The Shadow of Yesterday's Wisdom Text: Job 8:8-10
Introduction: Miserable Counselors and Dead Tradition
We find ourselves in the middle of a disaster. Job, a righteous man, has been systematically dismantled by a series of calamities orchestrated in the heavenly courts. His children are dead, his wealth is gone, and his body is covered in agonizing sores. And into this vortex of suffering step his friends, men who are ostensibly there to comfort him. But as we see, their comfort is like sand in a wound. They are, as Job will later call them, "miserable comforters."
The words we are examining today come from the mouth of Bildad the Shuhite. And what he says is a classic example of offering true principles in the service of a damnable lie. This is what makes for the most potent kind of bad advice. It is not the sort of counsel that is wrong from top to bottom, but rather the kind that is just true enough to be plausible, and just misapplied enough to be destructive. Bildad is a traditionalist. He is a man who reveres the past, respects his elders, and believes in the settled wisdom of the ages. And in this, there is something to be commended. But his traditionalism is a dead thing, a cudgel to beat a suffering man, not a living stream from which to draw wisdom.
We live in an age that has the opposite problem. Our generation is characterized by a terminal case of chronological snobbery. The modern mind believes that wisdom was invented sometime last Tuesday, and that all previous generations were populated by knuckle-dragging simpletons. We are convinced that we, who are "only of yesterday," have somehow ascended to a pinnacle of enlightenment. Bildad's error was to worship the ashes of his fathers' fires; our error is to spit on the ashes and deny there was ever a fire at all. Both are profound follies. The Scriptures teach us to honor our fathers, but they do not teach us to make idols of them. The lesson for us in Bildad's miserable counsel is to learn how to receive the wisdom of the past without turning it into a weapon against the God of the past, and against His suffering saints.
The Text
"Please ask of past generations, And establish the things searched out by their fathers. For we are only of yesterday and know nothing, Because our days on earth are but a shadow. Will they not instruct you and tell you, And bring forth words from their hearts?"
(Job 8:8-10 LSB)
The Appeal to Antiquity (v. 8)
Bildad begins his speech by directing Job's attention away from his present experience and toward the accumulated wisdom of the past.
"Please ask of past generations, And establish the things searched out by their fathers." (Job 8:8)
On the surface, this is good advice. The fifth commandment tells us to honor our father and mother, and this principle extends to the generations that came before us. Scripture is filled with exhortations to remember the deeds of the Lord in the past, to learn from the history of our fathers in the faith. The Psalms repeatedly call us to tell the next generation of the mighty acts of God. A people who cut themselves off from their history are a people who have given themselves over to dementia. They have no identity, no trajectory, and no wisdom.
So, is Bildad right? Should Job just listen to the old-timers? The problem is not with the principle, but with Bildad's application of it. Bildad's "fathers" have handed down a very tidy, mechanical doctrine of retribution: God is just, therefore the righteous prosper and the wicked suffer. Since you, Job, are suffering immensely, you must have sinned immensely. Q.E.D. Case closed. The tradition he appeals to is a flattened, two-dimensional caricature of God's justice. It has no room for the mystery of suffering, the testing of the saints, or the sovereign purposes of God that run deeper than our neat and tidy formulas.
This is the danger of all dead traditionalism. It takes the living faith of the fathers and fossilizes it into a set of rules. It preserves the letter of their doctrine while suffocating the spirit. The true fathers of the faith, the ones worth listening to, always pointed beyond themselves to the living God. Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob did not hand down a simple flowchart of divine justice; they handed down a covenant relationship with a God who is both just and merciful, both sovereign and mysterious. Bildad's tradition was a closed system; the Bible's tradition is a story, a drama that was still unfolding, and which would ultimately find its meaning in a suffering servant who was righteous, yet afflicted for the sake of others.
The Shadow of Our Days (v. 9)
Next, Bildad grounds his appeal to tradition in the finitude and ignorance of the present generation.
