The next to speak up is Bildad, and his tirade goes further in the wrong direction. Bildad feels that God’s integrity is being slurred in these events. How could Job not know why these things are happening? Bildad sees the lack of explanation for Job’s suffering as a threat to God’s honour which he sets out to defend. And he does this at Job’s expense. His reasoning is as follows: God must be right, so Job must be wrong. Let’s remember that we are reading wisdom literature here. The sort of thinking represented by Bildad may seem logical, but it isn’t wise. You can have lots of knowledge, and be great at reasoning things through, but have no wisdom. Some people like to have their theology clean cut, sealed, predictable and reasonable. But this is foolishness. God will not be put in a box. Even in the Bible we are confronted with more mystery than we are given revelation. We are told what we need to know, and this is certain. We are not then invited to form a rational system out of it and close all the mystery-gaps by deducing and rationalising. If you want to walk with God you had better get used to mystery. God is infinite and eternal. He is not, therefore, confined to space-time categories and his ways are beyond human logic. Life with God will rarely be clean cut, predictable and understandable. God will always be who he has revealed himself to be, and he will fulfil his plan, but how this may unfold is not for us to presume to predict.
Ask God to give you wisdom enough to live with mystery.
Read Job 8
