God Answers Job: Part 1

When is the last time you truly stood in awe over something significant that you have seen?

I can remember a few distinct times.

When I saw the Grand Canyon as a young teenager.

When I experienced love and forgiveness from my wife in a particularly difficult time

When I have gazed into the eyes of my children for the first time

We are meant to be in awe.

Psalm 19:1 ESV

The heavens declare the glory of God, and the sky above proclaims his handiwork.

Psalm 8:1 ESV

O Lord, our Lord, how majestic is your name in all the earth! You have set your glory above the heavens.

Isaiah 43:21 ESV

the people whom I formed for myself that they might declare my praise.

Revelation 4:11 ESV

“Worthy are you, our Lord and God, to receive glory and honor and power, for you created all things, and by your will they existed and were created.”

The fact that God is God is seen in his power in Creation. Knowing there is only one God, and what that means, is the basic foundation for peace in difficulty.

1. The Lord Redresses Job - Vs. 1-3

redress - to remedy.

God will remedy the situation in the end, but we should remember that the fact that God answers Job at all is really a gift.

Since the garden, communion and communication with God should not be seen as a “given.”

a. Grace in the Wind

Whirlwind

tornado

out of - not necessarily just the wind, but in it, by it, through it, God speaks.

Wind - brings us back to the beginning of the book.

Job 1:19 ESV

and behold, a great wind came across the wilderness and struck the four corners of the house, and it fell upon the young people, and they are dead, and I alone have escaped to tell you.”

Out of the wind of chaos, you could say, God speaks.

Chaos, which causes us to look in another direction, for another source, yet out of it, through it, God answers. Grace in the wind.

History is full of examples of religious people who have separated themselves from everything in order to find peaceful communion with God.

The Pillar Saints

The Monastic Orders

The Shakers

The Amish

b. Grace in the Wonder

God’s request to Job, from the onset, is meant to instill wonder and remind Job of his human limitations.

You might say, “that’s cruel. Doesn’t God lift us up and exalt us in due time?” Of course, but we are never exalted to his place.

Extreme error has always led to extreme chaos when people attempt to exalt themselves to the height of God.

Modern examples, dictatorships.

Biblical examples

Tower of Babel

Satan Himself

Actually, the closer we get to God, the more our wonder searches.

Metal detector, rapid beeping. The heart that longs and searches for God doesn’t rest from pursuit when it feels a sense of closeness, rather the search and pursuit intensifies, because glory leads to more glory, and wonder leads to more wonder.

Job, and his friends, had gone from wonder to wandering. Wandering in a dimness of their own imagination. Wandering in a dimness created by our sureness.

2. The Lord Redirects Job’s Attention - vs. 4-38

This might immediately seem unsatisfying. You say, “Job has been asking God this whole time for answers and God’s response to that is to distract Him?”

Distraction is one perspective, but it is a perspective that misses out on the grace here.

God’s desire is not to distract, but to redirect. To say to Job, and us, you have lost the wonder. Your sureness has blinded you, and given you pride.

You know me, and you believe in me, but have you become such a master of your little surroundings that you forget the entire order of existence?

Do you wonder? Are you in awe? Do you need to be brought back to a place of dumbfounded and intense admiration of God’s immense power and wisdom?

It’s not a distraction from your trouble, its to place your trouble in context.

a. Creation Reveals - Vs. 4-7

timeless majesty

limitless wisdom

steadfastness

goodness and wonder

Romans 1:19–20 ESV

For what can be known about God is plain to them, because God has shown it to them. For his invisible attributes, namely, his eternal power and divine nature, have been clearly perceived, ever since the creation of the world, in the things that have been made. So they are without excuse.

b. Waters Reveal - Vs. 8-11

water incites fear for desert-dwellers. Very few accounts in the Old Testament have people embracing deep water.

God holds back the waters.

c. Times Reveal - Vs. 12-15

Commanded the morning - the passing of time.

Genesis - evening and morning.

Two great lights - to govern the day and night.

Never failed in his proper administration of time, and never failed in his proper administration of his grace and mercy.

d. Depths Reveal - Vs. 16-18

Have you walked in the recesses of the deep?

6 people have descended, alive, to the bottom of the marina trench. Nobody has ever walked there.

35,000 feet below the waters surface, you would be instantaneously crushed.

God not only defines the depths as creator, but he is master of them. He is not harmed by the depths of the trench

He is not harmed by the depths of death and darkness. Our limits, his clay.

e. Heights Reveal - vs. 19-21

Can you personally explore the surface of the sun?

instant death, like the depths.

What we wonder at and fear due to peril, God works for our good. The Sun as a parable of suffering.

f. Storms Reveal - vs. 22-30

snow and hail

wind

torrential rain

frost

Jesus

Matthew 8:27 ESV

And the men marveled, saying, “What sort of man is this, that even winds and sea obey him?”

g. Skies Reveal - vs. 31-38

Psalm 19:1 ESV

The heavens declare the glory of God, and the sky above proclaims his handiwork.

All these things bewilder us. Scientists study them and in their closeness reveal more and more depths of mystery.

The mystery, in one sense, is a wall between us and God.

Yet, in another sense, it is a blessed mystery, a blessed wall, a wall that is transcended by God’s interaction, his care, his grace, and love.

Psalm 8:3–4 ESV

When I look at your heavens, the work of your fingers, the moon and the stars, which you have set in place, what is man that you are mindful of him, and the son of man that you care for him?

Romans 8:38–39 ESV

For I am sure that neither death nor life, nor angels nor rulers, nor things present nor things to come, nor powers, nor height nor depth, nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord.