VIII.
The burden of Bildad’s speech is very much what that of Eliphaz was: the justice of God, and the impossibility of one who is not a wicked man being forsaken of God and punished. This, which is emphatically the problem of the Book of Job, was the great practical problem of the Old World, as we see from Psalms 37 and the like. It is a problem which not seldom weighs heavily on our own hearts even in the light of the Gospel, though, of course, since the redemption of the Cross of Christ this problem has once for all been practically solved. What is so conspicuous in the speeches of Job’s friends is their total want of refinement and delicacy of feeling. They blurt out without the slightest compunction the most unscrupulous charges, and they cast the most reckless insinuations against him. Here, for instance, Bildad does not hesitate to say that Job’s sons died for their transgressions because God is a righteous God, and He would not have been righteous had they, being innocent, perished. Thus, in order to save the credit of the righteous God facts must be distorted or misrepresented to any extent, as though God were not a God of truth as well as of righteousness.