The book of Job

[ZNP]

First of all, I have been enjoying your responses here, particularly the lengthier ones. I find them quite compelling and edifying. Thank you. The idea regarding Melchizedek and Job is not something I had heard before, so it is very interesting and has given me something to reflect on.

I agree with a lot of what you have written about the book of Job. The one thing I see differently, however, is the character of Elihu. I have seen other views defending him as some kind of wise, sensitive counselor, enlightening Job and pointing Job to a better way. I've seen him painted with these broad strokes, but when I dug into his actual words, what he says, and why he says it, I found him to be quite the opposite of who he proclaims himself to be.

Yes, it seems like Elihu is approaching Job and his ordeal with a different argument than the 3 friends. However, a lot of what Elihu says is simply a regurgitation of their arguments, and he even repeats ideas that Job has already stated.

But the fundamental problem with his argument is that it is still based on the assumption Job is suffering as a result of his sin. This, most of us understand, is not true. So Elihu's whole claim is built on a faulty foundation.

For example, let's look at Elihu's words in Job 33:26,27

Then he will pray to God, and He will accept him,
That he may see His face with joy,
And He may restore His righteousness to man.
“He will sing to men and say,
‘I have sinned and perverted what is right,
And it is not proper for me.

This is part of a longer passage, but look at the implication. He is talking about God rescuing a man from going into the pit. OK, right...but the primary problem is that this does not apply to Job and the ordeal he is enduring. Elihu is inferring in verse 27 that Job is suffering due to his sin and needs to repent. Again, as we know, this is not why Job is suffering based on what is laid out in chapters 1 & 2.

That is my fundamental issue with the opinion that Elihu is right in trying to explain to Job why he is suffering. I just don't see how he is revealing anything to Job about wisdom or anything else. What I do read is a lot of accusations and berating of Job by Elihu. At one point Elihu says Job should be "tried to the end". Considering all that Job has endured, that statement is purely sadistic.

I have more than these, but here are a few questions I have for those in support of Elihu:

1. Elihu is angry. Some argue this is "righteous" anger, but I disagree. Even if it was "righteous" who would want a person *burning with anger* as their counselor ? Who? Plus, when Elihu appears, Job is at his lowest point and proceeds to rake Job over the coals. I think Job was wise to ignore him and not respond.

2. Nowhere in the text is Elihu affirmed by anyone. Not by God. Not by Job. Not by the 3 friends. The only praise given to Elihu comes from Elihu. Are we to believe him because he *claims* to speak for God?

3. Why does Elihu constantly tell them to "hear" him and "listen" to him? Is he insecure? What is that about?

4. Elihu accuses Job of saying he is more righteous than God, but where does Job say that? What's the verse?

Thank you for your insight, I have corrected my previous understanding. I now think that Elihu can be seen very clearly in the church in Ephesus, they were good at examining if someone was an apostle, but they left their first love. You can see it in Sardis, they have a name they are alive but they are dead, and they are seen in Laodicea, they say they are rich and have need of nothing. But the fact God says nothing about Elihu and the fact that Job doesn't intercede for him indicates his lampstand has been removed. So Elihu is a study in the apostasy. In fact the Epistle of James seems to really dismantle Elihu. I have credited you in this latest addition. If you have any more suggestions on how to edit it let me know.

Dead_Religion_in_Jobs_Four_Friends.pdf

drive.google.com

 

[ZNP]

Interceding on Behalf of Eliphaz — Part One (a)​

The First Speech of Eliphaz (Job 4–5) and Its New Testament Fulfillment​

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There is a reason God does not rebuke Eliphaz for asking the wrong questions. He rebukes him for not knowing the answers. Every question Eliphaz raises in his first speech is theologically legitimate. Every observation he makes about divine greatness, human frailty, the impossibility of self-justification, and the need for an advocate is accurate as far as it goes. The tragedy of Eliphaz — and the tragedy of all religion that precedes the revelation of Jesus Christ — is not that it asked the wrong things. It is that it could not see that the answers were coming in a person.


Paul makes this precise point in Ephesians: "the mystery which from the beginning of the world hath been hid in God" (Ephesians 3:9), now disclosed — not revised, not corrected, but fulfilled. The questions were always right. The mystery was always there. What was hidden from the ages and from the generations has now been made manifest. To preach Jesus Christ as the gospel is, in the most literal sense, to intercede on behalf of Eliphaz — to bring him the answer his own questions were reaching toward.


With that framework established, we take up his first speech.

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"If we assay to commune with thee, wilt thou be grieved? but who can withhold himself from speaking?" (Job 4:2)


Eliphaz frames his counsel as an irresistible burden. He cannot help but speak, and he asks Job preemptively not to be wounded by what is coming. The question is honest — he genuinely senses that correction will grieve, and he genuinely cannot restrain himself from offering it.


What he cannot yet see is the relational context that makes correction not merely bearable but life-giving. The writer of Hebrews addresses exactly this dynamic: "My son, despise not thou the chastening of the Lord, nor faint when thou art rebuked of him: for whom the Lord loveth he chasteneth, and scourgeth every son whom he receiveth" (Hebrews 12:5–6). Eliphaz's question assumed that grief is the natural and unavoidable response to being addressed in one's suffering. Hebrews does not deny the grief — it supplies the context that transforms it. The one speaking is a Father. The one receiving is a son. And the writer goes further: "if ye be without chastisement, whereof all are partakers, then are ye bastards, and not sons" (12:8). Discipline received within the father-son relationship is not evidence of rejection. It is the very mark of belonging. Eliphaz sensed something true — that correction had to happen, that it would be painful, that it could not be withheld. What awaited full disclosure was the covenant relationship that gives that correction its meaning.

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"Is not thy fear of God thy confidence, and thy hope the uprightness of thy ways?" (Job 4:6)


Eliphaz identifies Job's hope with precision: it is confidence in his own integrity, in the uprightness of his conduct, in the faithfulness of his record before God. This is not a cynical observation. It is an accurate description of the highest form of religious life available within the framework Eliphaz inhabits. The fear of God expressed through upright living was, and is, the crowning achievement of Levitical devotion.


But Paul, writing to the Colossians, discloses what was hidden behind that framework: "Christ in you, the hope of glory" (Colossians 1:27). This is the answer Eliphaz's question was always pointing toward without knowing it. The hope of the Levitical system is the uprightness of your ways — the sufficiency of your sacrifices, the faithfulness of your conduct, the integrity of your record. The hope of the Melchizedekian priesthood is not what you have accomplished but who dwells within you. When suffering strips away every external credential, as it stripped Job, the man whose confidence rests on his own integrity has nothing left to stand on. But the man in whom Christ dwells has lost nothing essential. The hope of glory cannot be seized by any adversary, cannot be disproved by any affliction, because it does not reside in circumstances — it resides in the indwelling presence of the Lord Himself. Eliphaz was right that Job's hope needed a better foundation. He could not yet see what that foundation was.

 

[ZNP]

Interceding on Behalf of Eliphaz — Part One (b)​

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"Who ever perished, being innocent? or where were the righteous cut off?" (Job 4:7)


This is perhaps the most consequential question in all of Eliphaz's speeches, and arguably in the entire book. It is the load-bearing pillar of retribution theology: innocence guarantees survival. The system is just. The ledger balances. Therefore if you are perishing, you are not innocent. As a statement of how the Levitical order operated, it is entirely correct. Under that covenant, obedience produced blessing and transgression produced curse. The question is not wrong. It simply could not anticipate what was coming.


