NOTES for Job 25:1-6

Bildad's words to Job reveal the spiritual state of Job's friends as clearly as could be. In essence, they no longer care what they say, as long as they do not leave Job's speeches unanswered. For leaving them unanswered is frightening. For Job's friends, answering him is a matter not only of religious but also, to use modern terms, of existential self-preservation. It is this self-preservation that occupies them; they no longer care about Job. Of course, in such a situation each acts in his own way, according to his abilities. But if there is nothing of substance to say, one can repeat over and over what has already been said more than once.

Words are now needed neither for seeking the truth nor even for communication, but to keep a certain verbal process going, a certain momentum one had better not step out of. For to step out of it would mean coming face to face with the reality Job has already encountered. And Bildad, like Job's other two friends, repeats familiar religious truths again and again, truths that were once a revelation but have now become commonplaces of popular religious literature. Hiding from reality behind generalities and banalities is quite ordinary, and in this respect religious people are no different from nonreligious people.

Job has nowhere left to hide, but his friends simply refuse to understand this. They continue offering him the religious banalities with which they themselves so successfully shield themselves from the reality that has been revealed to Job. But they have overlooked one thing: that reality has come much closer to Job than to them. Or he has come much closer to it than his friends have.

You can shield yourself from the sun with a parasol, as long as you are on earth. But close to the sun, a parasol will no longer help. Job has come too close to the evil in which the fallen world lies, and at the same time to the providence that governs that world. Here, the generalities of religious books cannot shield anyone from reality. Job has already realized this, though he does not yet fully understand where he has found himself. His friends, however, understand nothing and do not want to understand: they feel more at ease that way, and they do not want their peace disturbed.

As if answering Job's doubts, Bildad again reminds him that the ways of God are inscrutable, and that no one is pure before Him (vv. 1-6). Such an answer, as one can easily guess, only added fuel to the fire of the doubts and torments that troubled Job. He wanted answers, wanted the certainty he had had before and had now lost; Bildad's answer only increased the uncertainty. Of course, for a religious person such uncertainty often even has its appeal. This is not surprising: religious consciousness is always to a certain degree abstract. The God of religion is usually not the living God, but a scheme, an abstraction, a speculation. Religiosity was born not from the experience of revelation, but from speculation; at its foundation lies not so much communion with God as theology.

Of course, the experience of revelation was often clothed in religious forms, but it nevertheless always remained in a certain sense alien to religion. For a person seeking a meeting with the living God, God's incomprehensibility is the main problem: until God Himself throws a bridge across the abyss that separates Him from human beings, no communion with God will be possible. For a religious person, however, such incomprehensibility does not constitute a problem at all. On the contrary, it even leaves a certain space for reflections about God, for suppositions, guesses, and theological concepts. Religion, of course, also presupposes relations with God, but at a safe distance, from which it is almost impossible to discern God. That is why religiosity presupposes a certain speculative and conventional image of God: religion rarely brings a person into direct communion with God.

And for this reason the religious person is inwardly ready to accept that he will know less about God than he could. In exchange for refusing to draw near to God, religion gives him certain guarantees of safety on condition that he observe certain norms and rules that will allow him to maintain relations with God at a safe distance. But in that case, of course, the religious person can no longer claim to know the ways of God. And Bildad, repeating the well-known words about the inscrutability of God's ways, is in essence offering Job the chance to give up seeking God and limit himself to what religion can give him.

It cannot be said that Bildad is mistaken; there is much truth in his words, for God's might truly surpasses everything in the world, and nothing can compare with Him. But Bildad's truth is partial: it reflects only a fragment of what human beings are able to understand about the Creator. Unfortunately, people tend to mistake a partial truth for the fullness of truth and then build upon it something that appears plausible but is false.

Yes, the Creator's greatness surpasses everything He has made, and beside Him all things appear imperfect. But God did not create the world so that, once distorted by evil and sin, it would remain that way. Dominion and awe belong to Him; that is true, but so do love and salvation. A human being is neither a worm nor a moth, if only because God has placed humanity at the head of creation and intends us to become His redeemed fellow workers.