Job 28

Job 28:1

POEM OF CREATIONHe continues his discourse with one of the most beautiful poems of creation that you can find anywhere. It may not seem like poetry to us, but it is Hebrew poetry and it is beautiful. He deals with things that are absolutely wonderful. If we were studying poetry, I would spend a long time here. God has put silver and gold and iron and precious stones into the earth. It is difficult to find these things. I personally do not think that men have found the vastness of the treasures that are really in this old earth on which we live. I think this chapter is saying that clearly. It also suggests that there are precious stones which have never yet been discovered, which might be more valuable than the diamond.

Job 28:4

Not only does the earth turn up precious stones, but also it produces foodbread for us to eat.

Job 28:6

The birds fly over the earth and its mountains. There are veins of minerals down in the earth that the birds fly over and know nothing about, neither can the vulture see them. There must be precious stones and veins of riches and wealth which are completely unknown and untapped.

Job 28:9

God can cause the earthquake. He can change the topography of the land. He can expose those veins of riches in the earth that He wants to have exposed.

Job 28:10

Job has been talking about the minerals and the precious stones in the earth. There are things which are of even more value: wisdom and understanding. Job knows that God has placed the minerals in the earth, but where is the source of that precious commoditywisdom?

Job 28:12

Job is telling his friends that they have not found wisdom. I would like to voice an opinion on the basis of this passage. I do not believe that all of this probing of the ocean floor and space and every crevice in the earth is going to tell man anything relating to real wisdom and real knowledge concerning the origin of the earth. Man cannot find it there. He will not learn how it came into existence nor who put it into existence.

Job 28:15

We have paid billions of dollars to bring back rocks from the moon. Those are mighty expensive rocks, friend. But they are not telling man what he would like to know.

Job 28:16

The wisdom that Job hoped his friends would bring to him is a wisdom beyond the understanding of man.

Job 28:19

Even the Bureau of Standards just can’t evaluate it.

Job 28:20

We have heard about it, but even death ought to tell us something. It ought to tell us that there is something on the other side, and it ought to tell us that there is something we don’t know. Men just step through the doorway of death, my friend, and they are not able to get word back to us. Houdini, the great magician, left a code with his wife before he died so that he could communicate with her after he was gone. Spiritualist after spiritualist came to Mrs. Houdini, claiming to have a message from him. She would say, “Give me the code.” Not one of them was able to come up with the code, which means that no one heard from Houdini after he died. We just don’t get word back from over there. That should tell us that there is something which we do not know today. He goes on to say something very interesting:

Job 28:26

For many years the critics said this was an incorrect statement; that everyone knows you see the lightning before you hear the thunder. But after it was discovered that sound waves do not travel as fast as light waves, they realized that the lightning is the flash from the crash of the thunder that takes place. How amazing that the writer of the Book of Job knew that it was the “lightning of the thunder”!

Job 28:28

Job’s friends were not able to probe this man’s problem at all. We are going to see his secret sin revealed, but it is not anything that his friends suspected. He is suffering from a bad case of perpendicular “I-itis.” This is a very bad disease. It is a case when the little pronoun “I” becomes so important that all we can talk about is “I, I, I.” We find that Job is filled with pride. This shows us that even a good man needs to repent. We will find in this chapter of twenty verses that Job uses the personal pronouns “I” or “me” fifty-two times. Mark them in your Bible. You will be amazed. Job is wrapped up in himself. That is his big problem. We will see how it had affected his life. It affects the life of anyone when he gets all wrapped up in himself. Someone has said, “When you’re wrapped up in yourself, it makes a mighty small package.” This chapter does not contain any form of a confession by Job. It is really his boasting. He has “I” trouble. There are many of us who have it too. The perpendicular pronoun is the hub of the wheel of life for all of us. Everything is a spoke that goes out from us. We see no brokenness of spirit. There is not that broken and contrite heart, no admission of guilt, no confession, no feeling of guilt or failure. His friends were not able to help him. They failed to see the real problem. They didn’t know Job, and they didn’t know themselves, and they certainly didn’t know God. They believed that God sent trouble to Job only as a punishment, and they thought Job was just holding out. They roughed him up and were miserable comforters to him. Each one used a different approach, and yet they all came to the same conclusion. We can sum up the methods of his friends. Eliphaz was the voice of experience. He used what would be called today the psychological approach. This is the approach of the power of positive thinking. It adopts a cheerful attitude. Bildad was the traditionalist, and he used the philosophical approach. That would be the approach of several of the seminaries today. They use the philosophical approach, but that doesn’t help anyone. Zophar was a religious dogmatist. He thought he knew all about God. He sounds like some of us fundamentalists, by the way. All of us would fall into the category of one of these friends. As we have seen, not one of his friends had been able to help him. Now I do want to say on Job’s behalf, as we move into this chapter, that he was a “perfect” man according to the standard which God had set up, which was sacrifice. He was a very wealthy man. He had all that it took to make this life agreeable. He had what it took to make him important in the world. We have seen that he was a religious man. He feared God. He had a concern for his children. He didn’t put up a false front. He could be weighed on the scale of God’s balance and not be called a hypocrite. So the insinuation of his friends was base and low. He was a genuine saint of God, a quickened soul, a child of God. His earthly cup of bliss had been full and running over. Then why should this man suffer? Actually, the suffering is only incidentalalthough Job would never have told you that. The suffering in Job is about as important as the fish in the Book of Jonah, in which the real problem is between Jonah and Jehovah. Here the real problem is between Job and Jehovah. Even Satan, the enemy, is secondary. The real problem is Job. He did not know himself, and he did not know God. Socrates has said, “Know thyself.” That is important. Job didn’t know himself. He was self-righteous and self-sufficient. He received all kinds of compliments from people, and there was a little of the self-adulation. There was a spiritual egotism in this man’s life. We will see this clearly when God confronts him. Job now is going to tell us about himself. He reviews his past. Chapter 29 is Job’s “This is my life.”