inkling·sJob 28:20-23
I came to this chapter in the middle of a decision I had spent weeks researching, certain that if I went deep enough the answer was down there somewhere. Job 28 is a poem about mining, and it stopped me. Whose voice it is remains the chapter's old crux — the speech sits oddly in Job's mouth, and we read it as the poet's own interlude. The poem marvels at what we can dig out of the dark — silver traced to its vein, gold and sapphires prised from rock, mountains overturned by their roots.
We are astonishingly good at finding what is buried. Then the poem asks:
From where, then, does wisdom come? And where is the place of understanding?
Wisdom is the one treasure the mine does not hold. No gold, however cleverly extracted, can buy it. Abaddon and Death—the grave and the underworld personified—can only say they have caught a rumor of it. Then: God understands the way to it. Wisdom lives where God lives. The poem closes by naming where our part begins: Behold, the fear of the Lord, that is wisdom, and to turn away from evil is understanding. Job keeps asking, and asking hard — though he slay me, yet will I hope in him (Job 13:15) — and the whirlwind presses the same point rather than overturning it, asking Job where light dwells. What changes is not that we stop digging but where: we leave the shaft that will never yield and take up the search Proverbs commands — the fear of the Lord, hunted as for hidden treasure (Proverbs 2:4-5).
“Immortal, invisible, God only wise, in light inaccessible hid from our eyes.”
— Walter Chalmers Smith · 'Immortal, Invisible, God Only Wise' (1867)Walter Chalmers Smith's hymn knew why the mine comes up empty. In light inaccessible. Not buried deep but held high, in the one place no shaft reaches. John answers it: No one has ever seen God; the only God, who is at the Father's side, he has made him known (John 1:18). In Christ are hidden all the treasures of wisdom and knowledge (Colossians 2:3) — and they came to light at a cross no one would have dug for: folly to the Greeks, a stumbling block to the Jews, and the wisdom of God (1 Corinthians 1:18-25). Christ Jesus, Paul writes, became to us wisdom from God (1 Corinthians 1:30).