Job 5:7

Yet, men give birth to evil,

   As surely as sparks dart upward.

I cannot remember the exact setting, but I was recently in a conversation about the difference between the facts of science and truth. From the time I was small, I was taught not to lie and told to “tell the truth”. I was conditioned to what was “truth”. More recently, the big kid was assigned a mock trial in government class and it brought back memories of Government at the YMCA and learning that two people could see the same thing and have different ideas of what the truth was. Somewhere along the way I made the transition to limiting “truth” to the Word of God and acknowledging that everything else is temporary. A lot to pull out of a few sparks?

I selected “yet” over the other options as it gave the pause the other interjections did, but it also contrasts the coming truth with the thoughts that came before.

My options for “men” included “man” and “human beings”. I picked this third option to refrain from saying evil comes from women and still be rebellious in selection.

As with the previous verse, my sources had lots of “trouble”, a “mischief”, and a “wretchedness. I picked evil to match the previous verse, but also because it seems like the correct meaning of the passage. The big swap that came from my favorite source is that men are not born to cause trouble, but men are the source of evil. I am sure there are deeper aspects to the underlying use of “birth”, but a topic for another time, perhaps.

The second stitch had a few choices for the interjection and the term for how the sparks go upward, but I picked “as surely” to highlight the consensus of “truth” and “dart” for the accuracy I perceive in how the sparks “behave”.

In this verse, the scientific truth is that sparks fly upward. But as in the discussion I referenced, every day people are working to make more and better models of how nature is and updating the “science” behind everything our “enlightened by science” leaders preach to us. Beyond the raging debates on vaccines and viruses, cows releasing methane, and electric cars here to save us from ourselves, we find that the truth of God as shown in the Bible does not change. The more we understand it, the more it becomes consistent with itself and the reality of the world in which we live. Sparks fly upward over a hot fire in somewhat cold weather. I am sure science can come up with more caveats, but my point is that each “science” fact is based on a series of assumptions that may or not be true. People see things based on their own paradigms (recognized or not) and often fail to see what cannot be comprehended. This aligns to why prophecy is so often confusing as people who cannot fully understand the vision are trying to use their limited vocabulary to pass on the message God has for the prophet’s audience. In Ezekiel, the wheels beneath the creatures probably made little sense to the people of his time. Now, is sounds a lot like the wheels on my desk chair and I have no problems accepting wheels that do not seem to turn.

The passage tells us that evil is a byproduct of the choices of people, that the truth of this is from God, and that cannot be changed by the good wishes of mortal man. God created the universe to follow His design, not ours.