Lenten Study Job Ch 25
I think the Lord is telling me I have a lot to do today. Chapter twenty-five has only six verses. It is a simple one today. I suspect that will not be the case at some point. However, it is the case today. Bildad’s simple point is that God is God and Man is not God. There’s a lot in that, but we’ll only deal with a small part of it.
"There was a man in the land of Uz" by andrevanb is marked with CC BY-NC-SA 2.0.Caption
1 Then Bildad the Shuhite answered,
2 “Dominion and awe belong to Him Who establishes peace in His heights.
Job 25:1-2 (NASB)
This is a good summary of “fear of the Lord.” Dominion; God is Sovereign over all of creation. All of it. He rules it all. What does that mean? It means He made it all and can do whatever He wants with it. All of it. If He wants to destroy some of it (or all of it), He is allowed to do that and has the ability to do it too. Some people may disagree with the order of things, but no one can argue with God. Things are set up and operating under the exact rules God wanted for His reasons. He is content with creation running as it is because He said it was good.
31 God saw all that He had made, and behold, it was very good. And there was evening and there was morning, the sixth day.
Genesis 1:31 (NASB)
As humans with free will, we make decisions God doesn’t like, but that doesn’t change the fact that God set up the rules, and they are operating as He intended. We cannot change His rules no matter what we do. There are consequences for our choices and actions. Some of those are written in stone, and others are more malleable. Where God can intervene, He does for those who love Him. Where His rules do not allow Him to change things, He walks beside those who love Him through the difficulties. Make no mistake, it is God’s world, but they are our choices, our consequences.
4 “How then can a man be just with God? Or how can he be clean who is born of woman?
5 “If even the moon has no brightness And the stars are not pure in His sight,
6 How much less man, that maggot, And the son of man, that worm!”
Job 25:4-6 (NASB)
Bildad knew about Messiah, but he didn’t know about Jesus. We, on the other side of Job’s experiences in the book named after him, do know about Jesus. We know the answer to Bildad’s rhetorical question.
14 “As Moses lifted up the serpent in the wilderness, even so must the Son of Man be lifted up;
15 so that whoever believes will in Him have eternal life.
16 “For God so loved the world, that He gave His only begotten Son, that whoever believes in Him shall not perish, but have eternal life.
17 “For God did not send the Son into the world to judge the world, but that the world might be saved through Him.
18 “He who believes in Him is not judged; he who does not believe has been judged already, because he has not believed in the name of the only begotten Son of God.
19 “This is the judgment, that the Light has come into the world, and men loved the darkness rather than the Light, for their deeds were evil.
John 3:14-19 (NASB)