Job 15:18

Which wise sages have declared,

   Not concealing anything received from their ancestors.

 

I was working on Job 38:39 and it brought back an image on social media of an antelope crippling a cheetah. I always liked the cheetah because it was so fast. But later I realized the life of a cheetah was chasing prey due to starving; and now with this, I realized it must be a terrible life. The price to pay to be the best at something seems high.

‘Sages’ was mostly ‘men’, but I felt the gender not required. ‘Declared’ was mostly ‘told’, but I felt the need for more power.

‘Not concealing’ was also ‘not hiding’ or ‘withholding’, but also a whole different take for the second stitch of ‘and their fathers did not deny’.

The vision I get is of a gathering where the bold in their prime stand up and throw out things they believe; then the old people either let it stand or deny it by shouting the ‘whipper snapper’ down. (Not that I know what whipper snapper means.) The problem with this type of learning is that new ideas are often shouted down even though they are right only because the old people do not want to have to deal with it. I am sure this is how our culture functions, only the process is played out with dollars and is upset when the new ideas roll over the objections.

The real problem with the verse is that the culture does not appreciate the new ideas of the young. Our culture only seems to value money and even the best ideas are discarded if no one makes money off it. If medicine was built around just getting people healthy, then the whole world would change or at least according to a Star Trek episode I watched.  So much money goes to making people look better or feel younger that there is little left over for training people to stay home if they are sick or to eat right and exercise to stave off old age.

When I look back at Star Trek itself, I see that the original series itself was not well received by the buying public, but once the young kids experienced its thirst for knowledge in reruns, it created a whole new generation of people willing to examine what the wisdom of the ages was telling us. From a scientific standpoint, it has been great, but science has its own system of right and wrong and the worst ideas are quickly thrown aside. Politics seems to be having a feast of throwing stuff away right now.

However, this has also impacted the spiritual side. People have gone wildly after the new ideas (most of which are old and many times discarded) and found themselves to be lacking so much that they go after even the wildest of new ideas. The standard fare of spiritually aligning with the God of Abraham and Isacc and Jacob or the revealed need for the salvation of Christ have been tossed aside for ‘I want to be whoever I want to be and I want you to treat me according to my wishes’. I am not saying someone cannot dress up like a cat, but I am saying I do not have to go out of my way to make them happy. You do you, but do not let it get in my way of me doing me. There is a whole lot of not love bound up in those ideals. The plan to love God and love others seems to have worked pretty well across the entirety of time.

Written 12/29/24, Posted 2/8/25, Job 355