Whence comes Wisdom

This transcript has been automatically generated

Now I notice we’re a little bit behind in time, so if this is your usual sleep time, I’m asking you now to wake up as we move quickly into Job 28.

We’re studying the ancient book of Job over 5 Sunday mornings. And our theme is Things Too Wonderful for Me.

And that little quote comes from Job at the end of the book.

And we come this morning to the 3rd of the 5 in the short series. Now let me try and recap very quickly. We began a few weeks ago by looking at the unique character of Job. He was a man uniquely godly. He was described by God as a man like nobody else on the face of the earth.

And when we open up chapter 1, we’re suddenly back into the heavenly court. And there Satan appears before God and he accuses God of having in Job a fair-weather believer. So Satan says to God, here is a man who is acting in a godly way because he has got so much health and wealth. But take away his health and wealth and you will soon find that he stops being so godly. So God gives Satan permission to remove all the blessings.

And Job finds himself without children, without property, and without good health.

And when we enter Job chapter 3, we step out, as it were, from the heavenly court and we come onto what might be the testing ground. And there is Job with his 3 friends. And between the 4 of them, they have not got a clue why this suffering has come upon Job. They cannot explain it and they’ve got no assurance of the outcome.

And it’s on this testing ground that Job has the opportunity to curse God and show Satan to be right, or to honour God and show God to be right, although he himself does not realise the cosmic implications of his behaviour. As we do. And his suffering is therefore the vehicle for his response or reaction. Now last time, 2 weeks ago, we skimmed over the dialogues that Job has with the 3 comforters. 28 chapters we looked at in about 28 minutes, which was enough for any of us.

And they’re frustrating conversations because the 4 men know nothing.

They are frustrating. And that is why I suggested that these conversations could well be described as dialogues in darkness. And these 3 men, they look at Job, they see the suffering, they are horrified by it, and they deduce that there is some wickedness that lies behind it. Job himself is experiencing the suffering. He deduces that he has been abandoned by God.

And so these 3 comforters, they have this theory which they try to stretch over Job. They have got a formula. They have made a guess, but they are wrong.

And they fail to comfort Job because they have got no truth. In fact, they actually burden him because they are inaccurate and they are insensitive. We have been learning in Read, Mark, Learn, for example, in chapter 4, that if we all speak the truth in love to one another, we will grow up. And here are 3 comforters who come and they speak error in anger. And they all go down.

Well, in all the anguish and the suffering, Job does not ask for his wealth back and he does not ask for his health back and he does not contemplate suicide and he does not pray for healing. The real concern that’s on his heart and his mind is his relationship with God and he feels that the relationship is gone because the outward signs have gone. Very common, isn’t it? We depend on the outward circumstances far more than we know. Now what we actually know from reading the book of Job is that what Job feels is not what he experiences.

Please stay with this.

We know that what Job feels is not what he experiences. And behind the test, God is completely in charge. And this book of Job challenges us to grasp the fact that God’s honour is a higher priority than we realise. And it’s a higher responsibility than we assume. And if any of you have glimpsed that, well, I’m glad.

Well, Job has not lost his relationship with God at all as he feels he has. Right at the beginning God says, this is my servant, and he stays God’s servant right the way through the book. And as Job continues to trust God and continues to honour God, he— obey God, he honours God. He trusts and obeys and God is glorified. Now it’s not for 100 years, many, many hundreds of years later, that a man comes along and walks on the face of the earth who is literally blameless and upright.

And this particular man not only feels abandoned by God but is abandoned by God. He not only feels it but He experiences it. And on the cross Jesus Christ experiences a situation that none of His followers will ever experience. In fact, we have the promise of God that because of the cross our relationship with God will never be severed for an instant. Not sickness, not evil, not death, nothing shall separate us.

Now of course suffering may cause us to think it.

Suffering causes Job to think it. But God was in control of Job’s situation. God was in control of Jesus’ situation. God is in control of your situation and He is in control of my situation. And Paul tells us in Romans that in all things and through all things God is working for the best for those who love Him.

