The Bible Provocateur
The Bible Provocateur
LIVE DISCUSSION: (Job 8:11-22) - Upholding the Perfect Man (Part 4 of 4)
Courage shows its face when comfort leaves the room. We walk through Job 8 with honest eyes, testing Bildad’s confident sayings against what God already declared about Job and asking how often we make the same mistake—using true phrases in false ways. Along the way, we zoom out to the bigger story: Moses at the Red Sea, Abraham on the mountain, and the blazing center of it all—Jesus, who embraced poverty, rejection, and a sham conviction so the guilty could go free. If pain proves guilt, what would Bildad say to Christ? That question reframes the entire conversation.
We dig into why “blameless” doesn’t mean sinless perfection but a reconciled standing. Perfection lives in Christ alone, and that changes how we read suffering. The easy promise—repent and prosper—collapses under the weight of the cross. Restoration is real, but the inheritance is greater than comfort: a robe of righteousness that cannot be taken. We trace Barabbas’ release and the true Son’s condemnation to expose the deep exchange at the heart of the gospel. Then we bring it home: how systems—religious and political—nudge believers to hush the name of Jesus, and why faith must speak anyway, with courage and compassion.
If you’ve been bruised by verses used as a club, if you’ve wondered why the upright still ache, or if you’re wrestling with pressure to stay quiet about Christ, this conversation offers clarity and ballast. We call each other to read Scripture carefully, apply it gently, and stand firm when it isn’t expedient. Subscribe, share with a friend who needs steady hope, and leave a review to help others find the show. What part challenged you most?
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At any time, you will be rewarded for it. You'll be rewarded for your faithfulness. Don't give up, don't be afraid. Don't let them tell you you can't say something when it comes to the Lord Jesus Christ. Because it is then and only then where you are really going to see the glory of God work in your life. Moses led the people of Israel to the Red Sea. And even he, I'm certain, was confused as to why God took him to that place when there was nowhere else to go when Pharaoh's army was chasing them. But they went there nonetheless, and Moses led them there. And he led them there because he trusted in the Lord, just like Abraham taking Isaac up to that mountain to make a sacrifice, even though there was no animal going that they took with them. Not when it is simply convenient, because when it is inconvenient to trust him, when it is inconvenient for us to trust him because of our flesh, that's when he steps in and you see things you've never seen before. That's when you see the greatness of God working in your life. Not when you are on your couch, not when you're comfortable, not when you're not being afflicted, not when you are not being persecuted, not when you're not going through trials and tribulations or temptations. It is when it is hard to be a Christian in the circumstances that prevail or surround you. It is when you serve him and stand up for him, even when it is not expedient to do so. That's when you'll see what he will do on your behalf. I'm just telling you. Anyone who says that, anyone and everyone who denies that Jesus Christ is everything that he says he was and that he is, they are antichrist. Antichrist is already here and has been here all along, all along, has always been here. That man that all you people are looking for is never going to come. It's the beast that comes out of the sea. It's the system of this world. The sea is the world. The beast comes out of the sea. The beast is the antichrist. He comes out of the world. And he comes out of, and because he's the antichrist, what he what he does is he comes out of what is perceived as being Christian, hence Antichrist. I can't wait to do a series on this again. But if you're looking for something that is never coming, then when it comes, or if it's already here, you won't even recognize it. Meg brought up those 1,000 pastors that went to Israel so that they can become ambassadors for Israel, for a people that hate everything about the Lord Jesus Christ. I know I'm bringing this up again, but it has to be understood. I want to make sure that you are ready for what is coming. Because they are going to try to get us to stop talking about the Lord Jesus Christ. And when it becomes something that they can do conveniently and they can do it strategically and in a smart way, where it doesn't look like they're upsetting our rights or whatnot, they're going to find a way to keep us from talking about Christ. And what are you going to do? What are you going to do? Verse 20. Neither will he help the evildoers. Christians, listen. Listen, he will not cast away a perfect man. He's telling this to Job. He's telling this to Job. Bildad is telling Job, God will not cast away a perfect man, Job. Neither will he help the evildoers. Mariah, let me ask you a question. What's the problem with this verse? What is Bildad's problem in this saying? What is his? He's in a little bit of a pickle that he doesn't know. Why?
