Bible Commentary - Job 28

In this chapter, Job praises the supreme value of wisdom over all things.

This chapter is both beautiful and profound, so this will be one of my longer commentaries for the book of Job.

This chapter contains three parts.  The three parts are neatly divided by a repeated verse, first in verse 12 and then second in verse 20.  Job asks the question, where does wisdom come from?  And then having spoken to some length, he asks the question a second time.  The heart of this chapter is Job’s search for wisdom, and his conclusion is a short but powerful attempt to find it.

The first section is from verses 1-11, and it is a fascinating explanation of ancient mining techniques.  I would capture Job’s sentiment as this: people do lots of hard, dangerous work to try to accumulate material wealth.  People love beautiful gemstones, and they will go to great lengths to find them, even treading under the earth where no animals or birds ever go (v. 7-8).  We see that people are capable of great determination, and when we exercise that determination we are capable of uncovering secret things, hidden things.

Then in verse 12 there is the turn; while men go underground to find gems and gold, where do we go to find wisdom?  Where is the place we need to mine to dig up understanding?

The second section, from verses 13-19, says that gold and gems cannot be exchanged for wisdom.  This sets up a beautiful contrast between the subject of the previous section and Job’s real target.  While people may work hard for material wealth, it cannot be exchanged for wisdom.  People go to dangerous lengths to mine gems out of the earth, but where do we go to get wisdom?  We cannot trade money for wisdom, we have to find it.

So Job raises the question a second time: where can we go to find wisdom?

In the third section, from verses 21-27, Job is basically saying that God knows and understands all things, and that wisdom comes from God, and that the place of understanding is in God’s presence.  If we want to find wisdom, we must find it in God.

Lastly, verse 28 answers the question: wisdom is found in God, to fear him, and to avoid evil.  While our pursuit of wealth may end in the bowels of the earth, our pursuit of wisdom must end in the presence of God, from whom all wisdom flows.

In so many ways, this chapter is the answer to the book of Job.  As I stated previously, the book of Job is asking the question, why do bad things happen to good people?  The answer, as given here and later reiterated by God himself, is that God has created all things in the world, including many marvelous and mysterious things, and that God possesses a wisdom that exceeds human comprehension.  Therefore we should all trust in God’s wisdom, honor and fear him, and avoid evil.

For so much of my life, this was an answer that I did not understand or particularly like.  I always viewed it as an argument from authority, that Job was telling us we should just take it for granted there is an answer because God is so powerful, but without actually telling us the answer.  I have heard Job criticized as the book that commands us to blind faith, trusting God in the midst of suffering without knowing why or having good reason to do so.  I didn’t really know how to refute those arguments even while I continued to believe in God’s goodness.

It was only reading this chapter just a few days ago that I think I’m finally beginning to understand this answer.  The basic logic in Job, which we see in verses 21-28, is that God has created things in the natural realm that are beyond human understanding.  God has created lightning and thunder, and he shapes the path of each thunderbolt.  God has measured out every drop of water in all the oceans in the world.  God moves each gust of wind in every moment, in every place, everywhere that wind can be found.

These natural marvels exceed human wisdom, understanding and power.  In every way God is on an entirely different plane of existence from human beings, and the extent of his knowledge and wisdom exceeds even the possibilities of human thought.  Bringing this back to the topic at hand, how can God permit suffering in the lives of righteous people?  Basically what Job says (both here and in the book as a whole) is that God has such exceedingly great wisdom and understanding in the physical world, that he is equally great and equally wise in matters of justice, morality and human experience.

The physical world symbolically represents the spiritual world of justice and righteousness, and demonstrating God’s power and wisdom through natural creation proves it everywhere.  We see the nature of the creator infused in the things he has created, and the mystery and splendor of the natural world stands as a signpost for us to perceive the transcendent reality of the eternal God.

The reason why I always struggled to understand Job is that I didn’t instinctively connect with Job’s wonder at the mystery of creation.  From childhood until now, I have always been a scientist at heart, seeking to understand the natural world in greater and greater ways.  While there are many good things about science and exploration, I think my pursuit of a greater understanding of the natural world stripped me of that sense of wonder at the unknown.  To someone like Job, lightning is a strange thing, both mysterious and powerful, and an apt symbol of the nature of God.  To me, lightning is a handful of electrons traveling through a voltage potential at relativistic speeds.  More understanding, but less wonder.