Because the spotless Lamb perished. The one who was in every conceivable sense innocent — examined, tested, declared without blemish, the one whom even his judge could not convict of a single charge — was cut off. John the Baptist's announcement, "Behold the Lamb of God, which taketh away the sin of the world" (John 1:29), is not the refutation of Eliphaz's question but its ultimate answer. The Levitical system itself required that the sacrifice be examined for spotlessness, precisely because only a spotless victim could serve as a sufficient offering. The examination was always pointing toward one examination that would be final and complete. Jesus Christ passed that examination — and was cut off. Not despite His innocence but because of it.


Paul draws out the full weight of this: "him who knew no sin he made to be sin on our behalf" (2 Corinthians 5:21). And the positive answer — the permanent dealing with sin that no animal sacrifice could accomplish — is what Paul describes when he writes of Christ "that he might sanctify and cleanse it with the washing of water by the word" (Ephesians 5:26). To be right before God and pure before one's Maker is not achieved by the sufferer's own unblemished record. It is received through union with the one whose record is unblemished on our behalf. Eliphaz asked the question that made the cross necessary. The cross is its answer.

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"To which of the saints wilt thou turn?" (Job 5:1)


Eliphaz's challenge is rhetorical and, in its context, unanswerable. Who among the holy ones will take Job's case? Who in the heavenly court will serve as his advocate? The implied answer is no one. Job has no standing, no counsel, no one to speak for him. He stands alone before a justice that has already rendered its verdict in the form of his suffering. Within the framework available to Eliphaz, this was simply true. There was no provision for a heavenly advocate. The accused stood alone.


The New Testament answers this question with a directness that could only come from the one who designed the answer before the question was ever asked. Jesus tells His disciples: "I will pray the Father, and he shall give you another Comforter, that he may abide with you for ever" (John 14:16). The word parakletos — Comforter, Advocate — is precisely the legal term for one who stands alongside the accused and takes up their case. Eliphaz asked who would serve as Job's paraclete. The answer is the Holy Spirit Himself, sent by the Father at the request of the Son, abiding permanently with the believer. What Eliphaz intended as a closing argument — you have no one — becomes, in the light of the New Testament, the very doorway through which the most extraordinary provision in all of Scripture enters. God Himself becomes the defender of the one the religious system has condemned.

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"I would seek God, and unto God would I commit my cause: which doeth great things and unsearchable; marvellous things without number" (Job 5:8–9)


Eliphaz is not wrong that God is great, that His works are unsearchable, that His marvellous deeds are without number. Every word of this is true. His error is not in the description of God but in what he draws from it. In his hands, divine greatness becomes a counsel of resignation: God is too high, His ways too deep, His workings too mysterious — therefore accept your condition, submit without understanding, and be content to remain outside the mystery. The unsearchability of God is deployed as a reason to stop pressing, a theological ceiling beyond which no one may rise.


The New Testament takes the identical truth and draws the opposite conclusion — because it has the identical truth plus the disclosure that was always coming. Paul writes to the Colossians that in Christ "are hid all the treasures of wisdom and knowledge" (Colossians 2:3). The wisdom is not withheld — it is hidden in Christ, and Christ is in the believer. The mystery Eliphaz could only gesture toward from the outside is the mystery Paul announces has now been made known: "Christ in you, the hope of glory" (Colossians 1:27). We are not left outside admiring the impenetrability of God's wisdom. We are joined to the one in whom that wisdom is concentrated and, through Him, progressively disclosed.


And the greatness of God in the New Testament is never an argument for passivity — it is the foundation for participation. We are, as Paul tells the Corinthians, "labourers together with God" (1 Corinthians 3:9). Christ is the head; the church is the body. The unsearchable wisdom flows through the body because the head dwells within it. Eliphaz looked at the greatness of God and said: be silent, submit, commit your cause and ask nothing more. The New Testament looks at the same greatness and says: this is precisely why you are called, equipped, and sent — because the one in whom all wisdom dwells has made you His body, and His cause is now yours.

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Eliphaz asked five questions in his first speech. Every one of them was legitimate. Every one of them was pointing, without knowing it, toward a provision that had not yet arrived. The rebuke he receives in Job 42 is not the rebuke of a man who asked the wrong things. It is the rebuke of a man who, having asked the right things, settled for religion instead of waiting for the answer. To intercede on his behalf — as Job himself was commanded to do — is to bring him what his own questions required: not a better argument, but a person.

 

[Drich]

Also, satan says he is roaming the earth, going back and forth in it. This seems to parallel what Peter writes in his first epistle:

1 Peter 5:8
Be of sober spirit, be on the alert. Your adversary, the devil, prowls about like a roaring lion, seeking someone to devour.

Not a big point of contention, but that is my take on satan in Job. Satan was prowling around the earth, looking for someone to devour, when God says, "Have you considered my servant Job?" In other words, "Have you considered devouring my servant Job?" to which satan seems to infer, "Yes, I've considered devouring him, but You have prevented me." Then God removes the hedge and satan unleashes his attacks on Job.

This sounds 100% plausible. I am simply saying Nothing in the text says satan had plans against Job specifically till God presented Job to Him.

 

[ZNP]

Interceding on Behalf of Eliphaz — Part Two (a)​

The Second Speech of Eliphaz (Job 15) and Its New Testament Fulfillment​

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In his first speech, Eliphaz was pastoral. He asked questions born of genuine concern, even if his framework could not reach Job's condition. By his second speech, the pastoral mask has begun to slip. The questions are sharper, more personal, more prosecutorial. He is no longer asking what has happened to Job. He is asking what is wrong with Job. And yet, as before, every question he raises is legitimate within the world he inhabits. The tragedy deepens precisely because he is still right about the questions. He simply cannot see that the answers have not yet arrived — that the mystery Paul would one day call hidden from ages and from generations is the very thing his interrogation requires.

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"Should a wise man answer with windy knowledge, and fill his belly with the east wind?" (Job 15:2)


Eliphaz is charging that Job's defense is empty — all breath, no substance, words without weight. Within his framework, this is a reasonable charge. If Job cannot produce the evidence of righteousness that the system requires, what exactly is he offering?


Paul answers this in 1 Corinthians 15, but he inverts the direction of the accusation entirely. It is not Job's defense that is vain — it is any proclamation that lacks the resurrection. "If Christ be not risen, then is our preaching vain, and your faith is also vain" (1 Corinthians 15:14). The east wind that fills a belly with nothing is precisely the religion that has doctrine, tradition, and moral seriousness but no risen Lord at its center. Eliphaz's own system, for all its weight and antiquity, is the windy knowledge — because it has not yet been filled with the substance of the crucifixion and resurrection of Jesus Christ. What looks like empty protest in Job is, in typological terms, the cry of one who cannot be satisfied with a framework that has no living Savior in it.

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"Should he argue in unprofitable talk, or in words with which he can do no good?" (Job 15:3)


What is the point, Eliphaz asks, of words that accomplish nothing? It is a fair question from within a system where words are measured by their effect on the ledger — by whether they produce repentance, restored favor, measurable outcome.


Paul addresses this directly in 2 Corinthians, and again the direction is reversed. Our ministry does not save by argument, does not convert by force of persuasion. We are, Paul writes, like those in a triumphal procession, carrying censers filled with incense — "a sweet savour of Christ, in them that are saved, and in them that perish: to the one we are the savour of death unto death; and to the other the savour of life unto life" (2 Corinthians 2:15–16). The fragrance does its work not by being profitable in Eliphaz's transactional sense but by being true. To those marching toward destruction it announces destruction. To those marching toward life it announces life. Job's words seemed unprofitable to Eliphaz because Eliphaz had no category for a witness whose words accomplish their work invisibly, in the realm of the Spirit, beyond what any ledger can measure.

