In the ongoing second round of false accusations, Eliphaz charged Job that his sufferings were the fruit of conceit and arrogance (15:1-35). Job did not reply in kind (16:4). He understood and acknowledged that no one could abuse him if they were not given permission by God, 16:11 (cf 2Sa 16:11; Jn 19:11).
However, Job’s certainty that his undeserved afflictions were sanctioned by the sovereign God infuriated his adversaries all the more: To suggest that God would let anyone suffer who did not deserve to be punished was for them nothing less than blasphemy. And they surely understood who was on Job’s mind when he called his adversaries ungodly, 16:11. When their theology was questioned, they felt questioned, and questioning them was an infuriating transgression:
Bildad’s second speech
Job 18:
- 18:1-2a How long will you (lit.) ‘lay snares to utterances’. The translation of the Hebrew is uncertain. However, what follows indicates that Bildad accused Job of being intent to find fault in their sermons instead of acknowledging and praising their source as prophetic:
- 18:2b-4: Consider what we already preached to you, or else there is no point if we continue talking to you (v2b). Despising us as stupid cattle (v3), you tear yourself in anger (v4), and all this because you regard only yourself as important: Do you think the world revolves around you?
- 18:5-7 You became entrapped and are now snuffed out because you are wicked, the victim of your own scheming,
- 18:8-11 entrapped by ropes hidden in the path of your own choosing!
- 18:12 Calamity is prepared for exactly your kind of wicked people,
- 18:13-14 so that ‘the chief of death and terror’ (Satan) may torment and consume you.
- 18:15-16 Even your tent needs to be disinfected after you, because you are so rotten from the root to the top.
- 18:17-18 You and the memory of your name are driven out of this world.
- 18:19-21 You have no posterity among God’s people, because you are unrighteous and don’t know God.
Reply to Bildad’s second charge (Job 19):
Job 19:
- 19:1-3 How long will you remain callous? Ten times you have already accused me of divisiveness, blasphemy and now apostasy.
- 19:4 How can you accuse someone of being a false teacher who has no followers? Even if it were true that I have erred, the fact alone that no one believes me proves that your accusations are baseless.
- 19:5-6 But if you continue to exalt yourself against me and to blame me for what happened to me, then be warned: Behind this outcome (my disgrace and how ‘you magnify yourselves against me over it) is God who allows it to thereby magnify your condemnation (v29).
- 19:7-12 He breaks me down and treats me as if I were indeed His enemy, and for the very purpose to estrange me from you, and from the guests and the staff of my house, and even from my wife and my siblings so that the ones I counseled and loved have turned against me.*
- 19:21-24 How long do you want to continue to chew me up? O let these words be written (i.e. for you to feel your lack of mercy). Let them be permanently carved with a chisel on the rock (i.e. so that your hearts of stone could understand, and for all posterity):
- 19:25-27 I am certain that my redeemer lives, and that therefore I will eventually be raised from the dead to see Him with my eyes.**
- 19:28-29 But you, if you cling to your pretext for a case against the innocent, you store up for yourself God’s wrath for your own judgment (cf Mt 25:45).
* A foreshadowing of how Christ was to become a stumbling block for his fellow Israelites, cf Isa 53:3-4; Mk 9:12
** Here, the OT affirms faith in a bodily resurrection just like the NT does (cf 1Cor 15:35ff).
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