Study of Job 12:19

He makes the priests without reason,

   Drives the temple servants into confusion,

 

A friend sent me a link to an absurd story about the Astros. It got my mental juices flowing, and I decided on the optimal path for the Astros to follow for next season. It probably won’t happen as it carries a lot of risk going forward after next season and takes more money than they usually spend. But as they say, you have to spend money to make money.

‘Makes’ was also ‘leads’ and ‘drives’. ‘Priests’ was also ‘princes’. ‘Without reason’ was ‘stripped’, ‘plundered’, ‘spoiled’, ‘naked’, ‘mad’, ‘astray’, and ‘into madness’. Based on all I read, this verse was about religious persons and not worldly leaders and I followed that for both stitches. Drives would have bene fine with madness, but I felt makes was the better action and in turn chose ‘without reason’ over the presented options as it seemed to fit the context better.

‘Drives’ was also ‘overthrows’, ‘leads’, ‘gives’, and ‘misleads’. ‘Temple servants’ was also ‘mighty’, ‘long established’, and ‘votaries’. ‘Into confusion’ was also not used, ‘astray’ and something I could not follow from my weird source. My choices mainly followed from the first stitch.

In my accountability meeting today, we spoke about people who could not drive better than they do. When I reread ‘without reason’ and ‘into confusion’, I recalled this and my goal of lowering my expectations of people. I know that the topic of the verse is how even our church leaders sometimes get it wrong, but I was extrapolating this to everyone we might expect something of. Every baseball franchise is owned by rich people who try to hire smart people for the lowest amount of money to put together the best possible teams for that amount of money. It is just following the rest of the fallacies of the capitalistic system.

I knew nothing about F1 until this adventure with my kid’s friend, but now I know it is currently not dominated by a driver’s skill, but by an engineering advantage one team has over everyone else. This is how every closed system ends up, dominated by those who can exploit the rules. I did this back when I played fantasy baseball. Most of the owners were probably glad to see me go. The other teams will be glad when they finally catch up to the leading F1 team, but it may never happen until they change the rules.

However, God is unchanging, as are His rules. We never have to worry about them changing. But we do need to make sure that when we have questions about anything, we go back to His Word for the answer and not just to our leaders who are only fallible human sinners like us. The only expectation we can have of other people is that they will fall short, and that we need to love them anyway. I struggle with this. But Jesus gave His life for them, and I need to follow His lead.

 

Written 11/28/23 Posted 1/26/24 Job 276