Year 5, Day 122: Job 28

Theological Commentary: Click Here

Discipleship Focus: Guidance, Power

• Power: This is the natural outcome when we truly get our authority from the king.  When our authority is from God, we are equipped with His power to accomplish His will.  We act on His behalf in a world that He desperately loves.
• Guidance: God grants us His guidance.  Sometimes this guidance is God leading us away from temptation.  Sometimes this guidance is helping us to follow in a direction for which He has chosen.  Our default position should be to wait for God’s guidance and then follow when it comes.

Job gives us a really interesting perspective into humanity.  What can humanity not do?  We can shape the world around us.  We can pull precious minerals out of the earth and form them into new things.  We can change the flow of water, dam up rivers, create lakes and reservoirs.  We can dig into the earth and move mountains.  We as human beings are incredibly powerful.

However, what is the end of such power?  We are on the verge of our population becoming greater than our ability to produce food for it.  We are on the verge of having potable water shortages.  There are reports that say that within 50 years we may have burned through the earth’s resources of fossil fuels and even the uranium deposits that we use to generate electricity.  We have incredible human power, but do we have the wisdom to utilize it properly?

You see, human beings are incredibly powerful beings.  We are insightful and creative.  But when we utilize this power without wisdom, we ultimately endanger ourselves with respect to our long-term survival.  We need to use the power that God has naturally given to use over His creation in conjunction with the guidance that comes from His character.  Only when we use the power of God in conjunction with the wisdom of God are we truly living as He would have us live and in a matter that is for our own good.

Yes, we are powerful.  But as Job asks in this chapter, are we wise?

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