My last post was May 2nd which is now almost five months away. It has been a busy summer, but I have also been just plain lazy. I worked on Job 30:4 today, so I am “behind” by about 18 chapters. Not that I ever committed to a goal, but I have recently decided my aversion to goals is not helping me. Maybe in the three months leading up to Christmas, I can make some progress.
Job 12:8
Speak to the earth, to teach you,
The fish of the sea, to declare to you.
The previous verse was about birds and beasts. The earth was also “plants of the earth”, but I saw no support for that directly. Teach was also instruct, but neither seemed better to me so I went with the numbers.
Declare was also inform, tell, and explain. Explain seemed too deep and tell too shallow. Declare just seemed the way to go.
Not remembering context, my first reaction is to point out that the earth and the fish cannot speak and asking them will not help you. To learn from the earth or the fish, one would have to study them in great detail, and even then, you might not learn anything helpful. The whole train of thought is that wisdom that people can figure out is no wisdom at all and is as useless as making stuff up. The wisdom of God is the only true wisdom and is so great that it transcends all that you can learn from people or experiences no matter how long the accumulation of knowledge continues or how detailed the studies get. We have learned so much about science since Job was written, but we had to unlearn a lot of it, and the lessons of Job still apply in the internet age we are in and will still apply in the artificial intelligence age we are entering.
I have invested in Nvidia several times over the years and made a good bit of money. The latest oddity is that my account did not sell when it hit the $500 barrier as I “ordered”, and as predicted, it has fallen off that level as people realized no matter the profits, the company was still overvalued. I doubt my bank will make good on the issue claiming some “out of our hands excuse” that flies legally but will just be another lesson for me. Next time I will have the sell order just below the round number barrier and make my sell a little early. Understanding how people look at round numbers is not really about the value of stocks so much as how people look at the value of stocks. Some “wisdom” that pales in comparison to the “wisdom” of not putting all your eggs in one basket and losing big when something happens you did not expect.
In my over three years of studying Job verse by verse, I have been constantly awed by the wisdom God gave us all so long before Christ, that so often points to Christ, and confirms that God loves us. Our salvation through God’s love is the most important part of any wisdom we can ever gain. Somehow, I don’t think even Jonah heard that from his fish.
Job 261