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"But thou castest off fear, and restrainest prayer before God" (Job 15:4)


Eliphaz's charge is that Job's argument is corrosive — that it undermines the fear of God which is the foundation of all right religion, and that it hinders prayer. Within his system, this is a serious accusation. The fear of God is the beginning of wisdom. To erode it is to erode everything.


But note what he identifies as the foundation: fear. This is the load-bearing pillar of Levitical religion, and it is not wrong as far as it goes — "the fear of the LORD is the beginning of wisdom" (Proverbs 9:10). The New Testament does not demolish this foundation. It builds far beyond it. The foundation of the New Testament is Jesus Christ, the rock of our salvation. We rest not on fear maintained by performance but on grace and mercy — on the truth that "God so loved the world, that he gave his only begotten Son" (John 3:16). And John, writing in his first epistle, makes the contrast explicit: "There is no fear in love; but perfect love casteth out fear: because fear hath torment. He that feareth is not made perfect in love" (1 John 4:18).


In his first speech, Eliphaz challenged Job's hope, resting as it did on the uprightness of his ways. Now he challenges Job for abandoning fear. What he cannot see is that the New Testament answers both charges with the same provision: the surpassing knowledge of the love of God, which becomes one of the three great pillars on which the believer stands. Hope is no longer in one's own integrity. And the governing disposition before God is no longer fear maintained by trembling — it is love received and returned.

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[ZNP]

Interceding on Behalf of Eliphaz — Part Two (b)​

"For thine iniquity teacheth thy mouth, and thou choosest the tongue of the crafty" (Job 15:5)


Eliphaz is now claiming to discern the spiritual source of Job's words. The mouth, he argues, is being taught by iniquity. The tongue Job is using is the tongue of the crafty. He believes he can read the spirit behind the speech.


But Eliphaz himself is walking in darkness. His own first speech acknowledged that he received his theology through a vision at night — a spirit passing before his face, a whisper, a form he could not discern (Job 4:13–16). The revelation he built his entire framework upon came from a source he admitted he could not identify. The epistle of 1 John gives us the test he lacked: "Hereby know we the spirit of truth, and the spirit of error" (1 John 4:6). Walking in the light is not a matter of doctrinal position or religious seriousness. It is a matter of fellowship with the Father and the Son, and it produces a discernment that darkness cannot manufacture. Eliphaz was attempting to discern spirits without the light that makes discernment possible.

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"Thine own mouth condemneth thee, and not I: yea, thine own lips testify against thee" (Job 15:6)


This is a true principle, and it appears in the New Testament with full force. James writes that out of the same mouth proceed blessing and cursing, and warns that this ought not to be (James 3:10). Jesus Himself declares: "out of the abundance of the heart the mouth speaketh" (Matthew 12:34). The mouth does testify. The words do reveal the heart.


But the application to Job is false — and the record is clear. Job has not cursed God. His own wife urged him to "curse God, and die" (Job 2:9), and he refused. Whatever anguish has poured from his mouth, it has not been the cursing that Eliphaz implies. The reason the mouth will ultimately speak blessing rather than cursing is not self-discipline but transformation — and transformation begins with revelation. We love God because He first loved us (1 John 4:19). Until Job sees that the love of God is not contingent on his performance — until that revelation breaks through — the blessing cannot fully come. The heart must first receive before the mouth can fully give.

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"Art thou the first man that was born? or wast thou made before the hills?" (Job 15:7)


Eliphaz is appealing to seniority — to the weight of accumulated experience and tradition. Wisdom, in his framework, belongs to age, to lineage, to those who have sat longest with the received understanding. Job is implicitly being told: you are not old enough, wise enough, or senior enough to challenge what the tradition has established.


The New Testament dismantles this appeal at its root. Paul asks the Corinthians: "Where is the wise? where is the scribe? where is the disputer of this world? hath not God made foolish the wisdom of this world?" (1 Corinthians 1:20). The very tradition Eliphaz is invoking — the accumulated wisdom of the ages — is precisely what God has chosen to bypass. He has hidden His wisdom not in the senior men who have sat longest with the received understanding, but in Christ, and in the revelation given to those who, by the world's measure, have no credentials at all. Eliphaz is doing what dead religion always does: using tradition as a weapon against revelation. But God has always worked the other way.

 

[ZNP]

Interceding on Behalf of Eliphaz — Part Two (c)​

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"Hast thou heard the secret of God? and dost thou restrain wisdom to thyself?" (Job 15:8)


Eliphaz asks this question to close a door. No one has heard the secret counsel of God. No one has access to divine deliberation. To claim otherwise is presumption.


But the New Testament opens exactly the door Eliphaz is trying to close — and it does so with the authority of the one who holds the key. John sees in his vision that the scroll sealed with seven seals, which no man in heaven or on earth or under the earth was able to open, is taken by the Lamb who was slain (Revelation 5:3–7). The title deed to creation, sealed and inaccessible to all, is opened by Christ upon His ascension to the throne. And Paul, writing to the Ephesians, announces that the administration of this mystery — "hid in God" through all prior ages — has now been made known, dispensed specifically through the apostolic revelation given to Paul himself (Ephesians 3:9–10). Yes — the New Testament claims exactly what Eliphaz says no one can claim: access to the secret counsel of God. Not by human wisdom, but by the Spirit of God who searches even the deep things of God (1 Corinthians 2:10).

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"What knowest thou, that we know not? what understandest thou, which is not in us?" (Job 15:9)


The tradition is complete, Eliphaz implies. There is nothing to know that the accumulated wisdom of the elders has not already accounted for.


What we know is the dispensation given specifically to the apostle Paul — the administration of grace, the mystery hidden from all prior ages, now disclosed. We know that the blood of Jesus has opened the way into the Holy of Holies, where no priest under the Levitical system could remain, and where timely help is now available to every believer: "Let us therefore come boldly unto the throne of grace, that we may obtain mercy, and find grace to help in time of need" (Hebrews 4:16). We are saved by grace, and even that faith by which we are saved is not of ourselves — "it is the gift of God" (Ephesians 2:8). What we understand that was not yet in Eliphaz is not the product of superior human reasoning. It is a gift given in a person, at a moment in history that had not yet arrived when Eliphaz was speaking.

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"Are the consolations of God small with thee? is there any secret thing with thee?" (Job 15:11)


Eliphaz cannot imagine any comfort greater than what the tradition already offers — submission, discipline received as correction, restoration in exchange for repentance. In his view, Job is rejecting a perfectly adequate consolation.


But the consolation the New Testament offers is of an entirely different order. God's comfort is to make us heirs — "joint-heirs with Christ" (Romans 8:17). His comfort is to give us access to "the exceeding greatness of his power", the same power "which he wrought in Christ, when he raised him from the dead" (Ephesians 1:19–20). And Paul tells the Corinthians that the comfort we receive in our own afflictions becomes the very substance of our ministry: "that we may be able to comfort them which are in any trouble, by the comfort wherewith we ourselves are comforted of God" (2 Corinthians 1:4). The consolations of God are not small. They are immeasurably beyond anything Eliphaz could conceive — and they are given precisely so that they may be passed on.