SPEAKER_00:Because it's God's sovereignty. He has not um, in fact, cast away the righteous, and he's not afflicting him because he's a sinner or evildoer.
SPEAKER_07:Right, sister Lisa, and then Candy. Lisa, what do you think?
SPEAKER_02:Well, Bildad is all messed up because God himself called Job perfect.
SPEAKER_06:Here we go.
SPEAKER_02:So, yeah. So poor Bildad is deceived.
SPEAKER_07:He's the deceived one, not Job.
SPEAKER_02:That's right.
SPEAKER_07:He's the deceived one. Now he think about it. He is telling Job that your problem is that you are not perfect. You're not a perfect man. If you were, God wouldn't cast you away. But we know what God already said about Job. And the first word was that he was perfect. We're not talking about sinless perfection. That's not what we're talking about. But that he was complete in terms of where the sinner can stand before God in peace, reconciled. Job was perfect, complete in Christ. And Bildad doesn't even realize that he is confirming what the Lord had already said. And and it's just amazing to see this.
SPEAKER_03:Oh Lord.
SPEAKER_06:Sorry about that. I meant to do that.
SPEAKER_04:That was okay. Yeah, there's all kinds of things that I've had. I know back earlier I was thinking about the stony and the the hands getting choked up. And that's that's exactly what I see in the past past scriptures. And right now, what you're talking about, yeah, he was perfect. And that's that's that's the thing. His friend was blind. They don't even know him. But anyway, yeah.
SPEAKER_07:Yep. Sorry. Brother Jeff and then Meg. No, no problems, Candy. That was good. Jeff and then then Meg.
SPEAKER_05:In that verse, it says that uh surely God does not reject one who is blameless or strengthen the hands of the evildoers. Okay. Job is the one, as we pointed out, who is blameless. But Jonathan, let's look at the other side of that coin. Bildad's hands are without strength, because he is convicting and condemning an innocent man. What's the last word of that verse? Evil doer. And that is exactly what Bildad is doing right now.
SPEAKER_06:Yep, absolutely. Sister May, go ahead.
SPEAKER_01:Okay, so since the law since the Lord deemed Job perfect, again, here we see good old Bildad prophesying again. And something John. No, that's you. I I got a new one for you, but um so prophesying again something that he didn't know, that we know and we see. But what does Jesus say in terms when he was speaking to the Pharisees? He says, If your righteousness does not exceed that of the Pharisees, right, then you are no way in fit for my kingdom. He then goes further to say, Be ye perfect, as your father in heaven is in perp is perfect. But what he was really saying is, the only way that you can be perfected is in me. That is it. And so Job being perfect and upright by God through this entire time, he was in God. Right, right. You know what I mean? Like so many people say, you know, you hear all these Christians talking about, oh, you gotta be perfect, you gotta do this. No, the perfection is in the Lord Jesus Christ who did everything perfectly, right?
SPEAKER_06:Absolutely.
SPEAKER_01:Oh, he could perfectly reconcile man back to the Father. Right.
