Job 8:9 (For we are but of yesterday, and know nothing, because our days upon earth are a shadow:)
A couple of days ago a neighbor of mine came to my office at the Bill Rice Ranch and he, our head wrangler and I had a discussion about a gate between our properties. He is older than I, and I learned a lot of things that I had not known before. The reason I learned them is because he has experience that I do not. He has a perspective. He is on one end of my property and I am kind of buffered by all the people he would know by that property. So, I listened, and I learned quite a few things. He filled me in on some knowledge he had about an old log cabin that I’d seen on a horse ride. I learned a lot. That is kind of the nature of life. We can learn things from the experience of others because they elongate the limited experience we ourselves have.
In Job 8, one of Job’s so-called friends, Bildad, says in verse 9, “For we are but of yesterday, and know nothing, because our days upon earth are a shadow.” Our lives are brief, and they started just recently. Someone says, “I wasn’t born yesterday.” Well, in the grand scheme of things, yes, you were, and our time of departure is not far from here. It is just a shadow away.
Bildad basically said, “You need to learn from those who have gone before.” Job’s friends did this on a couple of occasions. They appealed to the gray-haired men who were older than even Job’s father. There is some great wisdom to this. We need more knowledge than our experience alone can provide. There are two reasons for this.
First, we won’t live long enough to make all of the mistakes ourselves. If experience is the best teacher, there are some experiences you can’t live through. I’d far rather learn from your experience than to be always learning from mine. So, we don’t live long enough to learn from our experience.
Second, even if we are learning from someone else’s experience, maybe we are not asking the right people. That is possible. It is possible for a gray-haired man to not have a lick of sense if he hasn’t learned himself from the experiences he’s had.
In contrast, God’s truth gives us knowledge that our experience alone could not provide. There are two reasons for this. First, the Bible gives history that only the Bible could. The story of Job is poetic misery you might say, but it is a story we might not know otherwise. It happened at a certain time in a geographical spot and there is a context to it, but there is so much we know about the what and the why that God alone could provide. So, the Bible alone gives us history that only the Bible could.
Also, the Bible answers questions only the Bible or God could answer. In Job 9, Job asks a really good question, “How should man be just with God?” That is a question that the Bible answers. His name is Jesus Christ, and He is the go-between between sinful people and a holy God.
Today, I should learn from the experience of others, my own experience, and from the endless wealth of experience that I read of in the Word of God.