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"Why doth thine heart carry thee away? and what do thy eyes wink at?" (Job 15:12)


Eliphaz cannot account for Job's passion. What is driving this? Why won't he simply settle? The question reveals the limit of religion that has no living calling at its center.


The New Testament has a direct answer: we have been commissioned. "Ye shall be witnesses unto me" (Acts 1:8). The passion that Eliphaz cannot explain is the passion of one who has been apprehended for a purpose — whose eyes have been opened to something the religious system has not yet seen and cannot contain. The unsaved, the unconverted, the man still inside the old framework, cannot account for that kind of driving urgency. It looks like instability. It looks like arrogance. It is neither. It is calling.

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"That thou turnest thy spirit against God, and lettest such words go out of thy mouth?" (Job 15:13)


To Eliphaz, this is the ultimate charge: revolt against God Himself. But he has confused the institution with the Lord. The veil in the temple said everything Eliphaz is saying: you cannot enter, you cannot see, you cannot know, you cannot come near. And when Jesus was crucified, "the veil of the temple was rent in twain from the top to the bottom" (Matthew 27:51). From the top — God tore it. The tearing of the veil was an act of divine rebellion against the system that had substituted itself for the presence it was meant to guard. Jesus Himself declared: "I am the way, the truth, and the life: no man cometh unto the Father, but by me" (John 14:6). We are in open revolt against every veil that keeps the believer out of the Holy of Holies — not because we reject God, but because we follow the one who has pioneered a new and living way straight into His presence. Eliphaz would be entirely right — were it not for Jesus Christ.

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"What is man, that he should be clean? and he which is born of a woman, that he should be righteous?" (Job 15:14)


This is the question that closes the second speech, and it is the most searching of all. Eliphaz is not wrong. Born of a woman, formed of dust, conceived in the ordinary way of fallen humanity — what standing does such a creature have before a holy God?


The New Testament's answer is two words: born again. Jesus tells Nicodemus — himself a teacher of Israel, himself a man of the tradition — "Except a man be born again, he cannot see the kingdom of God" (John 3:3). The first birth produces exactly what Eliphaz describes: a creature born of a woman, unable to stand clean before the Creator. The second birth produces something entirely new — a child of God, born not of blood nor of the will of the flesh nor of the will of man, but of God (John 1:13). Eliphaz asked the right final question. It is the question that makes the new birth necessary. And the new birth is the answer that his entire second speech, question by question, was requiring without knowing it.

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Eliphaz's second speech is harsher than his first, but it is not less accurate. He is pressing deeper into the genuine problem: the impossibility of human righteousness, the limits of human wisdom, the inaccessibility of divine counsel, the inadequacy of any consolation the old system can offer. Every question he raises is a doorway. The New Testament walks through every one of them — not to condemn the questions, but to bring what the questions could not stop asking for.

 

[christophernyc]

You have provided no proof that brethren means people of like faith. Quite the contrary.

James, talking to his brethren, does not mean people of like faith, James means his fellow Jews. Brethren is referring to tribal affiliation.

Here is an example of brethren. Mat 4:18 And Jesus, walking by the sea of Galilee, saw two brethren, Simon called Peter, and Andrew his brother, casting a net into the sea: for they were fishers.
Mat 15:24 But he answered and said, I am not sent but unto the lost sheep of the house of Israel.

Jas 1:1 James, a servant of God and of the Lord Jesus Christ, to the twelve tribes which are scattered abroad, greeting.

There is different types of faith, and the brethren that James was talking to were not all of one faith.

Jas 2:1 My brethren, have not the faith of our Lord Jesus Christ, the Lord of glory, with respect of persons. For if there come unto your assembly a man with a gold ring, in goodly apparel, and there come in also a poor man in vile raiment; And ye have respect to him that weareth the gay clothing, and say unto him, Sit thou here in a good place; and say to the poor, Stand thou there, or sit here under my footstool: Are ye not then partial in yourselves, and are become judges of evil thoughts?

Jas 2:14 What doth it profit, my brethren, though a man say he hath faith, and have not works? can faith save him?

What was Job's faith in? Was it not in his own righteousness? Job 27:6 My righteousness I hold fast, and will not let it go: my heart shall not reproach me so long as I live.

Here is some of the brethren that James was talking to. Jas 5:1 Go to now, ye rich men, weep and howl for your miseries that shall come upon you. Your riches are corrupted, and your garments are motheaten.Your gold and silver is cankered; and the rust of them shall be a witness against you, and shall eat your flesh as it were fire. Ye have heaped treasure together for the last days. Behold, the hire of the labourers who have reaped down your fields, which is of you kept back by fraud, crieth: and the cries of them which have reaped are entered into the ears of the Lord of sabaoth. Ye have lived in pleasure on the earth, and been wanton; ye have nourished your hearts, as in a day of slaughter. Ye have condemned and killed the just; and he doth not resist you.

1. See post #718 https://christianchat.com/threads/the-book-of-job.221503/post-5754971 . Did you read it? James is writing to believers in Christ Jesus who have been scattered.

2. Also, James 2:1, which you also quoted, is plain as day:
My brethren, do not hold your faith in our glorious Lord Jesus Christ with an attitude of personal favoritism.

3. You never rebutted post #718 until I pointed it out to you. I think if you had a strong case to make, you would have made it sooner.

4. Regarding James referencing Job as an example to believers who are suffering, I never came across any coherent answer to support your position. You focused on James 5, which was rebuking the rich who are taking advantage of people, but there is no reference to Job there. None at all. Then, when Job is specifically mentioned **by name** in James 5:11, you are conspicuously silent and appear to avoid it all together. Strange.

 

[ZNP]

The Examination of the Lamb part 1.​

Bildad’s First Speech — Job 8

Bildad the Shuhite is the second examiner. Where Eliphaz appealed to experience and vision, Bildad appeals to tradition — the wisdom of the fathers, the ancient testimony of those who have gone before. His first speech in Job 8 is a compressed but devastating prosecution. Each question he poses functions as a test applied to the one who stands before him.

Yet there is something more at work in Bildad than mere cruelty or error. The High Priest Caiaphas, pronouncing judgment on Jesus, said: “It is expedient for us, that one man should die for the people, and that the whole nation perish not” (John 11:50). John is careful to note that Caiaphas did not say this of himself — he prophesied. Though his motives were corrupt and his accusations were unjust, he was nevertheless functioning as an instrument of God’s righteous demand: a spotless lamb must be offered for the sin of the nation. He was right about the need. He was catastrophically wrong about what that meant for the one he was condemning.

Bildad operates in the same paradox. His accusations against Job are unfair. His reading of Job’s suffering is wrong. But beneath the unfairness, he is pressing the very question that God’s holiness requires an answer to: is this man without blemish? Can he stand the examination? The three friends are, without knowing it, functioning as the inspectors of the sacrificial lamb — probing for any spot or defect that would disqualify the offering. Job endures this examination and is vindicated. And it is precisely because he passed the examination — because God declares at the end that Job spoke what was right — that Job is qualified to intercede for the very men who accused him (Job 42:7–9). He becomes the priest for his prosecutors.

Job understood this. His anguish was real and his protests were fierce, but he never broke under the accusation and he never abandoned God. He grasped, even in the darkness, that what was happening to him was according to the will of God — not as a punishment, but as a preparation. The examination had to be endured. The lamb had to be inspected. And the one who survives the inspection whole is the one through whom God’s mercy reaches even those who wielded the knife. Read through this lens, Bildad’s questions take on a weight he could never have anticipated. He was asking the right questions. He simply could not foresee what the answers would cost — or what they would accomplish.




Question 1

"How long wilt thou speak these things? and how long shall the words of thy mouth be like a strong wind?" — Job 8:2

THE EXAMINATION

Bildad opens not with a theological argument but with an attack on Job’s speech itself. The word translated “strong wind” carries the sense of a powerful, blustering, uncontrolled rush of air — impressive in force but empty of substance. Bildad is saying: your words are loud but they carry nothing. You are producing volume, not truth.

The deeper accusation is that Job’s complaints against God are not just wrong but inherently self-disqualifying. A man who speaks this way has already demonstrated something about his character. In the ancient Near Eastern wisdom tradition, the ability to control one’s tongue under pressure was a mark of a righteous man. Bildad is turning Job’s very grief against him — your outcry proves you are not what you claimed to be.

THE NEW TESTAMENT ANSWER

This is a valid test, and it separates the two kinds of ministry the New Testament describes. In 2 Timothy 3, Paul warns of those who have a form of godliness but have denied the power thereof. The form is recognizable, respectable, composed. It knows how to speak well in seasons of blessing. What it cannot do is continue to speak when everything has been taken — because the form was always drawing its strength from circumstances, reputation, and the approval of the system.

The power Paul has in mind is the indestructible life. This is the life Hebrews 7:16 ascribes to Christ’s priesthood — not a priesthood constituted by the law of a physical requirement, but by the power of an indestructible life. The ministry that flows from this life does not go silent when the cross is applied. It cannot. The indestructible life cannot be silenced by circumstance, stripped of its source by suffering, or disqualified by the removal of visible blessing.

Job’s words sound like wind to Bildad because Bildad’s ears are calibrated to the form. He has no instrument for detecting the indestructible life, because the indestructible life does not present its credentials in a way the form can verify. When everything is stripped away — health, wealth, reputation, the support of friends, the felt presence of God — what continues to speak? If it is the form, it goes silent or it recants. If it is the indestructible life, it keeps speaking. The genuine ministry is the one that takes up its cross and follows the Lord Jesus into death — and speaks from that place.




Question 2

"Doth God pervert judgment? or doth the Almighty pervert justice?" — Job 8:3

THE EXAMINATION

This is Bildad’s foundational premise stated as a rhetorical question expecting an obvious “no.” The logic is airtight within retribution theology: God is just. Justice means the righteous prosper and the wicked suffer. You are suffering. Therefore the math is settled — not because Bildad has investigated Job, but because the system cannot be wrong.

What makes this question so sharp is that it is not actually about Job. It is about the integrity of God’s governance of the universe. Bildad is saying: if you claim to be innocent, you are not just defending yourself — you are accusing God. The question forces Job into an impossible corner. Either God is unjust, or Job is guilty. God is the God of the universe. Nothing happens unless He allows it. He is allowing this suffering. Therefore you must accept that this is from Him and that it means what Bildad says it means.

THE NEW TESTAMENT ANSWER

The premise of the question is true as far as it goes. God does not pervert judgment. His governance of the universe is just. But Bildad’s error is in assuming that God’s allowance of suffering is His final verdict on the sufferer. He has no category for a suffering that is not a sentence.

The resurrection of Jesus Christ is God’s own answer to this question. God allowed His Son to be nailed to the cross. Man sentenced Jesus to death. Every mechanism of Bildad’s retributive logic pointed in one direction: this man is cursed, cut off, condemned. But the resurrection is God’s declaration that the cross was not His verdict on the Son — it was His provision for the world. Paul writes in Romans 1:4 that Jesus “was declared to be the Son of God in power according to the Spirit of holiness by his resurrection from the dead.”

The resurrection is God overturning the judgment of men. It introduces into history an event that Bildad’s framework cannot absorb: a man who suffers, dies, and is then vindicated by the one who supposedly condemned him. The suffering was real. The death was real. But it was not the end of the story — and Bildad’s system had no chapter for what came next.

 

[ZNP]

Question 3

"If thou wert pure and upright; surely now he would awake for thee?" — Job 8:6

THE EXAMINATION

This is a conditional question that functions as a diagnosis. Bildad is not asking whether Job is pure — he is telling Job what would be true if he were. The implication is painfully clear: since God has not awakened for you, the condition has not been met. You are not pure. You are not upright.

The word “awake” pictures God as alert, watching, ready to act on behalf of those who qualify. Bildad’s God is a transactional God. Present your credentials and He will perform. The silence of heaven in Job’s case is, for Bildad, the answer. The examiner has already rendered his verdict by withholding the response. God’s silence is your guilty verdict.

THE NEW TESTAMENT ANSWER

On the cross, the Lord Jesus cried out: “My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?” (Matthew 27:46). By every measure Bildad’s system could apply, this was the definitive answer to the conditional question. God had not awakened. Heaven was silent. The one on the cross was not pure. The verdict was clear.

But the answer is not what Bildad’s framework predicted. The silence of heaven at Calvary was not a verdict on the Son’s purity — it was the cost of His substitution. Paul states it plainly: “Him who knew no sin he made to be sin on our behalf” (2 Corinthians 5:21). We committed the sins. They had to be paid for. We could not pay. Jesus took our place. The silence of God toward His Son in that moment was the silence of justice being satisfied on behalf of the guilty — not a verdict against the innocent.

This is precisely what the Melchizedekian priesthood does. It does not operate within the transactional framework where purity produces blessing and impurity produces curse. The Melchizedekian priest enters into the curse on behalf of those who deserve it, bearing what they cannot bear, so that God can awaken for them on the basis of what the priest has absorbed. Bildad asked the question that the cross was designed to answer.




Question 4

"Can the rush grow up without mire? can the flag grow without water?" — Job 8:11

THE EXAMINATION

Bildad shifts to a nature parable. The papyrus reed and the marsh grass cannot survive without their native environment. Cut them off from the water and they wither faster than any other plant. Every living thing depends on its proper source. The godless man looks green and flourishing for a moment, but he has no root in God — and without that root, collapse is inevitable.

The question being put to Job beneath the surface is: what is your root? What is your source? The implication is that Job’s apparent collapse reveals he was never truly rooted where he claimed. A man genuinely connected to God would not be in this condition. The papyrus does not lie — if it is withering, the water was not there.

THE NEW TESTAMENT ANSWER

The question is answered by the resurrection — and the test it reveals is more precise than Bildad knew. The test for resurrection life is death. That is how you discern it. Any life that merely avoids death has not yet been proven to be the indestructible life. It is only when death is applied that the difference between natural vitality and resurrection power becomes visible.

This is the meaning of Aaron’s rod that budded (Numbers 17). The twelve rods of the tribal leaders were placed in the tabernacle overnight — dead sticks, cut off from any source of water or soil. By morning, Aaron’s rod had not merely survived. It had budded, blossomed, and produced almonds. The test the Levitical priesthood used to identify the true priest was not which rod looked most alive at the beginning. It was which rod produced life after being cut off from every natural source. Death was the examination. Resurrection was the credential.

Jesus Christ is the ultimate answer to Bildad’s question. He was cut off. He was placed in the tomb. Every natural source was removed. And on the third day He produced life — not the resumption of the old life, but resurrection life of an entirely new order. The one whose root is in Christ does not wither when outward circumstances fail, because his source is not in the mire of visible blessing. It is in the risen life of the one who passed through death and came out the other side.




Question 5

Implied question behind Job 8:13–15: “Is your righteousness real, or is it a spider’s web?”

