Wooden Truths and Miserable Comfort Text: Job 8:20-22
Introduction: The Danger of Being Right
There is a peculiar danger in being right, or more precisely, in being almost right. It is the danger of taking a true principle and applying it like a sledgehammer to a situation that requires a surgeon's scalpel. This is the error of Job's friends, and it is the particular error of Bildad in the passage before us. We must understand that the problem with Job's counselors is not that they were entirely wrong in their theology. In fact, much of what they say, taken as a general principle, is perfectly biblical. God does uphold the righteous. God does judge the wicked. The problem was not the truth of their statements in the abstract, but the brutal, wooden, and graceless application of those statements to a man being crushed by the mysterious hand of God.
Bildad, like his companions, is a practitioner of what we might call a tidy, vending-machine theology. If you put in a coin of righteousness, you get out a candy bar of prosperity. If you are suffering, it must be because you put in a slug of secret sin. This is the ancient root of the modern prosperity gospel, a damnable heresy that reduces the sovereign Lord of the universe to a cosmic bellhop, at our beck and call to deliver health and wealth. Bildad looks at Job on his ash heap, scraping his sores with a piece of pottery, and his systematic theology clicks into place. The syllogism is simple: God punishes evildoers; Job is being punished severely; therefore, Job must be a severe evildoer. It is logical, it is neat, and it is entirely wrong.
What Bildad and his friends could not see was the prologue in Heaven. They were ignorant of the cosmic contest taking place, a contest in which Job's faithfulness was the battlefield. They were attempting to explain a four-dimensional reality with a two-dimensional grid. Their failure is a profound warning to us. It is possible to wield true biblical propositions in a way that makes you a miserable comforter. It is possible to be right woodenly, and in being so, to stand rebuked by God Himself, which is precisely what happens to these men at the end of the book. So as we come to these verses, let us not simply dismiss Bildad as a fool. Let us rather see the truth in what he says, and then see the profound error in how he says it, and where he applies it.
The Text
Behold, God will not reject a blameless man,
Nor will He strengthen the hand of the evildoers.
He will yet fill your mouth with laughter
And your lips with shouting.
Those who hate you will be clothed with shame,
And the tent of the wicked will be no longer.
(Job 8:20-22 LSB)
A Truth Misapplied (v. 20)
Bildad begins his conclusion with a statement that is, on its face, entirely true and orthodox.
"Behold, God will not reject a blameless man, Nor will He strengthen the hand of the evildoers." (Job 8:20)
Who can argue with this? It is a bedrock principle of divine justice. The psalmist says, "For the LORD is righteous, He loves righteousness; The upright will behold His face" (Psalm 11:7). And again, "The wicked plots against the righteous And gnashes at him with his teeth. The Lord laughs at him, For He sees that his day is coming" (Psalm 37:12-13). God is on the side of the righteous. He does not ultimately abandon His people. He does not take the hand of the wicked to prop them up and give them lasting success. This is true. This is biblical. This is sound.
But a truth out of season is a lie. A truth misapplied is a cruelty. Bildad is not delivering a lecture on systematic theology in a classroom; he is speaking to a man whose children are dead and whose body is rotting. The clear implication of his "Behold" is this: "Look, Job, the matter is simple. God doesn't reject the blameless. You are clearly being rejected. Therefore, you are not blameless." He uses a glorious truth about God's faithfulness as a club to beat his suffering friend. He has turned a promise into an accusation.
His theology has no room for the cross. It has no category for a righteous man who suffers for a purpose higher than immediate retribution. He cannot comprehend a God whose ways are not our ways, whose thoughts are not our thoughts. He sees the ash heap, but he cannot see the throne. He sees the suffering, but he is blind to the sovereignty. And so he speaks a truth that, in this context, functions as a lie. God will not ultimately reject a blameless man, but He may test him. He may try him. He may lead him through the valley of the shadow of death for the sake of a greater glory. Bildad's tidy system cannot account for the fact that the most blameless man who ever lived would one day be utterly rejected, crying out, "My God, my God, why have You forsaken Me?"
A Conditional Laughter (v. 21)
Bildad continues by dangling the prospect of restoration, but it comes with a heavy, unspoken condition.
