Job 25 Bible study: How can man be just with God?

Every word of this chapter after its first verse is Bildad's: "Then Bildad the Shuhite answered" (25:1). It is his third speech, after chapters 8 and 18 (8:1, 18:1), and it comes after Job's answer in chapters 23 and 24 (23:1). It is six verses long. His first two speeches opened with How long: "How long will you speak these things?" (8:2), and "How long will you hunt for words?" (18:2). This one opens with God: "Dominion and fear are with him. He makes peace in his high places" (25:2) (tap Dominion, fear, high places). In the WEB the whole speech never says you. It asks about God's armies and his light (25:3), asks how man can be just with God (25:4), and ends with the moon, the stars and man (25:5-6). Keep in mind whose words these are. At the end of the book the LORD says to Eliphaz, "My wrath is kindled against you, and against your two friends; for you have not spoken of me the thing that is right, as my servant Job has" (42:7), and Bildad is named among those who then "did what the LORD commanded them" (42:9). The book doesn't say which of Bildad's words the LORD has in view, so these notes never treat Bildad's words as the book's own teaching. They don't throw out every word of them either.

Job 25:4→leads toJohn 5:24

Bildad asks, "How then can man be just with God? Or how can he who is born of a woman be clean?" (25:4). These are Bildad's words (25:1), and Job had asked the first half before him: "how can man be just with God?" (9:2), going on, "If he is pleased to contend with him, he can’t answer him one time in a thousand" (9:3). Jesus said, "Most certainly I tell you, he who hears my word and believes him who sent me has eternal life, and doesn’t come into judgment, but has passed out of death into life" (John 5:24). John doesn't name Job or Bildad, so setting the two side by side is a reading, resting on a shared subject: how anyone can stand in the right before God. Some read the two together: the question asked in Job is one Jesus speaks to, of whoever hears his word and believes the one who sent him. Others read each in its own setting: in Job the question belongs to the argument between Job and his friends, and the book doesn't answer it in these words; Jesus was speaking of the Son and the Father (John 5:19-23), and said nothing of Job. Neither reading makes Bildad's words a verdict on Job, or makes Jesus' words an answer to Bildad.

צָדַקtsadaqsay tsa-DAK

Brown-Driver-Briggs: "be just, righteous", and in the simple form "have a just cause, be in the right". "How then can man be just with God?" (25:4). Job had asked the question in the same five Hebrew words: "how can man be just with God?" (9:2), and the voice Eliphaz told of had asked with this verb, "Shall mortal man be more just than God?" (4:17). Job used it of himself too: "I know that I am righteous" (13:18). When the LORD answers Job, he uses it: "Will you condemn me, that you may be justified?" (40:8).