THE EXAMINATION

Bildad does not frame this as a direct question but as a declaration — “the hypocrite’s hope shall perish” — that functions as an examination. He describes a man who leans on his house and it does not stand, who holds it fast but it cannot endure. The implied examination directed at Job is: is your righteousness real, or is it the kind that looks solid but collapses the moment weight is applied? The suffering has applied the weight. The house fell. Bildad lets Job draw the conclusion.

The spider’s web is Bildad’s chosen image: intricate, impressive, visible — but structurally incapable of bearing any real load. The hypocrite’s hope is not obviously false. It has the appearance of substance. It is only when something leans on it that its nature is exposed.

THE NEW TESTAMENT ANSWER

The Lord Jesus addresses this directly in Matthew 7. Two builders construct houses that look identical until the storm comes. One has built on sand, one has dug down to the rock. The storm does not create the difference — it reveals the difference that was always there. The examination of suffering is not a punishment. It is a disclosure. It shows what foundation was actually present beneath the visible structure of a person’s life and ministry.

Paul applies this same logic to his own resume in 2 Corinthians 11. When his apostolic authority is challenged, he does not appeal to his training, his pedigree, his theological credentials, or his institutional recognition. He lists his imprisonments, his beatings, his shipwrecks, his stonings, his sleepless nights, his hunger. He presents his suffering as his credential — because suffering is the examination that exposes whether a ministry is built on sand or on rock. A ministry constituted by the indestructible life produces what Paul’s did: it keeps building after every storm. The spider’s web does not survive the first serious pressure. The house on the rock stands precisely because the storm has tested it and it has not fallen.

Bildad intended this as a prosecution. The New Testament turns it into a manifesto for apostolic ministry.




Closing Observation

Bildad’s first speech is, in its way, more theologically compressed than Eliphaz’s. He is not a man of visions and personal experience. He is a man of principles — and each principle he applies to Job is a principle that the gospel will later validate, expand, and turn inside out. The indestructible life vindicates Job’s speech. The resurrection overturns man’s judgment. The substitutionary silence of God at Calvary explains the forsakenness. The budded rod identifies the true priest. The house on the rock survives the examination that exposes the spider’s web.

Bildad asked the right questions. He simply could not have known that the one standing before him — the one his questions were designed to convict — was a type of the only man who would ever fully answer them.

 

[ZNP]

The Examination of the Lamb​

Bildad’s Second Speech — Job 18

By the time Bildad speaks a second time, the examination has entered a new phase. The first speech pressed the question of the lamb’s purity — is this man without spot or defect? The second speech is something darker: the forty-day period that follows the act of judgment. A verdict has been rendered. Now the question is what that verdict means, and for whom.

The parallel to the events following the crucifixion is precise. From the day Israel’s leaders rendered their official judgment on Jesus Christ — declaring Him a deceiver who cast out demons by Beelzebub — to the destruction of Jerusalem in 70 AD was a period of exactly forty years. During those forty years, the disciples moved through Jerusalem proclaiming repentance. And the temple records confirm what the New Testament implies: from 30 AD onward, God did not accept the atoning sacrifice. The scarlet cord tied to the scapegoat on the Day of Atonement, which tradition records had turned white every year for centuries (a sign taken from Isaiah 1:18), ceased to change color after 30 AD and remained red until the temple’s destruction. Heaven had rendered its own counter-verdict.

Bildad’s second speech presses precisely the question that this forty-year period posed to Jerusalem: when judgment is issued, someone is going to be judged. Either the accused is guilty and the judge is vindicated, or the accused is innocent and the judge has condemned an innocent man. There is no neutral ground. The argument cannot simply continue indefinitely. The time for words is ending. The sign will come.


Question 6

"How long will it be ere ye make an end of words?" — Job 18:2

THE EXAMINATION

By the second speech, Bildad’s patience is gone. This question has shifted from theological argument to open contempt. The plural “ye” may suggest he is addressing Job and his supporters, or it may simply be the rhetorical plural of exasperation. Either way, the message is: we are finished listening. You have talked long enough and produced nothing. The implication is that continued protest is itself evidence of guilt — an innocent man would have accepted the correction by now. The words have become intolerable precisely because they will not stop, and they will not stop because they are not producing the expected result: capitulation.

THE NEW TESTAMENT ANSWER

There is a genuine basis to this question, and the New Testament illuminates it. The Jewish religious leaders were asked to discern whether Jesus Christ was the Messiah. Their official answer was no — they declared He was casting out demons by the prince of demons, Beelzebub. Jesus responded with the most solemn verdict of His ministry: they had committed the unforgivable sin. If you reject Jesus as your redeemer, there is no other provision for the forgiveness of sin. The mechanism of atonement itself has been refused.

But what followed was not continued debate. The leaders did not extend the argument. Instead they asked for a sign — a confirmation from God that would settle the question. Jesus told them they would receive the sign of Jonah: three days and three nights in the heart of the earth, and then emergence. His death and resurrection was that sign.

And yet the sign was not only the resurrection. For forty years after that point — beginning at the day of judgment in approximately 30 AD — Jesus and the disciples moved through Jerusalem declaring: repent, for in forty years this city will be destroyed without one stone left upon another. This was a window, not a threat. But the window had a closing time. The words had to end. And the temple records confirm that from 30 AD onward, God withdrew His acceptance of the atoning sacrifice. Heaven had already answered. The question “how long will ye make an end of words” was answered by God Himself: forty years, and then the sign becomes the sentence.


Question 7

"Wherefore are we counted as beasts, and reputed vile in your sight?" — Job 18:3

THE EXAMINATION

This is a remarkable turn — Bildad is now the aggrieved party. Job’s refusal to accept their counsel has become, in Bildad’s mind, an insult to them. He is saying: your continued protest treats us as if we have no intelligence, no standing, no wisdom worth receiving. This question reveals that Bildad’s investment in the argument is no longer purely theological. His honor is at stake. The examiner has become personally offended by the refusal of the examined to simply confess.

The logic beneath the offense is important. Bildad and his companions have staked their theological authority on the verdict they have rendered. If Job is innocent, they are not merely mistaken — they are exposed as men who condemned an innocent man. The protest of the innocent does not merely assert his own righteousness; it implicitly indicts his accusers. This is why the continued speaking feels, to Bildad, like contempt.

THE NEW TESTAMENT ANSWER

We see this exact dynamic in the book of Acts. After the resurrection, the apostles moved through Jerusalem proclaiming that the leaders had condemned an innocent man. The leaders’ response is revealing: “Did not we straitly command you that ye should not teach in this name? and, behold, ye have filled Jerusalem with your doctrine, and intend to bring this man’s blood upon us” (Acts 5:28). They are not primarily concerned with the truth of the resurrection claim. They are concerned with the verdict it carries against them. To vindicate Jesus is to indict the Sanhedrin.

This is the structural logic Bildad has stumbled into. His first speech focused on examining the lamb before it is sacrificed — is it without blemish? His second speech has moved into the forty-day period of reckoning that follows. When judgment is issued by man, someone is definitively going to be judged. Either the accused is guilty and the judge is vindicated, or the accused is innocent and the judge has condemned an innocent man. There is no position in between. Job’s continued protest is, in this sense, the apostolic proclamation in miniature: the one you condemned is righteous, and your condemnation of him has fallen back on you.


