The Word
“And he said to the human race, ‘The fear of the Lord—that is wisdom, and to shun evil is understanding.” ~Job 28:28
The Thought
It seems wisdom is hard to come by these days. We are hard pressed to find a voice of reason. The “wisdom” of this world offers little consolation. We need a deeper hope, a deeper wisdom.
Reading through the book of Job this past week, I’m reminded of how foolish the wisdom of this world is. Job’s friends gave him plenty of input and claimed to be wise, however, their words echoed hollow in the face of Job’s deep grief. The counsel got so bad at one point, Job finally cut them off. The dialogue fell apart. Rational argument left the scene altogether.
Perhaps Job’s friends were well meaning to begin with, but what Job quickly learned from their arguments is that something was entirely missing. I’d like to call this “the mystery of the Divine.”
Job’s friends had the wisdom literature tied up neatly in a bow. They knew exactly how things were supposed to work: Those who are evil have their days numbered; they do not prosper. Those who are righteous will ultimately prevail.
Job doesn’t contradict this wisdom tradition entirely but he is suggesting there is a DEEPER wisdom. A wisdom that can only be gained from the knowledge of the Divine.
The Chronological Bible puts it this way:
“Job seeks a deeper wisdom. In a poem of astonishing power and beauty (Job 28), Job speaks of a profound wisdom, comprehensible only to God (28:23,24). The greatest wisdom for humans, then, is reverence for that profound God—”the fear of the Lord”—that is wisdom.” (Job 28:28)
I love how Job begins chapter 26. He describes this profound God by reminding his friends:
“He spreads out the northern skies over empty space; he suspends the earth over nothing. He wraps up the waters in his clouds, yet the clouds do not burst under their weight. He covers the face of the full moon, spreading his clouds over it. He marks out the horizon on the face of the waters for a boundary between light and darkness.” ~Job 26:7-10
This is no ordinary God. This is a terrifying God who spoke the world into existence. The God who from the very beginning, before the creation of this world, was the Word. “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.” (John 1:1)
In his book, The Beauty Chasers: Recapturing the Wonder of the Divine, Timothy Willard describes how we need a beautiful and terrible God:
“We need a God who is more than an icon we remember at certain times of the year. We need more than a high-five Jesus. We need the terrible and beautiful God of the universe. When C.S. Lewis was about eighteen years old, he created a word to encapsulate this kind of awful splendor. He called it terreauty. Without a terreautiful God, our worship will fall flat and disappear. And worship is the why of our existence.”
This God is the source of true, deeper wisdom. A God who is terrifying and beautiful, all wrapped up into one. A God under whose weight of power and beauty makes our knees bend in the mystery of the divine.
We’ve seen with our own eyes: things don’t always work out how we think they should. The dedicated worker loses his job unjustly. The cutthroat executive moves to the top of the ladder. The beautiful heart breaks. The child dies.
So how do we hold these stark realities in our hands without losing despair?
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