"He will yet fill your mouth with laughter And your lips with shouting." (Job 8:21 LSB)
Again, this is a beautiful promise. The hope of the righteous is a final, conclusive joy. "The righteous will rejoice when he sees the vengeance; He will wash his feet in the blood of the wicked" (Psalm 58:10). Our God is a God who restores. He is the God who will one day "wipe away every tear from their eyes" (Revelation 21:4). Laughter and shouting are the final vocabulary of the redeemed. So what is the problem?
The problem is the implied "if." Bildad is saying, "He will fill your mouth with laughter... if you repent of the secret wickedness that brought this all upon you." This is not a free declaration of grace; it is a transactional offer. It is a formula for blessing. Do this, and God will do that. This reduces God to a predictable machine and removes all mystery, all sovereignty, and all grace from the equation.
The irony is that Job will indeed have his mouth filled with laughter again. God will restore him. But it will not be because Job followed Bildad's formula. It will be because Job, through all his confused and agonized wrestling, clung to God. The restoration will come after God rebukes Bildad and his friends for not speaking what was right. The laughter will come, but it will come from the far side of a trial that Bildad's theology has no categories to explain. True Christian joy is not the result of a trouble-free life. It is a joy forged in the furnace of affliction, a joy that knows God is sovereign even when the circumstances are screaming that He is absent.
The Inevitable Reversal (v. 22)
He concludes with another statement of general truth, contrasting the fate of the wicked with the hope of the righteous.
"Those who hate you will be clothed with shame, And the tent of the wicked will be no longer." (Job 8:22 LSB)
This is the settled destiny of all who set themselves against God and His people. Shame is their final garment. Their dwelling place, their legacy, all that they built, will be erased. "For the arms of the wicked will be broken, But the LORD sustains the righteous" (Psalm 37:17). Bildad is correct. This is the end of the story.
But he is trying to read the last page of the book in the middle of the first chapter. He assumes that this final reversal must happen now, on his timetable, according to his neat and tidy sense of justice. He sees Job's suffering and assumes Job must be the one whose tent is about to be swept away. He cannot imagine that Job's accusers, the Sabeans, the Chaldeans, and even the supernatural accuser, Satan, are the ones who will ultimately be clothed with shame.
This is a profound failure of faith. Faith is the assurance of things hoped for, the conviction of things not seen. Bildad operates entirely by sight. He sees suffering, he deduces sin. He sees prosperity, he deduces righteousness. He has no room for the cross-currents of God's providence. He cannot understand that sometimes the righteous suffer precisely so that the wicked might be clothed with a greater and more profound shame in the end. He cannot understand that the suffering of the righteous is often the very means by which God works His purposes to bring about the downfall of the wicked.
The Gospel According to Bildad (and Why It Fails)
What we have in these verses is a perfect summary of every false religion in the world, including the false religion of moralistic, therapeutic deism that passes for Christianity in many of our churches. It is a religion of karma, of spiritual mechanics, of quid pro quo. Be good, get good things. Be bad, get bad things.
And it is a theology that has no answer for the cross of Jesus Christ. For on the cross, the only truly blameless man was utterly rejected by God. On the cross, the mouth of the righteous one was filled not with laughter, but with a cry of dereliction. On the cross, the hands of the evildoers were strengthened against the Holy One of Israel. On the cross, those who hated Him were not clothed with shame, but rather wagged their heads in triumph. The tent of the Righteous One was taken down and destroyed.
If Bildad's theology is the whole story, then the cross is the greatest injustice in the history of the universe, and God is a monster. But Bildad's theology is not the whole story. The cross is where God's justice and mercy meet. The cross is where God, in His infinite wisdom, laid the suffering of a righteous man, His own Son, at the center of His plan to save the world. He was rejected so that we, the ungodly, might be accepted. He was shamed so that we might be glorified. His tent was destroyed so that He might raise it up again in three days, securing an eternal dwelling place for all who trust in Him.
The book of Job is a signpost pointing to this reality. It teaches us that God's justice is not a simple, mechanical formula that we can chart on a graph. It is a deep, mysterious, and glorious thing that is fully and finally revealed only at the cross. Job's friends were miserable comforters because they offered a gospel without a cross. They offered law without grace. They offered truth without wisdom. And God's word to them, and to us, is that we must learn to be silent before the mystery of suffering, and to point not to simplistic formulas, but to the God who suffers for us and with us, the Lord Jesus Christ, whose rejection secured our laughter, and whose shame guarantees our glory.