Job CCLXIII

 In his short and concise answer to Job, so short in fact that theologians of the past have surmised that it was truncated, or that the rest of his speech was somehow lost to time, Bildad epitomizes the danger of perceiving God as one-dimensional, and putting Him in a theological box of one’s own design.

All Bildad saw was justice without grace, wrath without mercy, a God just waiting in the shadows, ready to unleash His judgment at the smallest deviation, who would think nothing of crushing His creation underfoot, regardless of his uprightness.

To Bildad, the only answer that made sense for why Job was suffering as he was was karmic reciprocity. If you’d done well, you’d be okay; since you’re not okay, you must be wicked. It’s a theory that doesn’t stand up to scrutiny, but one currently adopted by a large swath of the contemporary church. God is prospering me; therefore, I must be righteous. If prosperity were the metric by which righteousness is ascertained, then by that logic, Elon Musk must be the most righteous man walking the earth today.

That God would see a man as righteous was something Bildad could not wrap his mind around, especially Job and the condition he was in. It was an idea he would not allow himself to entertain, and so built a defense around his preconceived notion, insisting that there was no way man can be righteous before God, or that one who is born of a woman can be pure.

There must be something; we just haven’t figured out what that something is. To him, that Job had committed wickedness was a foregone conclusion. It wasn’t just a possibility or a probability; it was a certainty.

There is great danger in assuming that we know the mind of God and judging others based on those assumptions. Just because some things are as they seem, it doesn’t mean that they’re always as they seem.

As soon as she turned five, our oldest daughter got it in her head that she was a big girl. Whenever we’d go to the grocery store, she didn’t want to ride in the cart anymore and would walk beside it, usually picking out random items and throwing them in the cart as though they were free, gleefully selecting the most colorful boxes, whether we needed them or not, or whether she even knew what was inside.

One day we were in the cookie isle, and Victoria had already put three boxes of cookies into the cart, two of which I’d managed to put back on the shelf when she wasn’t looking, when she took another box off the shelf, ready to fling into the cart when with the stern voice employed by mothers the world over when their frustration level reaches a fevered pitch my wife said, “Victoria, no, that’s enough.”

An older lady happened to be pushing her cart within earshot, and the look she gave my wife was so fierce that one would think my wife was actively whipping the child rather than sternly telling her she needed to behave.

What the lady didn’t know was that we already had three untouched boxes of cookies at home that we were planning to donate to the local homeless shelter before they expired. Our daughter was doing what she was doing not because she was hungry or because she’d been deprived of cookies all her young life, but because she thought it was a game, fun, and she liked the colors on the boxes rather than what was inside. She assumed my wife was a bad mom just because she’d told our daughter no, when in reality she is the most attentive, caring, nurturing, and loving mother I’ve ever known, including my own.

It’s not that my mother wasn’t all of those things, but she was from the old school, and she had zero tolerance for foolishness. Couple that with the constant stress of making sure we had enough to eat, and working the handful of jobs she did in order to make it happen, and she didn’t have what one might call a long fuse.

Whenever we feel the compulsion to judge based on the information readily available to us, it would be wise to consider that we don’t have the full picture of the situation, and there are always unknown variables only God is privy to.

Bildad and his two friends had no such inclinations. They assumed they knew everything there was to know about Job’s situation and judged it accordingly. We’re all maggots and worms, but you’re wicked to boot because if you weren’t, then you wouldn’t be in the pickle you’re in.

All they saw was the severity of God, without acknowledging His goodness. They saw the rod of correction without acknowledging the possibility of the fires of testing, which would, once they’d run their course, produce a more refined Job.

Although the words Bildad spoke regarding the dominion, supremacy, and sovereignty of God were true, the purpose for which he spoke them was not to encourage, build up, or comfort Job, but rather to undergird and justify the verbal attacks he would shortly level against him.

There is a difference between speaking the truth with the intent to savage another’s hope, and speaking the truth in love with the purpose of edifying, encouraging, and building up. Over the years, I’ve had the displeasure of hearing some of the most ruthless, heartless, mean-spirited things come from the lips of believers, and their only defense would be, well, it’s the truth, isn’t it? True enough, but what was your purpose in speaking that truth in that moment, with that tone, and in the manner in which you spoke it?

Is the truth you choose to speak at the time you choose to speak it in service of binding up wounds, or pouring salt on them? Is it to edify, and comfort, or dispirit someone so thoroughly as to push them over the edge into despondency? If we were shown the same cruelty and indifference we so gleefully mete out to others, we would think those individuals monsters, yet have no qualms about doing it ourselves. Sometimes silence is a gift, and saying nothing is a surer sign of wisdom than anything we could have said.      

With love in Christ,

Michael Boldea, Jr.