Job 25:6

The worm is used as a symbol to show how extremely feeble man is (Job 17:14; Job 25:6). When Jehovah blessed Israel He said, "Fear not, you worm Jacob" (Isa. 41:14)... In Job 25:6 man is compared to a worm — literally 'a maggot' — a fitting figure of moral corruption.

His description of God's greatness and glory is fine and almost poetic. What he says about man is equally true: man is sinful, unclean and of no account, a worm before his Creator. But he could only repeat the question Job asked in Job 9: "How can a man be in the right before God?" He never tried to answer it. He never asked for a mediator, as Job had done. To Bildad the question had no answer. Perhaps he thought it excused the sin that he and his friends kept charging against unhappy Job.

Job simply rejected the charge that deep evil, covered over by loud claims of piety, was the cause of his terrible trial. But he was as far as Bildad from putting the creature on a false level with the Creator, least of all man, morally corrupt as he is. The lights of heaven have no brightness in His eyes; what then is a sinner worth? Considered on its own, what he urges is unquestionable truth; as a reply and an application to Job, it is perverse and pointless.

Having painted the greatness of God in a few grand strokes, Bildad turns to the littleness of man. "How then can mortal, frail man be in the right before God?" How can someone whose own mortality shows he is a sinner stand before the Almighty? How can one born of woman, with a nature inherited from the disobedient one, be clean in God's sight? Is it not true that every right grasp of the greatness and majesty of God produces a sense of sin and uncleanness? It was so with Job and with these friends at the last.

The first question on record is Bildad the Shuhite's in Job 25. In view of God's majesty and holiness, he asks how man can be right with Him — "man, who is a maggot, and the son of man, who is a worm!" David asks next, in Psalm 8, "What is man, that you are mindful of him, and the son of man, that you care for him?" David finds the answer; Bildad did not. ... Then, in John 12:34, we have the Jews asking, "How can you say that the Son of Man must be lifted up? Who is this Son of Man?" ... Finally, in Hebrews 2:6, it is asked again, "What is man? or the son of man?"

But the patience and lowliness of our Lord comes into view in that dark hour. As the forsaken One, He says, "I am a worm and not a man." He accepts a place of nothingness among the sons of men. He blots out self entirely. Now as always, "Christ pleased not Himself." As "a worm and not a man," He gave up every claim on divine deliverance. This is the crowning evidence of that Blessed One's perfect humility and self-denial.

By nature man has no hope of ever reaching such righteousness and purity, for he is a completely corrupted sinner. Bildad, however, was not applying this humbling lesson to himself, but to Job! Yet we all need to learn it about ourselves. The New Testament supplies the answer to this serious question. Man can be righteous before God, but only through faith in the Lord Jesus who has suffered for our sins. Righteousness is not ours by nature; it is credited to believers only because of their faith in Christ (Rom. 4:20-24).