Lent With Job and Saint Thomas Aquinas: Chapter Twenty-Five

Bildad, demonstrating again that he has not been listening to Job, or has not understood him, speaks of the power of God:

Seeming to ignore the words in which Job had said that it was not sufficient to argue against him based on the power of God, (23:13) he takes the beginning of his argument from divine power and proposes the greatness of divine power in two ways. First, as to the fact that God exercises his power on higher creatures, preserving them in the greatest peace, and so he says, “Power and terror,” by reason of which he ought to be feared, “are with him, (God), who makes peace in his higher works.” In lesser creatures more discord is found, as much in rational creatures, which is clear from the contrary motions of human wills, as in corporeal creatures, which appears in the contrariety through which they are subject to generation and corruption. But one finds no contrariety in superior bodies, and so they are incorruptible. In like manner the higher intellectual substances also live in supreme peace, and so they are without unhappiness. This highest concord of superior creatures proceeds from divine power, which has placed the higher creatures in a more perfect participation of his unity, as if they are nearer to him; and so he clearly says, “in his higher works,” those more conformed to him.

Second, he shows the divine power from those things he does in lower creatures in which he acts through the ministry of higher creatures, whose great number is unknown to man. So he then says, “Can one number his soldiers?” He calls soldiers of God are all of the heavenly powers which follow the divine will just as soldiers obey the command of their leader. The number of these heavenly armies is unknown to man, as Isaiah says, “He who leads out his host without number.” (40:26) Lest anyone deny that the heavenly powers regard themselves as soldiers, obeying the command of another, but are like leaders and princes who do everything from their own will, as those worshipers of many gods thought, he then says, “And over whom does his light not rise?” This is as if to say: All the heavenly powers are directed by divine illumination as men are directed by the fact that the light of the sun rises over them.

Go here to read the rest.  Merely to speak of the power of God, as Bildad does, ignores who God is.  Power cannot justify an act of injustice for example.  As God indicates at the end of the Book of Job, the friends of Job have spoke wrongly about Him, and I think Bildad wins the booby prize in that category.

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