Job 15:31

Let no one trust in them,

   Deceived by falsehood,

      For falsehoods will be their recompense.

 

In my working through Job, I have tried to not start a chapter unless I had enough pages to finish it in the same notebook. Today, I realized I missed this time and ran out of pages with seven verses to go in a chapter. It was failure, but the goal was inconsequential. Or it least insignificantly so.

This verse actually has a number of different formats across my sources and the simplicity of the final outcome is far from the complexity to get there.

Assuming the ‘them’ in stitch one is ‘the wicked’, my outcome has a noun of no one. ‘No one’ was also ‘no man’, ‘the wayward not’, ‘them’ and ‘him.

However, the ‘no one’ could be ‘the wicked’, and the verse be turned on its head. This would result in something like ‘Let the wicked not trust in self-deception’. This also runs the first two stitches as I have them into one.

‘Falsehood’  (stitch two) was also ‘emptiness’, ‘what is ‘worthless’, ‘vain things’, ‘vanity’, and ‘futile things’ as well as my selection of ‘them’ or ‘self-deception’.

‘Falsehoods’ (stitch three) was also ‘emptiness’, ‘nothing’, ‘futility’, and ‘vanity’. ‘Recompence’ was also ‘return’ and ‘reward’. Recompence is a big word, but it had the best fit.

I may yet change my opinion, but for now I will leave as is.

Our pastor spoke about James and its reference to looking at yourself in the mirror. In my contemplation, I determined that I probably spent most of my life ignoring what I saw in the mirror and acting upon the character within. Yes, I am white skinned, but I tried not to be prejudiced against the skin color of others as none of us had anything to do with that. Yes, I am male, but according to the natural order of things, we did not get to pick what we were or were not born with. One of my big dislikes of the gender fights is that if God sees us as perfect in the way we were created, why do we not love regardless of original or current sex. Just as I have never tried to see if anyone was circumcised or not, the only time sex matters is with me and my wife. (Probably a pun in there somewhere.)

Gender and sex are different, and I have yet to figure out what gender has to do with anything outside the tenants of someone’s chosen religion. My ‘religion’ is based on my acceptance of Christ as my savior and not something that I get to define as I see fit. There are guidelines in the Bible for how people of a particular sex ought to act, but I have never bothered to figure out how any of these apply to the world’s many and changing ideals on ‘gender’. Not sure how anyone can expect me to agree with gender-based norms when we can’t agree on religion.

Beyond this particular set of arguable ‘falsehoods’, I think the clear message is that the wicked believe things that are not true and the reward for believing things that are not true is just that, not believing the truth. I have this impression of a past president trying to get people to realize that there are indeed evil people in the world and evil people are not merely concepts in movies like James Bond and Mission Impossible. So many popular movies, tv shows, and novels are about good overcoming evil, but much of the real world ignores the need to combat evil or maintain infrastructure while chasing cheap water, fuel, and entertainment.

I read an article about the potential run up in meat costs if all the meat industry had to actually pay enough for Americans to do the work now mostly done by illegal aliens. Our national and state leaders are arguing over pie in the sky issues of criminals and drugs and free medical care while the real work needs to be done on providing visas to match labor needs and taxing immigrants to pay for the resources they use while working for next to nothing. I do not like paying $25 a pound for filet minion at the store, but I do not like evil people preying on people here just trying to make a living. Somewhere in here is a falsehood that is masking the dark reality of the rich preying on the poor.

 

Written 2/17/25, Posted 6/21/25, Job 371