When I Am Desperate

Job’s response to Bildad is pure scorn. 26:1-4 are to be read as sarcasm: “What advice you have offered to one without wisdom! And what great insight you have displayed!

Bildad is silenced and we don’t hear from him or his friends again.

It is tempting to read the verses that follow through 21st-century Western eyes, especially 26:7, which seems to indicate that Job understood the earth, as we do, as suspended in space. But we should be cautious since it isn’t altogether clear from the text what Job meant, and he seems in the rest of the chapter to be thinking within the worldview of the Ancient Near East. At that time, people were more concerned with the function of things in the universe than with their materiality and physical nature. (If you want to know more about this, see John H. Walton, Job, (NIV Application Commentary) on this chapter.) Some translations refer to “Rahab” in v 12—this isn’t the woman who sheltered the spies in the Book of Joshua, but a sea monster. And all this reflection on the power of God at work in the natural world is “merely a whisper of God’s power at work.”

We can reason only so much about God from the world he created. Human wisdom can take us only so far and can make terrible errors. Job knew there was something more, and we will see it when God reveals himself at the end of the book. We know so much more than Job ever did - not because of the discoveries of science but because Jesus came to show us what God is like.

But at this point, Job is at the end of his rope. He will speculate on wisdom in chapter 28, and have to listen to Elihu for seven chapters, starting at chapter 32, before he hears from God.

Respond in Prayer

Father God, thank you for Job’s complete intellectual integrity. Help me to have this kind of honesty as I wrestle with things I don’t understand. Don’t let me be put off by people who have glib answers. I trust you to be all loving and ultimately fair, even when I can’t see that at present.

Annabel Robinson

Unless otherwise indicated, all Scripture quotations are taken from the Holy Bible, New International Version® (NIV®).