true of the wicked; but how crushing to Job! Circumstances seemed to favour the charge.

Abstract truth by itself is of no use to the saints of God. Things that are true, but misunderstood and misapplied, can do more harm than many a thing that is false. Misapplied truth lends the apparent authority of God to an error, and that error carries all the more weight because it arrives as the truth. If someone says a foolish thing, or a plainly false one, people dismiss it. But no believer can shrug off the truth of God. So when the truth of God is used wrongly — when it is used to crush someone who at that very moment is an object of God's intense interest — how foreign and offensive that is to His mind!

Finally Bildad speaks of people both from the west and the east witnessing in astonished fear the bitter end of the wicked (v.20). He does not even think of a way out for Job, but places him among the wicked who dwell in fear, as all the evidence shows. "This is the place of him who does not know God," he says. He ignores how much Job had spoken of God and His ways, because he thought Job's words were hypocritical. When God finally stepped in, how totally astonished Bildad himself must have been. He saw in Job not "the bitter end of the wicked," but the wonderful end of an honourable believer who had suffered for a while and who learned patience in his suffering.

No wonder Job replied — goaded by the claim that he did not know God — "How long will you torment me and break me in pieces with words?" ... Yet even with all this probing of the wound, and his growing sense that God is afflicting him unfairly, his spirit is still growing stronger in hope, as we can see from his words. "For I know that my Redeemer lives, and at the last He will stand upon the earth."