SPEAKER_07:You know, you know, um, you know, Joe uh Bill Dad, he keeps putting his foot in his mouth, acknowledging and crediting Job in ways that he doesn't realize that he's doing, and Job doesn't realize that it's being done in a way where it's reaffirming the things that God already said about Job. Job doesn't know anything until later on, but he he will. And it's gonna be interesting because when God does step in, when God finally breaks in, I think it's in chapter 38, when he does break in, he don't need, he cuts through all the noise, and he goes right back to his, he goes right back, he goes right to Job. He goes to his servant, he goes directly to Job. So, so think of it like this. Think of it like, it reminds me of like, you know, you know how you see one of these these old movies, you know, where um some guy or a girl, let's say it's a girl, so it's you know, there's a bunch of guys that like this girl, and they're all and they're all in this one area, and the girl comes in and she runs in in slow motion, you know, and they're all got their arms, and she's coming to them, and then she goes, she goes right past them and goes to the most unlikely person. That's the that's the image I have of God breaking in on these guys. It's almost like they, you know, when God comes in, you know, they go direct, they go, he goes immediately and directly to Job. Not Bildad, not Zophar, not Elihu, not Eliphaz. He goes to Job. God is interested in his people, his bride. He went right to Job, the one who needed to be comforted. And it's an amazing picture. You know, but this whole thing with Job is that we see we see this this this whole well, let me I'll say this at the end, after my last the last verses. Um, because we're good, we're actually going to finish the chapter here. So verse 21 and 22, Bildas says, till he fills your mouth with laughing and your lips with rejoicing, they that hate you shall be clothed with shame, and the dwelling place of the wicked shall come to nothing. So he kind of he kind of gives him this sort of backhanded, this sort of backhanded, you know, uh slight. And he tells Job that if you will align yourself with the with righteousness, if you will, if you will um submit to righteousness, then God will once again fill your mouth with laughter and turn away the reproach of all your enemies and restore the favor that you had with other people. And he says that all you have to do is repent. Notice this all you have to do is repent and be faithful, have a trust that is rightly placed, and then he says, You will get all the stuff again. Now he's becoming this health and wealth prosperity teacher. If you just if you're just faithful, if you just repent, then God will fill your mouth with laughing, fill your lips with rejoicing, those that hate you will be clothed with shame, and the dwelling place of the wicked shall come to nothing. Your life is going to be flourishing, everything is to be everything is gonna be all great and good. He sees Job's sorrow as this unmistakable token of guilt, and he believes that relief depends solely on Job being broken, and like David said in Psalm 51, having a contrite heart. Even if you're going through problems, serious problems, and even if you have something to repent for and you do repent and you are restored, that doesn't mean that you're gonna be prosperous in the way the world looks at prosperity. And that's what Bildad keeps telling Job. If you just repent, you can get all the stuff back, you can have the increase. You know, and in essence, there's a truth to it when you look at it from a spiritual standpoint, but that's not what it is because we know that when you that there's an inheritance waiting for us. So, in that sense, of course, in that sense, it is true. God will exalt the righteous, those who are faithful, those who trust in Christ as their savior wear a robe of righteousness that can never be taken from them, ever. Never taken from them. But again, as we close this particular chapter, you we see the continuing theme or the skewer that continues to pin through all these things, which is that these men are saying a lot of truthful things, things that are laced with wisdom, even. But what good are they when they have been misapplied? Bildad is the kind of guy that uses doctrine, uses truth, uses antiquity as a billy club to beat down Job as if Job is an enemy, when he ought to be his friend, when he ought to be comforting him. There is nothing in the Word of God that we can look at and can't find a way to understand it if we don't understand it. We may read some of this language and be what and think, wow, this is some really lofty language to sort of grasp and lay hold of. And it is, it's tough. It's tough. You know, many of you, just like me in the past, you know, you read, and meek's continuing today, you read some of these passages of scriptures, and when they finally land, you're going like, wow, I never saw it that way. I get something like that almost daily. Almost daily. And so Job's suffering. If everything bildad, listen, if everything bildad was saying to Job, and