Bildad was perhaps the first health-and-wealth-gospel preacher.

But if you earnestly seek God and ask the Almighty for mercy, if you are pure and upright… your final days will be full of prosperity. (8:5-7)

If you do this, this, and this, God will pay your bills and heal you. So yes, the prosperity gospel is in the Bible. Are we to base our faith upon it?

Even Job questioned the truth of it. He realized God’s ways are not our ways, and God is not accountable to us humans.

He destroys both the blameless and the wicked. (9:22b))

If I wash myself with snow, and cleanse my hands with lye, then you dip me in a pit of mud, and my own clothes despise me. (9:30-31)

Job’s outlook is bleak. But he is acknowledging that the evidence proves that good things happen to bad people, and bad things happen to good people. The truth is you can’t buy God’s blessings with good behavior. So, no Bildad. What you say is not true.

Job needed to learn, as do we, that God’s ultimate goal has nothing to do with our comfort or material blessings. Paul emphasized this fact when he said in Philippians 4:11-13 that he had learned to be content in whatever situation he found himself.

Let go of expecting that check in the mail, and turn off the preacher who promises it will come if you do this or that, pray the right words, have enough faith, give enough money. That prosperity gospel was wrong when Bildad preached it, and it’s wrong in 2021.