Job 8:7

Bildad the Shuhite speaks these words, not Job, and not God. He's one of the three friends who come to comfort Job and end up arguing with him instead, and his argument in this speech runs on a simple transaction: be pure, pray hard, and God will restore you bigger than before. It sounds encouraging on its own, but stripped of context it functions as a formula, promising prosperity as the guaranteed payoff for good behavior.

God rebukes Bildad and the other two friends later in the book for this kind of talk, saying plainly that they “have not spoken of me the thing that is right” (Job 42:7). And yet the line turns out to be true for Job anyway, for reasons that have nothing to do with Bildad's formula: Job 42:12 records that “the LORD blessed the latter end of Job more than his beginning.” What actually restored Job was God's own mercy toward a man who stayed honest with Him through unbearable loss, worked out on God's timing, long after Bildad's tidy formula had already been rejected.