"For we are only of yesterday and know nothing, Because our days on earth are but a shadow." (Job 8:9 LSB)
Again, this is profoundly true. The brevity of life is a constant theme in Scripture. We are a mist that appears for a little time and then vanishes. We are like grass that withers. Our days are a shadow. This is a statement of radical dependence. Because our lives are so short and our perspective so limited, we are fools to think we can figure out the world on our own, starting from scratch in every generation. We desperately need to stand on the shoulders of those who came before. To reject the wisdom of the past is the height of arrogance for creatures as ephemeral as we are.
This verse is a direct rebuke to our modern conceits. We are obsessed with the new, the novel, the "progressive." We think our fleeting, shadowy existence is the measure of all things. But God's Word tells us we are ignorant precisely because we are "of yesterday." Our personal experience is a ridiculously small sample size from which to derive the meaning of the universe.
But notice the poison in Bildad's application. He uses this truth to invalidate Job's experience. He is essentially saying, "Job, your personal testimony of integrity, your lived experience of faithfulness, means nothing. It is a mere shadow. The only thing that has substance is the received tradition of the fathers, which says you must be a secret sinner." He uses the truth of human finitude to crush a man, rather than to drive him to God. The proper response to our shadowy existence is not to trust in the traditions of men, but to take refuge in the shadow of the Almighty (Psalm 91:1). The fact that our days are a shadow should make us long for the substance, for the one who is the same yesterday, today, and forever. Bildad points Job to the shadow of the fathers; the gospel points us to the substance, who is Christ.
The Voice of the Heart (v. 10)
Bildad concludes his point by personifying the wisdom of the past, giving it a voice that should instruct Job.
"Will they not instruct you and tell you, And bring forth words from their hearts?" (Job 8:10 LSB)
The fathers will speak, Bildad says. Their wisdom is not a dry, academic affair; it is words brought forth "from their hearts." This is an appeal to a deep, settled, heartfelt consensus. This is not just what the fathers thought; it is what they knew in the very core of their being. And what they knew, according to Bildad, was that Job had it coming.
But this raises the ultimate question for any appeal to tradition: whose heart are we listening to? The heart of man is deceitful above all things, and desperately wicked. A tradition that is merely the collected "words from their hearts" is nothing more than a monument to pooled ignorance and shared rebellion. The only tradition that has any authority is the tradition that comes from the heart of God Himself. This is what we call divine revelation. This is the Holy Scripture.
The true fathers of the faith, the prophets and apostles, did not bring forth words from their own hearts. They spoke as they were carried along by the Holy Spirit. They delivered to us a tradition that was received from God. And that tradition tells a far more complex and glorious story than Bildad's. It tells of a God whose ways are not our ways, whose thoughts are not our thoughts. It tells of a world where the rain falls on the just and the unjust. And most importantly, it tells of a righteous one, the Lord Jesus Christ, who suffered unjustly, who became a man of sorrows, acquainted with grief, so that through His affliction, we who are truly guilty might be healed.
Conclusion: From Shadow to Substance
Bildad's counsel is a perfect illustration of how to be right in your premises and dead wrong in your conclusion. Yes, we should inquire of the past. Yes, our days are a fleeting shadow. Yes, the fathers have something to teach us. But the great error is to terminate our trust in the fathers, rather than following their pointing fingers to the God of the fathers.
The modern world rejects the fathers and trusts in itself, a shadow trusting in a shadow. The dead traditionalist rejects the present and trusts in the fathers, a shadow trusting in other shadows. The Christian does neither. The Christian receives the testimony of the faithful fathers of the past as a great gift, a cloud of witnesses. But he understands that they are all witnesses to someone else. They all testify to the one who is the substance, not the shadow. "For the Law was given through Moses; grace and truth came through Jesus Christ" (John 1:17).
Our days on earth are a shadow. This is not the final word of despair, but the first word of the gospel. It is because we are shadows that we need substance. It is because we are of yesterday and know nothing that we need the Ancient of Days, the one in whom are hidden all the treasures of wisdom and knowledge. Bildad's wisdom left Job cornered and condemned. The wisdom of God, revealed in the gospel, finds us in our suffering, acknowledges the mystery, and points us to the cross. At the cross, we see the only truly innocent sufferer, and in His resurrection, we see the only true hope. The wisdom of the fathers is only good and true when it leads us there, to the foot of the cross and the door of the empty tomb. That is the only tradition that gives life, and the only history that can save.