Question 8

"Shall the earth be forsaken for thee? and shall the rock be removed out of his place?" — Job 18:4

THE EXAMINATION

This is one of Bildad’s most pointed questions. Job has been arguing that the moral order seems to be working incorrectly — that the innocent suffer and the wicked prosper. Bildad responds with withering sarcasm: do you expect the foundations of the universe to be rearranged on your account? Do you think you are significant enough that the eternal laws of God should bend because you find them inconvenient?

The “rock” here is the bedrock of the created order, the fixed moral architecture of the universe. Bildad is saying that Job’s complaints amount to demanding that reality itself be restructured to vindicate him. The arrogance of the claim is, for Bildad, its own refutation. The rock does not move. The earth is not forsaken for one man.

THE NEW TESTAMENT ANSWER

And the answer, in the case of Jesus, is yes. The rock was removed out of its place. The earth was not forsaken for one man — it was shaken for one man, and the shaking was God’s own signature on the verdict.

Matthew records what happened at the moment of the crucifixion: “And, behold, the veil of the temple was rent in twain from the top to the bottom; and the earth did quake, and the rocks rent; and the graves were opened; and many bodies of the saints which slept arose” (Matthew 27:51–52). The rock was literally removed out of its place. The dead rose. The earth itself bore witness. And the response of the Roman soldiers who had carried out the execution was not theological argument — it was a confession: “Truly this was the Son of God” (Matthew 27:54).

Bildad intended his question as a reductio ad absurdum. The immovability of the rock was his evidence that Job’s claim was preposterous. But the cross revealed that the rock’s immovability is not the final word — the one who laid the rock has the authority to move it. And when He does, it is not evidence of disorder in the universe. It is the most ordered event in the history of creation: God vindicating His Son, overturning the verdict of men, and signing His counter-declaration in the language of earthquake and resurrection.

The moral architecture of the universe was not violated at Calvary. It was fulfilled — at a depth that no system built on retribution theology could reach. Bildad was right that the rock does not move for an ordinary man making an ordinary claim. He had simply not reckoned with the possibility that the man before him was not ordinary, and that the God who set the rock in place might have something to say about where it stood.


Closing Observation

Bildad’s second speech is a portrait of the forty-day reckoning. The examination of the lamb has been completed. The verdict has been rendered. Now the question presses from every direction: will the words end, will the judge be vindicated, will the rock hold? The three questions of Job 18 are the three questions Jerusalem faced between 30 and 70 AD, and they are the three questions every system of merely human judgment must eventually face when it has condemned an innocent man.

The words did not end — they filled Jerusalem. The rock did not hold — it moved at the moment of the cross and the graves opened. And the judge was not vindicated — the verdict was overturned by the one whose authority exceeds every earthly court. Bildad’s second speech, like the second phase of the passion narrative, ends not with the silencing of the accused but with the silencing of the accusers — not by argument, but by an act of God that no argument can answer.

 

[ZNP]

The Examination of the Lamb​

Bildad’s Third Speech — Job 25

Bildad’s third speech is six verses long — the shortest contribution any of the three friends makes to the entire book. He has run out of arguments. What remains after the examination of the lamb and the forty-day reckoning is the bare theological fact that stands behind everything he has said: God is infinite, man is not, and the gap between them is absolute. Bildad states this with the compression of a man who has nothing left to add. He is not wrong. He is simply standing at the edge of what his framework can see, staring into a darkness he cannot name, asking three questions that his tradition has no power to answer.

What Bildad cannot see from where he stands is that these three questions — about God’s armies, about the justification of fallen man, about the worth of a creature of dust — are not the end of the inquiry. They are the precise coordinates of the gospel. Each one marks a place where the Melchizedekian priesthood enters with an answer that the Levitical system could never supply.

The picture is of the Jewish religion being an empty eggshell after Jesus Christ has been born again and ascended to the heavens as Lord of all.




Question 9

"Is there any number of his armies? and upon whom doth his light not arise?" — Job 25:3

THE EXAMINATION

Bildad opens his final speech by painting God’s absolute dominion. The heavenly armies are beyond counting. The divine light reaches everywhere without exception. The question “upon whom doth his light not arise?” is not tender. It is terrifying. God’s omniscience means there is no corner of existence where a man can hide something. No unexamined place. No darkness deep enough. The examination is total and inescapable. Whatever Job thinks he can conceal from the inquiry, he cannot. The light finds everything.

THE NEW TESTAMENT ANSWER

Jesus addressed this directly in Gethsemane. When the soldiers came to arrest Him, Peter drew his sword. Jesus stopped him: “Thinkest thou that I cannot now pray to my Father, and he shall presently give me more than twelve legions of angels?” (Matthew 26:53). Bildad’s armies are real. They were available. The power that could have shattered the arrest, the trial, and the crucifixion was present and deployable. Jesus did not lack access to the armies of heaven.

But to call on those armies would have been to refuse the purpose of the sacrifice. The lamb does not call for its own deliverance. The examination must be completed. The light of God’s absolute holiness must fall on the offering without any power being deployed in self-protection, because the entire point is that the offering absorbs what falls on it rather than deflecting it. Jesus passed under the full light of God’s scrutiny — not despite the armies standing ready, but while they stood ready and were not called.

For Israel, the lesson of those armies was learned at terrible cost. The nation that rejected the one who refused to call the legions was scattered to the four corners of the earth and left to endure, without that protection, the Spanish Inquisition, the Russian pogroms, and the German Holocaust. The armies of heaven had not diminished. But the one through whom their protection flowed had been refused. Bildad’s question about the innumerable armies cuts in a direction he could not have foreseen: the armies are precisely why the sacrifice had to be voluntary, and the voluntary nature of the sacrifice is precisely what makes it sufficient.




Question 10

"How then can man be justified with God? or how can he be clean that is born of a woman?" — Job 25:4

THE EXAMINATION

This is the theological summit of Bildad’s entire contribution to the book — and arguably one of the most important questions asked by any of the three friends. Having established God’s absolute purity and omnipotence, Bildad arrives at his logical conclusion: the gap between God and any human being is infinite. Justification — being declared right before such a God — is simply not available to a creature born of woman.

The phrase “born of a woman” is the key. It is not merely a poetic way of saying “human.” It is pointing at the mechanism of human generation itself as the problem. To be born of woman in the ordinary way is to enter existence through a channel that carries the full weight of human frailty, mortality, and moral inadequacy. Bildad is saying the contamination is not accidental — it is constitutional. You cannot be clean because of how you entered the world. The womb itself is the disqualification.

THE NEW TESTAMENT ANSWER

Bildad’s question is answered by going all the way back to the beginning — to the first word spoken about the mechanism of redemption. In Genesis 3:15, God does not say the seed of the man will crush the head of the serpent. He says the seed of the woman will crush the head of the serpent. The very channel Bildad identifies as the disqualification is the channel God had already designated as the entry point for the deliverer. The womb is not the problem to be avoided. It is the door through which the answer arrives — but through a woman alone, without the contaminating seed of fallen man.

The virgin birth is the precise answer to the precise question. What enters the world through a woman without a human father enters through the channel of humanity but not through its fallen generative mechanism. The seed of the woman crushes the head of the serpent — and the serpent’s head is the claim that no one born of woman can be clean before God.