Now the 3 comforters who speak to Job have got no answers at all. They’ve got no insight into Job’s problem and they’ve got no understanding of the outcome. Therefore they have no wisdom, no practical wisdom. And the brilliance of Scripture is that we come this morning to chapter 28, which seems almost deliberately to prepare us to move from the emptiness of man to the fullness of God. Now if you are following as Jonathan read chapter 28, you will have realised what a very unusual chapter this is.

In fact, it is such an unusual chapter that most commentators assume that it is a lost poem that landed in the book of Job.

And even a commentator like Anderson, a conservative commentator, says that chapter 28 could not be the words of Job. It’s too sublime.

Now actually, it is a chapter that fits into the book as a whole perfectly, as I hope we’ll see before we finish. And you may remember that we learned 2 lessons from the comforters 2 weeks ago. The first lesson is this: we must accept our limitations if we’re trying to comfort somebody. And the second lesson is this: We must assume our responsibilities if we want to comfort somebody. Accept our limitations, assume our responsibilities.

And in actual fact, Job chapter 28 takes up those 2 basic themes almost exactly. Now the chapter seems to be spoken by the author of the book rather than Job himself. And it is, as I say, as if the author of the book is preparing us to move from the emptiness of man to the fullness of God, even though our Bibles, if you will notice, keep the inverted commas up so that they are lost as to who to attribute the chapter to, so they include it in Job’s dialogues. Now the chapter raises the question of wisdom. What is wisdom?

If you look it up in the dictionary, it says something like this: it is mature intelligence.

Most people assume that wisdom is to be able to sort of throw the carbonite open and to be able to put your finger immediately on the problem.

Whereas actually we find in the Scriptures that wisdom, as God defines it and describes it, is a practical wisdom. This is the absurdity, that a young infant can be wiser in spiritual things than an old grandparent. This is where the Scriptures give the lie to our intelligences. This is where strings of degrees prove nothing in the kingdom of God. This is where the simplest believer can be the wisest believer because it is a practical wisdom.

A.W. Tozer defines wisdom like this, he says, wisdom is the best means to the best ends. Now that is a very brilliant definition. The best means to the best ends. And sometimes it is the simplest person who takes up the best means for the best ends.

You notice in Bible studies and even in pulpits that there is a tendency to put a gulf between the teacher and the listener, or between the clergyman and the parishioner. It’s as if the teacher or the minister is continually saying, come on, know your Bibles like I do. And the person in the pew who’s had, for example, no years of Christian living or no years in a theological college, finds himself with a continual inferiority complex because he just doesn’t know his way around all the verses.

Now Bible wisdom turns that on its head and it says that the man or the woman who knows a little and practises it is streets ahead of the person who knows his way all around the Scriptures but won’t live it out. That’s why when we come to the subject of wisdom, especially in the context of Job’s comforters, we are learning things that are very searching and practical. Now as we saw last time, the conversations of the 3 come to a stalemate. They haven’t got any wisdom between them. And Bildad finishes up for the 3 comforters with a short, pathetic speech.

It’s as if he sputters to a finish. And they are exhausted. And that is the end of human wisdom. And it is as if the author of Job wants to screw this lesson into our brains by turning to chapter 28 and saying essentially the same thing: Where does wisdom come from? Now the little question, where does wisdom come from, comes in verse 12 and verse 20.

And it appears that the chapter then divides neatly into 3 parts.

And the 3 parts can be described like this: verses 1 to 11 look at man’s power.

Verses 12 to 19, man’s wealth. Verses 20 to 28, God’s wisdom. So first of all, man’s power, verses 1 to 11. After we have been listening to Eliphaz, Bildad, and Zophar for 20 chapters, whatever chapters, and they failed to comfort God, we might expect the author to turn around and say, now look, these 3 are hopeless, powerless, useless. Typical.

But he doesn’t do that. He begins chapter 28 by paying great tribute to man. He begins by explaining that when it comes to the resourcefulness of man, he is exceptional. He explains that when it comes to searching out treasures and gold and precious stones, man is a genius.