More generally, the philosophies of modern naturalism generally claim that the universe is understandable; human comprehension will continue to increase and there are no secrets that God can hide from us.  From this point of view, Job’s analogies to natural wonder as an explanation of human suffering make even less sense, because we find ourselves understanding (or claiming to understand) the natural world, but still at a loss to explain human suffering.  Taken to the extreme, it renders Job’s argument almost a non-sequitur, because we simply don’t see the world the same way that Job and his compatriots saw it.

If we look at the world truthfully, claiming human mastery over the universe is pure hubris.  The world is filled with unexplained mysteries and will continue to be mysterious for long after everyone reading this is dead.  Natural creation is a strange and glorious place, and while the natural sciences have produced incredible insights into creation, we should acknowledge that the world yet remains unsolved by human inquisition.  This is a mystery that we should respect, even while seeking greater understanding.

In a similar way, God also has a wisdom that guides human lives and justice, and when we do not understand it, we should respect the mystery even while seeking God’s answers and God’s wisdom.

To be clear, I’m not saying (and I don’t think Job is saying) that respecting the mysteries means that we have to leave them unchallenged, untouched, and passively accept ignorance.  This is another criticism commonly leveraged by modern naturalists against religion in general and Christianity in particular.  The extreme view of naturalists is that every mystery solved, every natural law promulgated and proven, shrinks the space of God’s workings in the universe.  It’s as though the universe were divided between “understood” and “not understood” spaces, and that God were somehow relegated to working miracles in the “not understood” space but absent from the “understood” space, since the natural laws somehow render God redundant or obsolete.

This argument usually mixes in some historical narrative, such as the (generally accurate) point that many historical religions appear to have been constructed to “explain” natural phenomena.  For instance, you can look at the Greek and Roman pantheons as being a collection of gods organized around distinct aspects of nature.  If it is thundering, that’s because Zeus is mad; if the sea is churning with big waves, then something is going on with Poseidon.  From this point of view, explaining lightning as a natural phenomenon means that we don’t “need” Zeus to explain it anymore.  Secular naturalists are only too happy to extend this argument to Christianity, likewise implying that Christianity was invented to explain natural phenomena and then claiming that every natural law or discovery shrinks the realm of God’s operation.  This is the “rationality replacing religion” argument.

I have heard several people make this argument almost verbatim, and though it enjoys considerable support amongst secular constituencies, it falls apart under any meaningful inspection.  The simple and obvious counterpoint is that it presupposes God cannot be involved with natural laws, which has no rational basis.  I could just as well say that God is the driving force behind every natural law, and all of a sudden God fills both the “understood” and “not understood” spaces, just as he has from the beginning.  It is a necessary contradiction of this argument that there must be some kind of power that is enforcing all of the natural laws, and yet that force cannot be God, must be from within the natural realm, and is logically impossible to explain.  It is such a profound contradiction in scientific naturalism that it usually goes completely ignored and unthought, because such a thought would be terribly dangerous to the entire naturalistic enterprise.

Furthermore, it is also dubious to claim that Christianity bears any particular resemblance to the Greek and Roman habit of organizing their conceptions of the divine around natural phenomena.  When Jesus was on earth, one of the first things he did was start going around doing completely extraordinary, almost flamboyant, miracles like turning water into wine or walking on water.  These miracles do not “explain” natural phenomena.  They would freak people out, and raise even more questions than they answered.  Jesus did not speak to explain natural phenomena, he spoke to explain the human condition, the love of God and God’s purpose and intent for our lives.

The miracles of Jesus all beg for explanations rather than offer explanations, and the matters of love and purpose will never be solved by natural sciences and are totally immune to scientific exploration.  While some secular scholars fruitlessly try to prove that Jesus’s miracles can be explained by natural phenomena, absolutely nobody ever tried to do the opposite, using Jesus’s miracles to explain natural phenomena, which was the fundamental premise of the “rationality replacing religion” argument made above.  There is no world in which someone could say, “tidal motion is caused by the moon’s orbit, and therefore we don’t need Jesus walking on water to explain the tides anymore”.  Jesus walking on water never “explained” anything, so finding a secular alternative cannot render that miracle “obsolete” or “redundant”.

Bringing it back to Job, Job is not trying to explain natural phenomena either.  He is appealing to our sense of wonder and our sense of majesty at the natural creation.  The existence of natural laws does not diminish this if we understand that God is the power behind every natural law, and that our understanding of nature does not diminish God’s role in creating and maintaining the natural world.  Ultimately, when we look at the natural world we are really seeing the nature of God, and when we understand that God is great in all things, even the matters of our lives and of our suffering, and we will be contented in his justice and under his protection.

In the next chapter, Job describes the glory and honor of his earlier life.