We are reminded of Abraham, who after his victory over the five kings was met and instructed by Melchizedek — the priest of the Most High God who brought out bread and wine and blessed him (Genesis 14). The victory over the five kings foreshadows the seed of the woman crushing the head of the serpent: a battle that should not have been winnable, won by the one who had been prepared by the Melchizedekian priest. Isaiah confirms the lineage when he writes “unto us a child is born, unto us a son is given: and the government shall be upon his shoulder” (Isaiah 9:6) — and then describes a reign and a peace that has no end, a government that increases forever. This is not the Levitical priest who serves his term and is replaced. This is the priest-king after the order of Melchizedek, born of a woman, who answers Bildad’s question by being the one thing Bildad’s system said could not exist: a man born of woman who is clean before God, who stands in the gap between infinite holiness and constitutional inadequacy, and who justifies the many by what He is rather than by what they have done.

 

[ZNP]

Question 11

"How much less man, that is a worm? and the son of man, which is a worm?" — Job 25:6

THE EXAMINATION

Bildad closes with a question that is almost a verdict. If even the moon gives no pure light, and the stars are not clean before God, what possible standing can a worm have? The word translated “worm” here is rimmah — specifically the worm of decay, the creature of the grave, the organism associated with corruption and death. Bildad is not calling Job small. He is calling him essentially dead matter — the stuff of dissolution, not of the courts of heaven.

This closing image is the examination’s final pressure point: not just are you guilty? but are you even the kind of thing that can stand before God at all? The question denies not just Job’s innocence but his very capacity to be a party in the proceeding. A worm does not appear in court. A worm does not have standing. A worm is what is left when everything that mattered has already departed.

THE NEW TESTAMENT ANSWER

The psalmist asks the same question from a different angle: “What is man, that thou art mindful of him? and the son of man, that thou visitest him?” (Psalm 8:4). Bildad asks it as a dismissal. The psalmist asks it as a wonder. The New Testament answers both with the same truth, and the answer comes at three levels.

First, man is a vessel. He is designed to contain the Lord Jesus as treasure — the pattern Paul describes in 2 Corinthians 4:7: “But we have this treasure in earthen vessels, that the excellency of the power may be of God, and not of us.” The vessel is clay. The treasure is glory. The point of the clay is not that it is glorious in itself but that it is the chosen container for the one who is. Man is equally a vessel into whom the Holy Spirit can be poured — the very Spirit of the living God taking up permanent residence in the creature Bildad has correctly identified as dust.

Second, man is family. Jesus Christ is the firstborn Son of God who is leading many sons into glory (Hebrews 2:10). The worm does not remain a worm. Bildad’s rimmah — the worm of decay — is exactly the category Paul has in mind when he writes that the perishable must put on the imperishable, and the mortal must put on immortality (1 Corinthians 15:53). The creature of the grave is the raw material from which resurrection produces the new man, conformed to the image of the firstborn Son.

Third, man is a masterpiece. After two thousand years, the answer to Bildad’s question has been written across the entire earth. The gospel has gone to every nation. The church — composed of those whom Bildad would have dismissed as worms, creatures of dust and dissolution — has been tested, refined, scattered, persecuted, and proven. Paul calls this company God’s poiema: His masterpiece, His workmanship, created in Christ Jesus for good works (Ephesians 2:10). The worm that Bildad held up as the final evidence of man’s disqualification has become, in the hands of the Melchizedekian priest, the material from which God is fashioning the eternal trophy of His Son’s redemptive work. These are the many sons being led into glory — the answer to Bildad’s question written not in argument but in redeemed human lives that will glorify Jesus Christ, the Savior of all mankind, forever.




Closing Observation

Bildad’s third speech is six verses of compressed theological despair. He has examined the lamb, pressed the reckoning, and now stands at the edge of the abyss stating what his system can only state as an impossibility: no man born of woman can be clean before God, and man himself is nothing but a worm. He means these as closing arguments. He does not know they are opening statements.

Every question in this final speech is answered not by overturning what Bildad has observed, but by taking it with complete seriousness and going further than his framework allowed. The armies are real — and the sacrifice was voluntary precisely because the one making it had access to them and chose not to deploy them. The gap between God and fallen man is real — and it is crossed not by upgrading the man but by the seed of the woman entering through the very channel Bildad named as the disqualification. The worm is real — and it is the raw material God has chosen for His masterpiece, the poiema that will declare the glory of the firstborn Son for eternity.

Bildad asked the questions that defined the problem. The Melchizedekian priesthood of Jesus Christ is the answer that redefined what was possible.

 

[christophernyc]

Thank you for your insight, I have corrected my previous understanding. I now think that Elihu can be seen very clearly in the church in Ephesus, they were good at examining if someone was an apostle, but they left their first love. You can see it in Sardis, they have a name they are alive but they are dead, and they are seen in Laodicea, they say they are rich and have need of nothing. But the fact God says nothing about Elihu and the fact that Job doesn't intercede for him indicates his lampstand has been removed. So Elihu is a study in the apostasy. In fact the Epistle of James seems to really dismantle Elihu. I have credited you in this latest addition. If you have any more suggestions on how to edit it let me know.

Dead_Religion_in_Jobs_Four_Friends.pdf

drive.google.com

Wow. Read the essay last night. There are a lot of important and interesting things you drew out there. I think there is a lot more to unearth with Elihu, and for me, at least, he was the one who helped me really unlock understanding the book of Job as a whole.

Nice work!!!

 

[tttallison]

Wow. Read the essay last night. There are a lot of important and interesting things you drew out there. I think there is a lot more to unearth with Elihu, and for me, at least, he was the one who helped me really unlock understanding the book of Job as a whole.

Nice work!!!

It is interesting how you fellows pick the side of Satan over God. The same thing happened in Daniel.

Here in Job you have two Melchizedekian priests striving with one another. How crazy is that?

 

[christophernyc]

It is interesting how you fellows pick the side of Satan over God. The same thing happened in Daniel.

Here in Job you have two Melchizedekian priests striving with one another. How crazy is that?

Do you have any substantive response to James 5:11 and the specific mention of Job and why? Happy to hear if you do.

God bless you.

 

[ZNP]

Do you have any substantive response to James 5:11 and the specific mention of Job and why? Happy to hear if you do.

God bless you.

I have been working on this document, I would appreciate any criticism or suggestions you might make.

The_path_from_the_ash_heap_to_the_throne.pdf

drive.google.com

 

[tttallison]

Do you have any substantive response to James 5:11 and the specific mention of Job and why? Happy to hear if you do.

God bless you.

Yes I do. I agree with James that it was good for Job to hang in there.

You do realize that Melchizedek is God.

 

[LTL]

Yes I do. I agree with James that it was good for Job to hang in there.

You do realize that Melchizedek is God.

No, Melchizedek is Shem, the son of Noah. He settled in Salem due to the water at that location. Salem later became Jerusalem. I do not remember how I learned this information. Evidently, Shem was living the life-span that applied to the people before the flood. The priesthood was named after Shem (Melchizedek) because he had such a kind and loving nature.

 

[LTL]

No, Melchizedek is Shem, the son of Noah. He settled in Salem due to the water at that location. Salem later became Jerusalem. I do not remember how I learned this information. Evidently, Shem was living the life-span that applied to the people before the flood. The priesthood was named after Shem (Melchizedek) because he had such a kind and loving nature.

Another thought that seems to apply is that Shem was the bridge between the pre-flood and post-flood periods. He would have received the priesthood of God before the flood and taught Abraham after the flood. And so his name was given to the priesthood in honor of the role he played in bringing the priesthood to light in the life of Abraham and others. That seems reasonable. Also, this priesthood went to Moses through his father-in-law Jethro. So it was common knowledge in that region for a long period of time. It is the priesthood of God, given the name of Melchizedek, in honorable recognition to Shem, the son of Noah. Something like that.