Righteous Maggots
Introduction: The Cruelty of Correct Doctrine
We now come to the third and final speech from Bildad the Shuhite. It is mercifully short, but it is also brutally sharp. Job's friends, in their attempts to comfort him, have proven themselves to be miserable comforters indeed. They operate on a very simple, and very flawed, principle: the principle of karma, dressed up in covenantal clothes. They believe in a tidy universe where the righteous always prosper and the wicked always suffer, right here and now. Since Job is suffering spectacularly, their theological syllogism demands that he must be a spectacular sinner. Their task, as they see it, is to badger him until he confesses the secret sin that has brought all this ruin upon him.
Bildad's approach here is to overwhelm Job with the sheer, unapproachable majesty of God. Every single thing Bildad says about God in this chapter is true. It is orthodox. It is magnificent. And it is utterly weaponized. He is using the truth as a club to beat a suffering man into submission. This is the great danger of a theology that is correct in its propositions but destitute of the gospel. A half-truth presented as the whole truth is a lie, and the most dangerous lies are the ones that are ninety-nine percent true. Bildad has a high view of God and a low view of man. So far, so good. But his theological equation has no variable for grace. It has no room for a mediator. And so his truth, as true as it is, can only lead to one place: despair.
He asks the most important question a human being can ask: "How then can mortal man be right with God?" This is the central question of the entire Bible. It is the question that drove Luther up the wall of the monastery and to the foot of the cross. But Bildad asks it not as a genuine seeker, but as a rhetorical hammer. For him, the question is its own answer. How can man be right with God? He can't. So shut up, Job, and repent. What we must see is how the gospel takes Bildad's unanswerable question and provides a breathtaking, glorious, and utterly unexpected answer.
The Text
Then Bildad the Shuhite answered and said, "Rule and dread belong to Him Who makes peace in His heights. Is there any number to His troops? And upon whom does His light not rise? How then can mortal man be right with God? Or how can he be pure who is born of woman? Behold even the moon has no brightness, And the stars are not pure in His sight; How much less mortal man, that maggot, And the son of man, that worm!"
(Job 25:1-6 LSB)
God's Transcendent Majesty (vv. 2-3)
Bildad begins by establishing the absolute and terrifying sovereignty of God.
"Rule and dread belong to Him Who makes peace in His heights. Is there any number to His troops? And upon whom does His light not rise?" (Job 25:2-3 LSB)
The words are "rule and dread." This is not the soft, therapeutic deity of modern evangelicalism. This is the God who is a consuming fire. His dominion is absolute, and the proper response to it, in our natural state, is terror. He is not a manageable God. He is not a tame lion. He "makes peace in His heights." This means that in the celestial realms, His will is done perfectly. There is no rebellion, no chaos, no disorder. The order of the heavens is a testimony to His perfect, uncontested reign.
To emphasize this, Bildad points to God's infinite resources. "Is there any number to His troops?" He is the LORD of Hosts, the Lord of Armies. The angelic armies at His command are innumerable. This is a statement of His omnipotence. No one can stand against Him and hope to prevail. Then he points to God's omniscience: "And upon whom does His light not rise?" His gaze, like the light of the sun, covers all. Nothing is hidden from Him. There are no secret sins, no hidden motives, no dark corners of the heart where God cannot see.
Again, all of this is profoundly true. This is the necessary starting point for any sane theology. We must begin with the Creator/creature distinction. God is infinite, holy, omnipotent, and omniscient. We are not. Any attempt to approach God on our own terms, as though we are His peers, is an act of insanity. Bildad has laid the foundation of God's otherness, His transcendence. The problem is the foundation is all he has.
The Unanswerable Question (vv. 4-6)
From the heights of God's majesty, Bildad turns his attention to the dust of man's frailty, and he asks the central question.
"How then can mortal man be right with God? Or how can he be pure who is born of woman?" (Job 25:4 LSB)
This is it. This is the problem of the human condition in two parallel clauses. The first deals with our legal standing: how can we be "right," or justified, before the divine judge? The second deals with our moral condition: how can we be "pure," or sanctified, before a holy God? He correctly identifies the source of our impurity as our very nature: we are those "born of woman." This is a clear pointer to the doctrine of original sin. We are not sinners because we sin; we sin because we are sinners, born into the fallen race of Adam. Our very constitution is corrupt from birth.
To press the point home, he uses an argument from the greater to the lesser, a classic rabbinic form of argument called qal wahomer.
"Behold even the moon has no brightness, And the stars are not pure in His sight; How much less mortal man, that maggot, And the son of man, that worm!" (Job 25:5-6 LSB)
If you stand in the desert on a clear night, the moon and stars are symbols of breathtaking purity and brilliance. But, Bildad argues, from God's perspective in the heights, the moon is a dull rock and the stars are tarnished. They have no intrinsic glory of their own; all their light is reflected. If these celestial glories are dim in His sight, what does that make us?
Bildad does not mince words. Man is a "maggot," and the son of man is a "worm." A maggot is a creature that thrives on decay and putrefaction. A worm is a creature of the dust, easily crushed, lowly and despised. This is a statement of radical depravity. In comparison to the holy God, man is not just flawed or sick; he is unclean, insignificant, and repulsive. And once again, we have to say that from one angle, the Bible agrees. Abraham said he was but "dust and ashes" (Gen. 18:27). The Messiah Himself, speaking prophetically in the psalm of the cross, says, "But I am a worm and not a man" (Ps. 22:6). Bildad's diagnosis of the human condition is brutally accurate. Man, on his own, cannot stand before God.
The Gospel Answer
So where is the error? The error is not in the diagnosis, but in the absence of a cure. Bildad's theology is a two-point sermon: God is holy, you are a worm, the end. This is the message of every works-based religion on earth. It is the message of the law when it is divorced from the gospel. The law is a mirror; it shows us the filth on our face, but it cannot clean it. Bildad is a master at holding up the mirror. But he has no water. He has no soap. His only counsel is to despair of any hope of being right with God.
But God, in His Word, answers Bildad's question. How can a man be right with God? The Apostle Paul answers, "For our sake he made him to be sin who knew no sin, so that in him we might become the righteousness of God" (2 Corinthians 5:21). God solved the problem of our legal standing by imputing our sin to Christ and imputing His perfect righteousness to us. We are declared "right" not based on our performance, but based on Christ's performance, received by faith alone.
How can he be pure who is born of woman? The Apostle John answers, "the blood of Jesus his Son cleanses us from all sin" (1 John 1:7). Jesus answers, "Truly, truly, I say to you, unless one is born again he cannot see the kingdom of God" (John 3:3). The problem of our impure nature, being "born of woman," is solved by a second birth, a birth from above by the Spirit of God.
And what about the worm? What about the maggot? The glorious, mind-bending truth of the gospel is that God did not simply look down on the worm from His holy height and squash it. The eternal Son of God, the one through whom the stars were made, descended from the heights. He became the Son of Man so that He could become the worm for us. He took on our lowly, maggot-like state. On the cross, He was treated as the ultimate object of decay and scorn, so that we, the true worms, could be lifted up and adopted as sons.
Bildad saw the infinite gulf between God and man and declared it uncrossable. He was right. It is uncrossable from our side. But the gospel is the good news that God Himself, in the person of Jesus Christ, crossed it. He is the bridge. He is the mediator that Job longed for. He is the one who can lay a hand on us both. Bildad's question was right. His tone was cruel. And his answer was despair. The Christian faith takes that same question and answers it with a person: Jesus Christ, our righteousness, our sanctification, and our redemption.