Job 25 · a question people ask
Job asked the same question. Did he agree with Bildad?
Job asked it first: "Truly I know that it is so, but how can man be just with God?" (9:2). Job went straight on to a hearing with God: "If he is pleased to contend with him, he can’t answer him one time in a thousand" (9:3), and "For he is not a man, as I am, that I should answer him, that we should come together in judgment" (9:32). He also said, "Though I am righteous, my own mouth will condemn me" (9:20), and later, "See now, I have set my cause in order. I know that I am righteous" (13:18); in Hebrew righteous in both is the verb of 25:4's be just (tap just). In his last answer before this chapter he said, "Oh that I knew where I might find him! That I might come even to his seat!" (23:3), and "There the upright might reason with him, so I should be delivered forever from my judge" (23:7). Bildad asks the question and goes on to the moon, the stars and the worm (25:5-6). The two ask it with the same words, and the chapters around them show where each goes next. These notes don't say more than that about what either man meant.
The verses
““Truly I know that it is so, but how can man be just with God? If he is pleased to contend with him, he can’t answer him one time in a thousand.”
“Though I am righteous, my own mouth will condemn me. Though I am blameless, it will prove me perverse.”
“For he is not a man, as I am, that I should answer him, that we should come together in judgment.”
“See now, I have set my cause in order. I know that I am righteous.”