Job 28:26 Commentary and Bible Study

It was God’s wisdom that guided him in every detail of what he made for he left nothing to chance or to mere random processes. Chance certainly exists, but that is only from our perspective; from his perspective, nothing is chance; nothing is without purpose, and nothing without meaning. Every tiny detail forms part of his eternal plan. Whether we can understand the meaning is of course another matter, for it would take the mind of God to understand the plan of God. Even if God were to explain it, we probably could not grasp it. Here and there he brings meaning to the surface so that we have examples that we can understand and appreciate. This tells us that the parts that we cannot understand also belong to his plan and are meaningful, but we know this by faith. God makes the world operate by what looks to us like laws. When we study it carefully those who have skill are able to reduce things to their most simple terms and formulate a law which describes the behaviour of the world. This law is however really only our description of how God operates. He does not govern the universe by a series of miracles, but makes it operate in a predictable and orderly way so that man can study it and get the same result from one day to the next. God wants man to study his works, but he could not do this if God’s work did not follow constant and predictable patterns. However there are some things that are notoriously difficult to predict – the path which lightening takes as it travels with such speed from one part of the sky to another. This looks to us to be impossible to predict in advance, and yet God knows the path that the thunderbolt will take. All of this comes from the wisdom of God, but that wisdom is not some third-party entity which God consults external to himself. It is his own wisdom, part of his infinite being, for in explaining how wisdom operates, Job says, ‘he made a decree, a law’. God has never learned wisdom, for he always possessed it, and his wisdom is at work in everything he does.