Study of Job 12:16

With Him are strength and resourcefulness,

   The one who errs and the one who leads his to err are His.

I had the opportunity to buy a baseball card I wanted for $10,000 this week. I naturally passed on the opportunity as it is about 50 times my nominal limit. But just because something is beyond my limit does not make it less valuable to the world in general. I am sure whoever spent that much felt they got a good deal. Just like whoever just bought the Ferrari for $50,000,000 or about 1,000 times my nominal limit for a car.

‘Strength’ was also ‘might’ and ‘power’. ‘Resourcefulness’ was also ‘wisdom’, ‘victory’, ‘prudence’, ‘skill’, and ‘sound counsel’. ‘Strength’ seemed to win on strength of numbers. ‘Resourcefulness’ seemed the least common word to match the plethora of meanings suggested by others; a sort of balance of reasons.

‘The one who errs’ was also ‘the deceived’, ‘those who do wrong’, ‘duped’, and ‘misled’. ‘The one who leads his to err’ was also ‘the deceiver’, ‘causing to err’, ‘those who lead others astray’, ‘the duper’, and ‘the misleaders’. I thought there was a lot to this second stitch, and I wanted it to retain the uncommon feel that comes of it. Each Christian source has the ‘deceived and the deceiver’ which I felt sounds right but is too simple. One Jewish source has no people but simply ‘erring and causing to err’. I felt ‘duped and duper’ were funny, but not full enough.

God owns the strong, the wise, those who make mistakes, and those who cause others to make mistakes both from being wrong and from just being evil. I sometimes allow my own paradigms to mask the fact that God loves every person and wants each to be saved even if they have rejected Him many times over. I often want to reject people as soon as they have rejected me once. I call that sin nature.

While I was away, I got into a discussion on how much was too much for a rain jacket. In it, I remembered a rain jacket I got for ‘free’ when I sent in some box tops and shipping (or something like that) when I was a kid. It was my only rain jacket for many years as it had a facsimile autograph of Nolan Ryan and was great at keeping out the rain as it was pure plastic. Sadly, I left it wet in a bag a few years back and all kinds of stuff was growing on it by the time I pulled it out. By then I was no longer the poor kid willing to try and save it. It had to have been over 30 years old by then. My current rain jacket I bought in a hurry back in 2012 while in London for the Olympics. I am forever sad that it was not all I wanted in a rain jacket, but it still functions and may be my only rain jacket until it does not. In this realm of using things for decades, I can probably spend as much as my friend did on my next one, but it may be a long time.

One of the challenges I have in investing in stocks is when to sell. With baseball cards, I have always bought expecting to keep, or at least tried to. With stocks, I have fallen into buying the ones I like for what I think is a good price, only to realize the goal is to sell them and not keep them. Not often, and not significantly, but enough to know that I do not want to be responsible for picking stocks for other people. God made me with certain abilities to use for nonspiritual things like math and comparisons, but more importantly, He gave me spiritual gifts to simply glorify Him. I often forget that my using my abilities to only buy cards I think are worth it are also opportunities to use those events to glorify Him. I’m still not going to spent $10,000 on a card I want or use time working to try and sell the cards I have that I do not want, but at least I can remember that my opportunities to interact with the world are my opportunities to glorify Him because He owns those who err.

Written 11/16/23 Posted 12/14/23 Job 273