NOTES for Job 38:22-41

Continuing to speak to Job, God again and again turns his attention to the wisdom manifested in everything that happens in the world (vv. 22-41). At first glance, this is about the natural revelation of which Job himself, his friends, and Elihu had often spoken. Such natural revelation often became a starting point for seeking and knowing God, not only among God's people but also in the pagan world. But now Job looked at it with different eyes. Before, he knew that wisdom cannot be reduced to a certain sum of knowledge about the created world, even a very broad sum. But now he seems to begin to understand that there is no knowledge that has no relation to wisdom. Indeed, God clearly shows Job that nothing in the world happens without God's providence, though that providence works differently in different cases. He can pour rain from heaven (vv. 25-26), govern the turning of the heavenly spheres (vv. 31-33), and give food to the animals that need it (vv. 39-41). At first glance, it may appear that these are purely natural processes that take place according to laws established by God but without His direct participation.

But God immediately speaks of the wisdom placed in the human heart and of the understanding that distinguishes human beings from animals (v. 36). It turns out that God's providence extends equally to human beings and to the rest of creation. This would seem to lower the human being by making him equal to animals and to all of nature in general. But in God's eyes the situation looks different. God does not reduce the human being to the level of an animal; He raises the animals and all nature to the level of the human being. Then it becomes clear that for Him there are no primary and secondary tasks. In His design all elements are equally important, although each, of course, has its own place in it. And every person is as important to God as the whole created universe. If that is so, a person does not have to wait for God to find time to deal with his problems. He only needs to turn to God in order to receive answers to his questions. And with God, the world will become different for him. Without God the world is empty for a person; there is neither wisdom nor righteousness in it. With God the world receives both, but not for its own sake, only for the person in the context of his relationship with God. Then the world is filled with meaning, the meaning Job was seeking and which his friends could not help him find.

In the Bible, wisdom is not theory, not abstraction, not something speculative. Biblical wisdom is a practical thing. If, for example, a person could make a beautiful object out of stone, wood, or metal, he could be called wise. Because what was needed here was not only skill, but also that sense of beauty which a person feels with the heart more than with the hands.

Wisdom was also the art of dealing with people, the ability to understand them and see the motives of their actions. And righteousness too was wisdom: the skill of righteous life, without which it was impossible to follow God in spite of one's own sins, following while stumbling as little as possible and not falling. In the time when the Book of Job was written, this skill of righteous life was called wisdom above all. But righteousness is first of all relations with God. And with people too, in accordance with the commandments given by God. And those commandments did not appear by chance. They are not a moral code invented by God specially for man.

The commandments reflect the spiritual laws according to which a person's relations with God and people's relations with one another are built. They have existed as long as the world itself. Or at least as long as man has existed in the world. But if so, then God conceived these laws even before the creation of man, when He was creating His world. That means wisdom is not a human matter. Not only in the sense that man did not invent it, but also in the sense that it was not invented at all.

Man does not invent wisdom; he discovers it. More precisely, God reveals it to him, and man receives this revelation. But the origins of wisdom, which Job sought so intently, are where the origins and first cause of everything else, of all that happens in the world, are: with God. In His eternity. In the fullness of His life. In the depth of His person. There, where His creative will begins. And therefore there, where man by definition cannot penetrate. The origins of wisdom are inaccessible to man. Wisdom itself is accessible insofar as man is ready to receive it from God's hands, not by right, which man does not have, but by God's mercy.