God answers Job
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Job 38:1-7, 34-41
1 Then the LORD answered Job out of the whirlwind:
2 "Who is this that darkens counsel by words without knowledge?
3 Gird up your loins like a man, I will question you, and you shall declare to me.
4 "Where were you when I laid the foundation of the earth? Tell me, if you have understanding.
5 Who determined its measurements – surely you know! Or who stretched the line upon it?
6 On what were its bases sunk, or who laid its cornerstone
7 when the morning stars sang together and all the heavenly beings shouted for joy?
34 "Can you lift up your voice to the clouds, so that a flood of waters may cover you?
35 Can you send forth lightnings, so that they may go and say to you, ‘Here we are'?
36 Who has put wisdom in the inward parts, or given understanding to the mind?
37 Who has the wisdom to number the clouds? Or who can tilt the waterskins of the heavens,
38 when the dust runs into a mass and the clods cling together?
39 "Can you hunt the prey for the lion, or satisfy the appetite of the young lions,
40 when they crouch in their dens, or lie in wait in their covert?
41 Who provides for the raven its prey, when its young ones cry to God, and wander about for lack of food?

Let Job be the end of "happy church," where everyone assembles to receive a Ray Stevens kind of Gospel: "Everything is beautiful, in its own way." Job's story should yank people away from religious complacency. Job is having no "walk in the garden alone, while the dew is still on the roses." He does not hear a still, small voice in the night as Samuel did in the Temple. Nor, like Elijah, did he stand endure a "great and powerful wind" that "tore the mountains apart and shattered the rocks," only to find that "the Lord was not in the wind." God answers Job from the whirlwind of Job's shattered world, from the chaos of his spiritual and physical desolation.

Satan had taunted God that Job's piety was based only on the fact that Job was fabulously wealthy. If everything were lost, said Satan, Job would curse God to God's face. Now Job has summoned God for just such an encounter. But the question is no longer whether Job – or anyone – can be unconditionally pious, but how piety makes sense at all. Job has bitterly, defiantly pressed his complaint about God to God: "Let the Almighty answer me; let my accuser put his indictment in writing," Job has said (Job 31:35). For Job, justice, especially divine justice, is central. In the face of what he has suffered, unconditional piety "is at best meaningless and at worst monstrous, for it would appear to sanction divine arbitrariness and cruelty. The task God faces in the story is to articulate a theological vision that will make such a stance not only meaningful but also profound. It is a high-stakes gamble" (David Newsom).

God's reply to Job begins in chapter 38 and continues through the end of chapter 41. Our reading today is just a taste. But is it a taste of a great banquet or of thin gruel? By the time one has read the first 37 chapters one has wallowed in Job's misery. One has listened to Job's smart-aleck, self-righteous friends, with their turgid, repetitive explanations that have all the theological depth of a bumper sticker. Job's condition, the problems of human suffering and divine justice and the emptiness of easy explanations leave one famished for spiritual food and drink.

But at first reading of God's reply to Job, it seems God explains nothing, he just swaggers in and throws his weight around. "God seems to thump the divine chest, demanding to know who this Job character thinks he is, anyway. Most teachers are aware that if a student asks an embarrassingly difficult question, one way to handle it is to raise your voice, act insulted, and make the student feel silly and presumptuous for having asked" (Thomas Long).

In chapter 9, Job predicted this would happen. "If it is a matter of strength, he is mighty! . . . Even if I were innocent, my mouth would condemn me. . . ."(Job 9:19a, 20a). In other words, even though Job most desires to contend with God, Job has long known that he cannot win the argument. In effect, Job has warned the reader that when God does turn up, he will be a humbug, rather like the man behind the curtain whom Toto uncovered to Dorothy's accusing stare. God seems to have the awe and majesty of a god, but cannot govern with love and justice. Taking God's reply at face value, God says, "You've got a lot of gall to question the creator of the world! Be quiet! I'm God and you're not." And Job is just to answer, "Yes, Boss."

Unless . . .

