Wisdom and Rare Earth minerals
What Job might say on the race for rare earth minerals.
Unless you have been stuck under a rock for the last couple of weeks you won’t have failed to notice what appears to be the upending of the post-war consensus - its biggest signal being the shocking trouncing, one can say bullying, of Volodymyr Zelenskyy, President of Ukraine by President Trump and Vice President Vance at that fateful Oval Office press conference. On the dotted line was the mineral reserves of Ukraine, which is part of the US’s wider battle with China and its near stranglehold on the global supply and processing of critical and rare earth minerals.
This isn’t yet another take on that meeting, what it means for the western alliance or indeed (most importantly) Ukraine but one wonders if President Trump had read Job chapter 28 that morning would he have taken a slightly different position? As you can tell I am no current affairs analyst but it would appear to me Job had already worked out his take on the matter and as I read it this morning (just in case any Presidents are reading this…) I felt I should try and share it.
Job as you probably know isn’t having a great time, when we meet him in chapter 28 he has had to deal with his interminable friends trying to lay all the blame for his misfortunes on himself. Job, is having none of it though. But in chapter 28 he is trying to teach his friends something - that of wisdom.
Surely there is a vein for the silver, and a place for gold where they fine it. Iron is taken out of the earth, and brass is molten out of the stone. (v1)
Miners put an end to darkness,
and search out to the farthest bound
the ore in gloom and deep darkness. (v3)
Here he begins to describe the search for precious minerals, and how unlike the clear eyed falcon or wandering lion - it is humans that find it. It is only we who can ‘overturn mountains by the roots’, and it is…’hidden things they bring to light’.
Then, as now, the iron, copper, gold and sapphires Job mentions brought wealth and power but in the next verses Job turns it all around and asks;
But where shall wisdom be found? And where is the place of understanding? (v12)
It is not found in earth or in the sea, it is not found in anything we can dig up or produce; he doubles down even more by saying, ‘Abaddon and Death say,
“We have heard a rumour of it with our ears’. (v22)
Like the rest of Wisdom literature in the Bible there is only one place of understanding and wisdom:
‘Truly, the fear of the Lord, that is wisdom;
and to depart from evil is understanding.’
In the new Great Game, in which all our countries are playing there is no fear of the Lord so there is no wisdom, and is it not an evil to rail against one President, calling him a dictator and saying not a peep about another who truly is a dictator?
In Boethius’s Consolation of Philosophy, which is a good companion reader for the book of Job, Lady Philosophy reveals the path our desires take is in:
Do you want to pile up large sums of money? Where will you get it, if not from those who have it?
You want honours? How will you obtain them except by begging for them from those who can bestow them, thereby becoming not the proud man you wanted to be but a suppliant, a mendicant?
You want power? You will lie awake at night worrying about your subjects’ treachery. You want glory and fame? You will be the toy of vicissitude, trying to figure out the mood of the people and drawn this way and that by their fickle preferences.
Everyone talks of peace, whilst building up their armaments but the only true peace we will ever find comes from the Lord, His passion and resurrection. As Christians our duty is to fervently pray for our leaders that the grace of God may breach the hatred in their hearts and allow the sacred heart of Jesus and Mary to take over.
By Eric Hanna