When it comes to finding fine things, man is very great.

So he says in the first few verses, look at verse 3, man puts an end to darkness. Now that’s a very striking verse, isn’t it? Eliphaz, Bildad, and Zophar are absolutely immersed in darkness.

But when it comes to finding gold, iron, copper, men are experts at putting an end to darkness. They’ve got a luminosity and they get to work and they do exactly what they want. It’s a very striking phrase. Darkness is no obstacle to man. Man is the inventor of the light and the lamp, so to speak.

And in verses 4 and 5, man opens a shaft down into the earth.

And he dangles and he sways on a rope and he masters the earth and he masters its resources. He’s inventive. He’s ingenious. He’s courageous. He’s masterful.

And verse 7 and 8, even the falcon and the lion, able as they are, cannot discover what man can discover. They are far, far short of man. The bird flies over the wilderness and sees nothing. The lion walks over the wilderness and sees nothing. Man moves over the wilderness and exploits it and gets it.

One of the mining magnates in Australia is a man called Lang Hancock, and his daughter put him in a plane on one of his birthdays and took him for a little flight in their portable private jet. Over one of the wildernesses in Western Australia. And after they’d covered about 100 square miles, she asked him what he thought of it. Now the man in the street would say, that’s absolute waste of country. There’s nothing there.

It’s desert. It’s empty. But for Lang Hankot with this mining mind, you see, he saw that to be a very attractive piece of country. And his daughter then was able to announce that she’d bought it for him.

For his birthday.

Now, man is able to see deeply where there are resources and where there are riches. And the writer of chapter 28 gets to a kind of a climax of tribute in verse 9. And he, as if he says, is the rock hard and flinty? Yes, it is, but man will put his hand to it. Are there mountains in the way?

Verse 9: Yes, but man will turn them over. He will cut channels in the rocks. There is no obstacle to him. He will see everything that is precious. He will bind up the rivers if he has to, and everything that is hidden he will bring it up to light.

And so you see, the resources of the earth have to yield to man because man is the master. Now that is the point, isn’t it? Man is exceptionally clever. Man created in God’s image is able to make and create things and do things which are far, far beyond the rest of the beasts.

And man who has got great powers and dominion from God is able to exercise them. Now it’s never been so clear as in our day just how able man is. Man’s abilities seem to be just moving so fast we can’t keep up with them. I noticed, I think in Time magazine the other day, for example, that they are developing a telephone which will really reverse Babel, which we heard about last week, so that we will be able to ring and speak in our own language and thanks to the genius of the microchip, it will go straight through to the language of the people we are speaking with. Now that’s masterful, if it happens.

They say they are close.

The computer banks, the memory banks, the information banks, the great network of information banks across the world today are quite impressive, very impressive. Think of the breakthroughs in photography, just to take one example. This new camera that now takes a 360-degree photograph, it will take in what the eye can take in. Unbelievable developments. And then think again about transplants, microsurgery, plastic surgery.

That people can now be made taller. That voices can be made deeper, higher, stronger. Unbelievable. Satellite communications. Think of the Olympics.

I flicked on the television for 60 seconds yesterday to see if there were any Olympic news and got onto the Los Angeles athletics. And saw then a Russian move straight up to the pole vault and break a world record. Then I turned the television off.

Unbelievable! Right in front of the eyes. And man’s achievements are extraordinary. There is no doubt about that. This chapter is not attempting to put man down, but it does attempt to put man in his place.

If we finished at verse 11, we might assume this was a fine humanist manifesto. But then we come to this embarrassing question in verse 12: But where shall wisdom be found? And where is the place of understanding? And this is the question that really humbles man. At least it ought to.

Because man ought to be more than conscious that he cannot find the answers to fundamental questions of life, death, and judgement. It doesn’t matter how clever he is. We have to agree that all the quantity of achievements have not brought quality. We have not yet discovered a secret for nobility, generosity, kindness, patience, purity.

We have not found a secret of unselfishness. So you see, people are good at getting their home temperatures right, but they can’t get their home relationships right. They can make their homes beautiful, they can’t make their homes joyful.

