Job 8:4

He offers two proofs of God's justice, and the first is, to put it mildly, arbitrary and unkind. We may read verse 4, "When your children sinned against Him, He gave them over to the hand of their wickedness." In other words, Bildad assumes that Job's children got what their wickedness deserved, and so were cut off... This cuts deep into a father who had found no evidence of such wickedness in his children. He had watched over their spiritual state with care.

Bildad asks Job a plain question, "Does God pervert judgment?" Is He unrighteous? For anyone who knows Him there can be only one answer... This shows the dreadful cliff edge Job was approaching. He was driven on by the false principle that God always punishes for sin. Job was not a sinner; therefore God was unjust! This is terrible reasoning. Both the premise and the statement of fact are wrong, and the conclusion is blasphemous. Why did Job not stop, and Bildad too, and ask whether something was wrong in the premise: does God always punish for sin alone?

He suggested that God must have cast Job's children away as the penalty of their transgression. This must have been a bitter blow to Job, since he had so regularly offered sacrifice on their behalf. Even so, he advised Job that if only he would be upright and seek God, he would be blessed in his latter end.

He says, "If your children have sinned against him and he has cast them away for their transgression" — there they thought they had him. How could God do such a thing as to kill all his children unless there was something very bad in them? It was all the same principle, and the same false principle. And what shows the falsity of the principle is the universal test. Bring Christ in. Was it any lack of God's delight in Christ that allowed Christ to be the greatest sufferer, far beyond Job? So the estimate was entirely false, and so was the principle underneath it: that there must be evil in anyone who came to this depth of suffering.

Then he makes a cruel thrust at Job. He suggests that Job's sons had died because they had sinned against God, and that God coldly cast them away for their transgressions (v.4). This was not true, but what was Job to answer? So Bildad condemned Job's dead sons, then went on to attack Job himself. He told him this: if he would earnestly plead with God, and if he were pure and upright, then God would surely awake for him at once and turn his misery into prosperity.

We need not be surprised that God turns to Eliphaz and his friends with stern rebuke for their part in the argument... He addresses Eliphaz, the leader of the three, and declares His anger against them all. They had not spoken of Him what is right, as His servant Job had. And yet their whole contention had apparently been for God's righteousness! Had they not maintained this from the very start, with noble descriptions and fierce attacks on evil? Had they not pinned the charge of wrongdoing on Job with no proof at all, and against well known facts?