Job 28 (Where Is Wisdom To Be Found?)

Human beings have an amazing capacity to uncover secrets about how the world works, such that we’re able to build amazing computers and come up with unbelievable technology, but we still have trouble with the basic things, like working out how to stop killing each other!

There is a wisdom, Job would probably agree. There is an explanation to it all somewhere, I’m sure there is, but where that explanation is, God knows!

How do you come up with explanations for things like the holocaust? How do we explain to the people of Zimbabwe, why it is that they have to starve? We can come up with our own trite explanations of it all, but in the end they do not satisfy. In the end we find ourselves standing there with Job, asking ’where is wisdom to be found?’

Now Job gets an answer of course, and not just from his three friends, who each take up the same position as the writer of the book of Proverbs. Job gets an answer from God Himself, who tells Job’s friends that they don’t know what they’re talking about. Of course God also tells Job that he doesn’t know what he’s talking about either.

Mind you, Job turns out to be satisfied with that. He doesn’t get the explanation he was looking for, but he does get a sense of God’s presence, and he does leave his encounter with God with a new sense of assurance that the big guy can indeed be trusted to take care of the big picture, and that ultimately, one day, we will see that it all makes sense.

This scenario is played out in the final chapters of the book of Job, but it is anticipated for us back here in chapter 28 - in the concluding verses that I didn’t read to you before.

23 God understands the way to [wisdom], and he knows its place.

24 For he looks to the ends of the earth, and sees everything under the heavens..

28 And he said to humankind, ’Truly, the fear of the Lord, that is wisdom; and to depart from evil is understanding.’"

Can you see again what Job, or rather, what the Bible as a whole is saying to us about wisdom? For the book of Job is not just Job arguing with his friends, it’s different Biblical traditions arguing with each other. It’s the people of God at different times in their history, calling their own God-given wisdom into question and pushing themselves to come up with a better answer!

And whereas the Proverbs writer had said ’wisdom stands on the street corner, readily available to all’, Job says ’No’! Wisdom is not that easy to find. The answers to the big questions in life are not readily available to us, but this is available: ’Fear the Lord’. That is wisdom. ’Depart from evil’. That is understanding. We may never come to terms with the questions that bother us most deeply. God has not given us to understand the big picture of the way things work. But He has given us this: ’Fear the Lord. Depart from evil.’ And yes, we can all grasp that.

In the end, the book of Job comes to the same conclusion as did Moses, as recorded in Deuteronomy 29:29, "The secret things belong to the Lord our God; but the things that are revealed belong to us and to our children for ever, that we may do all the words of this law."