Job 12:3

Yet I, like you, have a mind as well,

   I am no less a person than you,

      Indeed, who does not know all these things.

 

I was waiting for input from a client and had an idea to see what study our group should do after we finish Hebrews. I think we should do James to finish the non-Paul letters, and then do the Pauline letters (rather than Revelation). I also thought I would want to do the Gospels before Revelation. Then I thought maybe the whole Old Testament before Revelation. Then I thought maybe Jesus would come back before we finish that.

Then, not to delay getting this done, I thought I would see how many verses I have left. I counted 478. One each day gets me close to finishing June 30, 2024, and I could finish it all in four years. I have not wanted a real goal before, but I think I want to shoot for this one. After I finish the Amalgamation, I want to study the book as a whole. If that only takes about four years, then maybe I could finish before I hit 60.

‘A mind’ was also ‘understanding’. ‘As well’ was not in every source, and it seemed redundant when I typed it, but I felt it added depth that maybe I was missing right now.

‘No less a person than’ was also ‘inferior to’. I am not sure the original intent was the inferior thing, but I felt there was potential for the idea to lead to an equality in sin vs. a betterment in mind.

‘All’ was only in one source and the others has ‘such’. I normally do not prefer the source that had ‘all’ as it tends to dumb down the words rather than enrich the ideas, but I felt Job wanted to use the haughtiness of his “friends” to put them in their place and ‘al’l does a better job of this.

On Sunday, our oldest saw an old teacher at church who was able to receive some encouragement. I felt this was totally a God thing as we almost left before this happened. My brain tells me that if I had not been watching, I might not have been able to give credit to God for such a thing. I feel that many others do not recognize God acting in their lives because they are not looking.

In my mind, Job is telling his companions that they are idiots, and of course Job, and everyone else, knows the silly arguments they are making, but it truly takes a wider viewpoint to see how God is acting and to understand how much God loves us.

I have just gotten to chapter 25 in my verse by verse efforts and the difference in clarity of who said what, and where verses go, between these early books and those later books is astounding. Experts have all kinds of ways to reconcile these differences from moving things around, to saying things were lost, and from deleting things, to changing things. My mind is telling me that it got to us how God wanted it to get to us, and my mind is attempting to formulate how this might align with the idea a student wrote this for a class assignment and had to turn it in before he was really done. I have a report I am working on that is not a work of art as I had a timeline in which to finish it.

This is different from my study of Job. I have no outside timeline. I can take as long as necessary to work on it. But I can totally see how the version of Job we have was not the final copy the author ever produced, but was a draft that was the last copy anyone else ever found. Maybe his dog ate his homework, and he had to turn in what he still had. I actually like the mental image of that. The outcome is that we all have a brain and we can all use it to learn, but sometimes, we do not put in the effort. God will give us all the wisdom we ever need, if only we seek.

 

(Written 4/10/23, Posted 4/26, Job 255)