Job 25:4

Bildad spoke for the third time. Like Eliphaz, each of his speeches was shorter than the last. Their compassion and their arguments were running out... His description of the greatness and glory of God is fine and almost poetic. What he says of the sin and uncleanness and insignificance of man, who is like a worm before his Creator, is equally true. But he could only repeat the question Job asked in Job 9: "How then can man be in the right before God?" He made no attempt to answer it, and he did not ask for a mediator, as Job had done. To Bildad it was an unanswerable question.

There is a great deal that is very beautiful in what Bildad said, only it had no bearing on the matter at all. "Dominion and fear are with God; He makes peace in His high places." Yes — but Job's trouble was that he had anything but peace in his low place.

Having in a few grand strokes depicted the greatness of God, Bildad turns to the littleness of man. "How then can man (mortal, frail) be in the right before God?" How can one whose very mortality is a witness of his sinfulness stand before the Almighty? How can one born of woman, with a nature inherited from the disobedient one, be clean in God's sight? Does not every true sight of God's greatness and majesty give us a sense of sin and uncleanness?

How can a criminal stand before a judge, and look for justification, when he is guilty? With man this is impossible... Job's friends could easily have shown how God justifies an innocent man. That would be simple. But Job is guilty — and how then? The law will justify him who keeps it... but if you break it, what can it do for you? And where is the person who has not broken it?... They could not justify the guilty.

There is defilement also. "Behold," says the psalmist, "I was brought forth in iniquity, and in sin did my mother conceive me." (Ps. 51:5) "How can he who is born of woman be pure?"... Man may imagine that he can work out a righteousness of his own. He may boast emptily of the dignity of human nature... But if he would stop for a few moments and think over the short passage now open before us, his pride, pomp, dignity, and righteousness would quickly vanish. Instead he might find the solid basis of all true dignity, and the ground of divine righteousness, in the cross of our Lord Jesus Christ.

Long ago both Job and his friend Bildad raised the question, "How can man be in the right before God?" (Job 9; 25). Both of them knew that man is fallen and guilty. Their question found no definite answer in Old Testament times... "But now," says the Apostle, "the righteousness of God has been manifested" (Rom. 3:21). It is offered "to all," and it rests "on all who believe." Its foundation is the blood of Christ.

So we generally find the answer to the double question of Job 25:4 in two things. First, the blood for propitiation, which is the righteous ground of our perfect justification. Second, the water of the Word. It comes to us once at the start, in a way that can never be repeated, and by it we are born of God. It then keeps coming, to cleanse our ways in practice.

Jesus was from the outset "holy," compare John 10:36, although "born of woman" (Gal. 4:4); see Job 25:4.