everything that Eliphaz has said to Job, and what the other guys are gonna say to Job, if all of them are right based on what they consider to be the impetus for why Job is in this situation, what would they have said to the Lord Jesus Christ? I'll give you a hint. They would probably say what those did say when Christ came. Remember, foxes have holes, but the Son of Man doesn't have a place to lay his head. He was born in poverty. There was no room for him, the Lord Jesus Christ, in the end. They tried to kill him, and they went so far, Herod went so far as to go and kill all the children under two years of age. So they could be sure that they got Christ. But they didn't. They harassed him at every turn. The Pharisees and the Sadducees joined forces when it came to Christ. The only ones who had mad love for the Lord Jesus Christ were those who were the were the chief of sinners, publicans, harlots, tax collectors, feeble people, in intellect, people who were lame, people who were blind, people who were deaf and dumb, people who had been subjected to all kinds of poverty and exploitation, lepers, lepers, the Lord Jesus Christ. Was tempted by the devil. After forty days of fasting, the first thing that Satan says to him was to turn these rocks into stones. I know you're hungry. And so he's telling people that he is the fulfillment of what we read in the book of Isaiah 42 and elsewhere. He's the one who said that all the prophets spoke about him. 316 prophecies. Christ says they all spoke about him. But not according to the tribulationists, the pre-tribulation rapture dispensational people. Not to them. Daniel 9, that's not about Jesus Christ at all. That's about some other antichrist person coming in the future who's going to go to Israel and build new temples and all this other kind of stupidity. None of that's true. All of the prophets pointed to Christ and were fulfilled, fulfilled by Christ, including and especially Daniel 9. And I only say especially because that's the one that so many modern-day Christians playing into the hands of this whole Zionistic mentality, Christian Zionism, they needed to believe it. That's why those 1,000 pastors went over there to Israel, bowing down to a false God. I'm telling you, this job suffered in an unimaginable way. He was blamed and accused of being a sinner. What was Jesus Christ accused of being? A person who hangs out with publicans and sinners. Yeah. The Lord Jesus Christ was accused of that. John the Baptist didn't do any of these things, he lost his head for it. Jesus Christ, he came eating and drinking. And he was accused of not only being a sinner, but associating with sinners. Remember when the lady poured the oil over Christ's head? And when the one lady was uh and she was washing, wiping his feet with her hair, and the disciples were saying, whoa, this is a bridge too far. Why is he letting that woman touch him like that? Christ was a carpenter. The Lord God of heaven in human flesh was working a job as a carpenter, hanging out with fishermen and publicans and tax collectors. But he suffered the whole time he was here, so much so that he was falsely accused of seditious activity. That was his indictment. Sedition. So the Romans knew that the Jews were jealous of him. They knew that. So they said, Well, look, this is your Passover, and you have a tradition in your Passover that we release one of your criminals. So the Romans thought that, well, if we offer them to let the Lord, this Jesus guy, to let him go, they'll go for it and just let him go. No. They said, no way, no way. Give us Barabbas. Give us Barabbas. Guess what Barabbas was imprisoned for? Being a political agitator. For sedition. For insurrection. What was Christ indicted for? Being a son of God. No. For being a political agitator. Yeah, yeah. Insurrection. He was indicted for insurrection. They said, and he was innocent of that. But they said, give us Barabbas, who all who was actually being incarcerated for insurrection, and he got a pardon. The equivalent of a pardon. Does anybody want to venture a guess what Barabbas' name means? Son of God. Son of the Father. Son of the Father, yes, sorry. Son of the Father. Didn't Barabbas go on? Hold on, hold on. One at a time. One at a time. Go ahead, Candy. Candy, go ahead.
SPEAKER_03:I said we see the consequences already for all of our sins.
SPEAKER_07:That's the way it's a good thing. Barabbas. His name means son of the Father. He was guilty of insurrection and was released in order that the one who was innocent of insurrection and who was actually the son of the Father went to the cross. And the whole trial was wrong, was illegal. Under Jewish law, the whole trial was illegal. That's why he had to be taken off the cross on Friday. Because that was illegal for him to hang on there through the next day, which was the Sabbath day. Go ahead, Meg.
SPEAKER_01:You know what? You know what's so interesting to me about that too? Is the only time we hear of Pontius Pilate's wife is when she had that dream and she told Pilate. And Pilate didn't put her put him under. It was the Romans.