People can control almost anything but they can’t control themselves. And this wide range of creativity has not brought a deep sense of satisfaction. I remember being part of a seminar once where we were looking at the fact that so many people were getting to be much older and what were we to do with so many living into their 70s, 80s and 90s. One of the elderly people said, put up their hand in the middle of the seminar and they said, we don’t want to just exist longer, we want to live longer. That’s a good distinction.

She felt herself to be existing but not living. You sometimes feel with all these inventions that are coming at us thick and fast, it’s a little bit like a shop assistant who keeps coming back at us and offering us more and more gifts that are becoming increasingly unattractive. We want to say, but where’s the thing that’s just right? Where’s the thing that puts its finger right on the need? So the shop assistant just picks up the pace and brings more and more things to our attention.

But, uh, not satisfying. So that’s the force of these verses. And here’s the balance. It’s a balance between man’s resourcefulness and man’s helplessness. You see, Eliphaz, Bildad, and Zophar combed the whole world for an answer to Job.

They don’t find it. And this book tells us very quietly that the answer is found outside the world. Here’s man, master of his environment, but when he looks for an answer to life, death, suffering, and judgement, there isn’t one in all the earth.

Now the chapter goes on in verses 12 to 19 to look at a second aspect of man’s power, and that is his wealth. It is as if man can say, ah, I may not be able to get it, but I’ll buy it. I may not be able to find it myself, but I know someone who can get it for me. And then in verses 12 to 19, the question is raised of what will buy wisdom. And the answer comes back that all the precious things that man has, will not buy it.

You can accumulate all the gold, all the silver, all the precious onyx, sapphire, all the jewels, crystal, coral, pearls, and nothing will buy wisdom. So you see, man has his natural values completely askew. He is absolutely insistent and persistent in searching out precious things. And at the end of it, he is dissatisfied and his precious things will not buy the satisfaction.

And if we put all man’s discoveries together, if we put all the computer knowledge together, if we put all the human conferences together, if we put all the gold and resources together, we do not come one iota closer to the answer of wisdom. What is life about? It’s a little bit like a world stage, isn’t it? As has been said many times. And here is this world stage and we are all part of it.

And we put a long-running show like Mousetrap to shame because the play just continues on and on and on. And the curtain goes up and I appear and you appear. And we do our part and we get our pay. And then the curtain comes down and we are finished. And then the curtain goes up again, new actors and actresses.

And they do their part and get their pay. And down comes the curtain and off they go. And round and round goes this play. And everybody lives for that. But then suddenly the curtain’s down and we’re gone.

And nobody will find an answer. What is this for? Why have we come, worked, toiled, got the good things, and disappeared?

And this chapter 28 is putting the screw of this question into our conscience in the light of the failure of Eliphaz, Bildad, and Zophar and saying man is not omnicompetent. Verses 1 to 11 tell us man can do anything but answer the big questions. Verses 12 to 19 tell us even his secondary powers to buy, to barter, come to nothing. And there is no answer until we get to verse 23.

God understands the way to wisdom and God knows its place and He looks to the end of the earth and He sees everything.

And verse 27: He saw wisdom and declared it and established it and searched it and He said to man, this is it. So you see, man can go on in cleverness and busyness and even carelessness, but when everything is done, when everything is done in the 20th century, when everything is done in the 21st century, when everything is done in the 101st century, there will not be an answer in this world to the question of wisdom. It is a little bit like Psalm 90, isn’t it? Do you remember we had a series in the evening from Dick on Psalm 90? And he pointed out this incredible paradox that man seeks to put his home into this world but never feels secure.

And the paradox is that you can build the most beautiful home and you can put everything into the home And yet we have actually been made and created for a heavenly home. And we will never feel secure until we are right with God. And finally, until we are home with God. In exactly the same way, man can search the earth absolutely and not come any closer to wisdom. So we come in verses 23 to 28 to God’s wisdom.