Unless we observe two things. First, no one book of the Bible contains all of God's revelations and thus no one book even asks all the questions, much less gives all the answers. In the rest of Scripture, God has more to say – and more importantly, to do – than he says in Job. Second, God's reply to job is mostly poetic. It is visionary. God calls us to experience existence, not just ponder our misfortunes.

The gospels tell of some Sadducees who could not imagine the nature of marriage in heaven, so they went to ask Jesus about it. Jesus informed the Sadducees that they had not even imagined the nature of marriage itself. Similarly, when Job says he cannot imagine the nature of God's justice, God replies that he has not even imagined the nature of nature.

Job had called for God to submit to a legal hearing. Surprisingly, God "is quite willing to be prosecuted. He only asks . . . to be allowed to cross-examine the witness for the prosecution," that is, Job. The first question God asks of Job is the question any criminal would be most entitled to ask: he asks Job who he is (Chesterton). At the end, Job admits he does not know.

In the presentation of Job's complaint and God's reply, the story moves beyond what it means for human to suffer, and inquires "what it means to be human at all when God is seen truly to be God" (Long). Job is compelled to probe the essential character of the human-divine relationship.

Job has shed all his presuppositions about God. Nothing he thought he knew works anymore. Thomas Long wrote, "Because Job suffers so grievously and so irrationally, he is no longer permitted the luxury of an illusion. Every attempt at make-believe falls before the reality of empty places at his family table and the throbbing pain in his body. The only god Job can manufacture from his misery is a monster, and Job must decide whether to flee from this arbitrary and punitive god or to stand up boldly to see if there just might be another God not of his own making. This great text stands over against the prevalent religious impulse to fabricate a wishful picture of the world, to imagine the sort of God who would rule benignly over such a world, and then to bow down in worship before this projection of our own sense of moral order."

"Who is this that darkens counsel by words without knowledge?" God demands. "Counsel" means the "planning of God is relation to his creation and includes what we understand by providence" (Gerhard von Rad). Job's former world of familiar order and routine has disappeared. God knows that Job has accused him of creating a world lacking moral order, a world governed by darkened counsel.

God defends his design of the world. A rapid series of divine questions reveals to Job that he does not know the ways of God. There is a purpose in creation that God knows but Job does not. Job is right is rejecting his sinfulness as the cause of his suffering. He is right to reject his friend's suggestions that he somehow deserves his suffering, but still, Job assumes too much. The whole of reality is far greater than Job can comprehend. Understanding is hidden from him. In the midst of the realms of nature, there is order and wisdom – not a fixed order, nor even an obvious order, but a flexible order that demands patience and wonder. God's questions humble Job because he cannot answer them, and they affirm the counsel of God.

But one would have to be God to answer the questions, so what is being proved? That Job is not God? Job already knows that.

In later verses, God explains how he has tamed the behemoth and the leviathan, mythical ancient monsters of unbridled destruction, the most powerful symbols of ultimate disorder the ancient Near East possessed. About the best the mythology of that world could hope for was that one day the gods, in a pitched battle, would defeat them, but maybe not. But the news about this from God is quite different. "Look at Behemoth," says the Voice, "which I made along with you." As for Leviathan, "Can you make a pet of him like a bird or put him on a leash?" Then God delivers an unconquerable defense: "Who has a claim against me that I must pay? Everything under heaven belongs to me."

Job has considered only two possibilities: either God is just in ways that we like and understand, or creation is basically chaotic. God's speech reveals another choice: that there can be a vision of everything – even chaos, even evil – brought finally into God's dominion. It is a vision from outside the human plane, "and yet one which serves to give radical hope in the present." "In the beginning, God," says Genesis, and in the end, also God. The Voice [from the whirlwind] is saying, "Don't you understand that there is no one else here?" (Long).

Job is compelled to consider that God is far beyond all human thought and imagining. A God whom Job can fully comprehend is no real God at all, and Job cannot understand God's mind as if Job were as great as God. Between God and Job is an impassable divide that no human being can cross. Only God can cross it.

The question is - has God crossed it? A topic for another time.

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