SPEAKER_07:It was a combination of the two. Because what they what the Jews did, they couldn't crucify Christ because they had no power under law to for capital punishment. So what they had, what they did, what they did, they usurped Roman authority, persuading them to use their law to put down their enemy by saying he was seditious. That he was speaking against them. We to this very right now the echoes are getting closer and closer today. We today. This country is being manipulated the same exact way. United States of America is being manipulated by those folks who have co-opted what used to be Israel and they are doing the same thing to the United States that they did to Rome. So that they can use our own country. And if you don't believe me, how many of your kids are allowed to have Bible studies at school? How many schools have Bibles in them anymore? Do you know how many schools around the country won't allow kids to pray? But you know, believers aren't paying attention. They're not paying attention. You got those thousand people, those pastors that went over to Israel, so that they can come back over here and be ambassadors for a religion that hates the Lord we serve. I'm gonna start, I'm gonna start sending you guys some of these videos on these in these groups that we're in so you can see that I'm not just telling you something. It's true. The blueprint has already been laid out in the word of God. The blueprint is already there. But I did digress. What I wanted to point out at the end is that if Job was accused of suffering because of his sin, all Christ's entire thirty-three and some odd months after his his whole year, his whole life here was a life of suffering. And he was a sinless, spotless, all-righteous son of God. And we see that Bildad and these miserable comforters, they see Job the same way that those people saw Christ at the time leading up to Calvary, and people today still see that Christ got what he deserved. You have people that are being cozy up to by Christians who believe that the Lord Jesus Christ was justly, justly condemned. But because we have this perverted gospel in this country, we're going to fall prey to them telling us we can't talk about the Lord Jesus Christ. And so I went a little long, and um, so I'll leave it there. But we got through the eighth chapter in just two or three sessions, so that's I think that's pretty good. And we will start the next one in in uh job chapter nine, and and um job will be the one.
SPEAKER_03:Brother Kyle.
SPEAKER_07:Brother Kyle. Hey, brother. God bless you. And so we'll pick up Job uh 9 tomorrow because Joe is gonna respond in chapter 9, and we're gonna see what he has to say. But because I went long, I won't I won't go around and get the last comments. We'll I'll close it up here and wrap it up.
SPEAKER_06:But um, I just want to tell you all um God bless you, and um I thank you for your generous time listening to these these these studies, and I love doing it, and I hope you get something out of it, and we'll continue to do so, and uh, and I will continue to do it.
SPEAKER_01:You forgot to say one thing.
SPEAKER_02:Be provoked, be persuaded, and be glad that you are not a bill dad.
SPEAKER_06:By the way, where'd you get that good-looking hat? That's a nice hat. Yeah, I I'm wearing mine too. I got this for my brother to encourage a servant. I haven't talked to him in a while. I haven't talked to him in a while, but I still wear the hat.
SPEAKER_07:Uh everybody, uh, brother Jeff, if you wouldn't mind closing us out in prayer, and we'll end it here.
SPEAKER_05:Uh and then we'll close it up. All right. Father, we thank you tonight for this incredible study. And how much we have learned about Job and what transpired in his life, what you allowed, what his friends tried to do, and can and condemn him for which he didn't do. But Father, we thank you for showing us tonight and how uh we sometimes work in those false accusations, and we need to step out of that. We need to step into your truth, Lord, that we know who we are, what we're doing, and why we're doing it. Father, for your service and for your glory. And Father, we lift up tonight those that we lifted up in prayer last evening. We pray for uh uh Megan's sister Carly, Father, with the surgery coming up later next month. Again, Lord, we pray for that surgery to go well, that everything is accomplished that they need and hope to do, that she comes through this with zero cancer of any kind, and that she gets on with her life and lives a long, happy, prosperous life. Father, your grace and your power will be there when that is done that day. We thank you for that. Thank you for each and everyone here tonight, Lord. Thank you for the work that Jonathan put in to this study tonight to bring all of this to us. Bring us back tomorrow night, ready for more, Lord, says we dive into your word and learn more about this. And Father, tomorrow help us to go out and provoke, persuade, encourage, and serve, Lord, those who we meet and you bring to our lives. And we just give you praise and glory now for all things in Jesus' name. Amen.
SPEAKER_07:In Jesus' name. God bless you all until tomorrow. Hope you have a great night and a good day tomorrow. God bless you.
SPEAKER_01:Amen. Bye.