Verse of the day · September 14

Why does Job 28 describe a mine before it answers where wisdom is found?

Men have been buried alive in the mines. Nobody has ever dug up wisdom.

And unto man he said, Behold, the fear of the Lord, that is wisdom; and to depart from evil is understanding.
Job 28:28

Job has been arguing with three friends about why God does what he does, and in the middle of it he stops and describes a mine. There is a vein for the silver, here and there, and a place where men melt the gold clean. Iron comes out of the dust, because the ore looks like nothing but earth. Bread grows on top of that same ground, and under it is turned up as it were fire — stones that sparkle like fire, brimstone that catches, coal that feeds it. Where the sapphires sit in the rock, men go down with lamps and set an end to darkness, and when one method fails they try another until they have searched out all perfection.

The water comes in and has to be bound from overflowing, driven off through pipes and canals before it drowns the work, and they undermine the mountains to force a way through the roots of them. The path they walk is one no fowl knows, unseen by the vulture's eye, which is quick-sighted, and untrodden by the lion's whelps, which have been down every other track in the wilderness. Men who dig in mines have their lives in their hands, Matthew Henry writes of them, in constant danger of being suffocated by the damps, or crushed, or buried alive by the fall of the earth upon them. What carries them through it is that their eye sees every precious thing; they fancy they see it glittering in front of their faces, and the difficulties stop counting.

Then comes the question, with the miners still standing there holding what they went down for: where shall wisdom be found, and where is the place of understanding? Henry grants them their point — what was hidden is brought forth to light and laid on the bank — and asks it anyway, because wisdom is not there. Ask the miners, and by them the depth says, It is not in me. Ask the mariners, and the sea says the same. The Geneva Notes draw the line in the same place: a man may reach a great many secrets of nature and never comprehend the wisdom of God.

The three men sitting with Job have been reading his sufferings as a verdict on him. Not comprehending the divine wisdom, JFB say, they should not infer his guilt from it. There is a wisdom hidden in God, secret, which does not belong to us, and a wisdom made known by him and revealed to man, which belongs to us and to our children.

And unto man he said. The search has run twenty-seven verses, and now God turns and tells him. He does not say, in Henry's reading, Go up to heaven to fetch happiness from there, or Go down to the deep to draw it up; the word is nigh thee. For John Gill that one sentence is the substance of what God has been saying all along — in his works, which were made so that men should stand in awe of him, and in his word, and by his prophets in every age. Here alone in the book of Job, JFB note, God is named Adonai, Lord or master.

What was kept back was not kept back out of grudging: man was told as much as he was concerned to know for his duty and his happiness, entrusted with as much of God's sovereign mind as is needful and fit for a subject, and not with a seat among the privy-counsellors. When God forbade him the tree of knowledge, Henry writes, he allowed him the tree of life, and this is that tree.

Departing from evil is the fruit and effect of that fear, Gill has it — a hatred of sin, an aversion to it, a carefulness not to commit it, an abstaining from all appearance of it. It puts him on a regard to God's commandments and to everything good, and it is the evidence and proof of a good understanding. we must first cease to do evil, Henry says, or we shall never learn to do well. The Geneva Notes measure the man by precisely that, giving him as much of this heavenly wisdom as he shows by fearing God and departing from evil.

Every other precious thing in the chapter had to be fetched up out of the dark by men with their lives in their hands. This one was said out loud, on the surface, to anyone with ears to hear it. And the man repeating it had already been described in those exact two terms, before any of the arguing started — one that feared God, and eschewed evil. His three friends had spent the whole argument telling him he was neither.

Drawn from Matthew Henry, John Gill, the Jamieson-Fausset-Brown commentary and the Geneva Bible notes. How these teachings are made

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