Now we ought to be asking ourselves the question, what does all this have to do with Job? And I think the answer is that Job is defined as a wise man in the very first verse of the book. If you look back to 1:1, you will see that Job was blameless and upright, one who feared God and turned away from evil. Now it was this way of life that prompted Satan to accuse Job and to test the root of Job’s wisdom. And Satan dared to suggest that it was a man-centered wisdom, that it depended on profits and comfort.

And so he was given permission to test it. And we find at the end that actually it is a God-centered wisdom, that it focuses on God, that it fears Him as God. It acknowledges Him to be the Creator, the Giver, the Sustainer, and the Judge. And then it responds appropriately. And so, even though Job wrestles through the chapters that intervene, and he struggles and he says the most outrageous things, he never stops acknowledging that God is God.

The God of wisdom, the God of power. And he holds these 2 together and he will not let them go. And he responds appropriately. So he is not a fair-weather believer. He survives the storm.

And he proves that God is right. In chapter 9 of Job, he says, God is wise in heart and mighty in power. In chapter 12, he says twice, with God is wisdom and strength. And these two are the essentials in a right understanding of God. Omnipotent, omniscient.

Friends, if you and I want to face suffering, we must hold these two together as Christians. Omnipotent, omniscient. If we let one outbalance the other, we will have false expectations. If we focus on God’s omnipotence and forget His omniscience, we will beg and beseech Him to do everything we ask. And we will expect Him to do everything, which is not a high view of God’s omniscience at all.

If we overbalance the other way and we hold up His omniscience and forget His omnipotence, we will just acquiesce. And we’ll say, well, it’s all up to Him. He’s sovereign. Why ask? But the man or the woman who holds God’s omnipotence and omniscience together will not have false expectations in suffering.

Exactly as Jesus held the two together. This is My prayer, but Your will be done. The two held in perfect balance. And that’s what Job does. He has the balance right, so his expectations are right.

He knows God does right. He knows God will do right. And he’s also got a right view of God’s ultimate and immediate plans.

That’s essential.

But his real struggle is to know whether God still is related to him or has cast Job off. So he will not stop fearing the Lord. Now, on Friday evening, I was sitting there trying to think to myself what it really meant to fear the Lord. I thought, what is it to fear the Lord? Surely there is a great lack of fear— reverent, awesome, holy, right fear.

And I put Job aside and I went on to some other work and I started to read a book which was discussing the nature of God’s wrath. And extraordinarily, but as I was reading these pages, I was absolutely fearful in the face of what I was reading. And suddenly struck very, very acutely with the wrath of God. And my immediate reaction was to want to be very holy, was to want to be clean, was to want to be faithful. This is a right response to God’s fear.

It seems to me if you want to measure how wise we are, we ought to ask ourselves how much we fear God If we want to find out how much we fear God, ask yourself how good you are at departing from evil. Because here’s the test, and it’s a humbling test, that where we are tolerant of evil in thought, word, and deed, it is because we have a poor fear of God. And if a poor fear of God, we badly lack wisdom. Now the struggle that Job faced in the question of his relationship to God has been given wonderful light in the Gospel. Romans chapter 8 tells us that nothing shall separate the Christian.

The cross tells us that because Christ has been abandoned, we will never be abandoned.

And how dependent we are on God’s revelation. If God did not speak, we would be like Eliphaz, Bildad, and Zophar. We would stumble in the darkness. We would come up with the best of human insights and nothing of the real answers of life, death, and judgement. So I think we ought to pray.

We ought to pray for ourselves that there is a greater holy fear of God. The holy fear which proves itself in a departure from evil. And then when that happens, we will be able to perhaps stand and say, God has made me a little wise and I am thankful to Him. Let’s pray together.

Lord God, we ask that You will make us people of wisdom, not because we deserve it, but because we need it and because You are gracious and merciful. We thank You for Your revelation. We thank You for the work of Christ on the cross. We thank You for the assurance of salvation. We thank You for Your Word.

We ask that we might be people who fear You as You deserve and depart from evil as is right. Make us these sorts of people, for we pray in Jesus’ name. Amen.