Job 7-8

Job 7
Job makes a a claim that lines right up with is understanding of life as it is: vane. He says, "Are not man's days as a hired man who eagerly waits for his wages?" (v2). He is given days of vanity and nights of trouble (v3). In verse 5, Job gives some gruesome details about his sickness and says, in verse 7, that he is doomed to die without hope.

Job begins considering his life and death in the next section. He is in a place such as the writer of Ecclesiastes describes, "better to go to a house of mourning than to go to a house of feasting, because that is the end of every man, and the living take it to heart" (Ecc 7:2). He is mourning! He is speaking his real emotions; he's not hiding from anyone, especially God. He's real with his friends, chastising them for considering Job's bed and couch a comfort (v13). Job knows that these material things will not truly comfort his soul. He would choose death, his only comfort for that period of his life. (Aside: so why doesn't Job kill himself like so many choose as an out? He knows that life is vain; he knows that life is futile and very painful for him specifically at the moment, but he knows that life is God's to give and to take, not his.)

"What have I done to you oh watcher of men?" Job is seriously opening up one on one with God. "Why do you not pardon my transgression?" Job knows God pardons transgressions.

Job 8
"If you would seek God..." Oh how we do not seek God today!

Bildad tries to get Job to seek out past generations and their counsel (v8). "Will they not teach you and tell you, and bring forth words from their minds?"

Bildad then encourages Job to endure, comparing him to a plant that grows the quickest, cannot deny the soil from which it came, yet withers the quickest of any plant. He says not to forget the Lord in your time of despair! (v11-13). He says some really good things for us to remember about our trust in God:

"Don't let your confidence in God be fragile like a spider web!"

"Don't trust in your house for it will not stand!"

"Don't spread your roots over rocky soil and be pulled so easily!" *

Bildad also says that God will not reject a man of integrity (which could also be translated as blameless or complete), but it seems to me that the Lord has not so far in the story come to the defense of such a man, which is the picture we get of Job in the first chapter. Bildad says in the last two verses that God will come to your defense yet and that he has not forgotten his servant Job.

* This quote reminds me of the parable of the seeds that Christ uses to explain how the word of God is spread among people. The seed sown on the rocky soil has a big problem in that that type of person never truly believes God's word because they fall away under persecution. (read Luke 8)