His strength shall be hungerbitten, and destruction shall be ready at his side.
Job 18:12 falls within Bildad's second speech, which takes part in the debate in which Job's friends argue that suffering and destruction come upon the wicked. That speech describes the final doom of the wicked. The verse depicts a wicked person's strength failing through hunger, with destruction close at hand.
It belongs to the accusations of Job's friends against Job in Job 8-27, to be read with Job 17 and Job 19 by bringing their accusations and Job's replies together. It pictures the calamity of the wicked person after his light is put out, when traps lie in his path and terrors pursue him and disaster waits nearby. In that condition his strength is weakened and eaten away by hunger, and destruction stands ready at his side and close at hand.
The friends' general claim that evil is ultimately punished is true, but they wrongly apply it to Job's suffering, since affliction does not prove that a sufferer is under God's displeasure. As part of the declamations of Job's misguided friends, the verse is not correct and reliable truth about God or about Job, so to take its statements as correct fails to rightly divide the Word. Though its words were put on record by inspiration, where they contradict the teachings of the Scriptures they are not verity and truth, and they must be compared with other portions of the Bible given through God's servants to see if they are sustained. Those who held the speaker to be Job, the perfect and upright man who feared God and turned away from evil and knew his Redeemer lives, taught that the verse is part of his witness that death is the ruling terror, an enemy to be dreaded and not a royal friend bringing believers at once into the immediate presence of the Lord, proving that death has been and is and ever will be an enemy.
Job 18:12 falls within Bildad's second speech, which takes part in the debate in which Job's friends argue that suffering and destruction come upon the wicked. That speech describes the final doom of the wicked. The verse depicts a wicked person's strength failing through hunger, with destruction close at hand.
It belongs to the accusations of Job's friends against Job in Job 8-27, to be read with Job 17 and Job 19 by bringing their accusations and Job's replies together. It pictures the calamity of the wicked person after his light is put out, when traps lie in his path and terrors pursue him and disaster waits nearby. In that condition his strength is weakened and eaten away by hunger, and destruction stands ready at his side and close at hand.
The friends' general claim that evil is ultimately punished is true, but they wrongly apply it to Job's suffering, since affliction does not prove that a sufferer is under God's displeasure. As part of the declamations of Job's misguided friends, the verse is not correct and reliable truth about God or about Job, so to take its statements as correct fails to rightly divide the Word. Though its words were put on record by inspiration, where they contradict the teachings of the Scriptures they are not verity and truth, and they must be compared with other portions of the Bible given through God's servants to see if they are sustained. Those who held the speaker to be Job, the perfect and upright man who feared God and turned away from evil and knew his Redeemer lives, taught that the verse is part of his witness that death is the ruling terror, an enemy to be dreaded and not a royal friend bringing believers at once into the immediate presence of the Lord, proving that death has been and is and ever will be an enemy.