More Wonderful Knowledge
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More Wonderful Knowledge
More Wonderful Knowledge
We began last week with the first time God has spoken since the awful tragedy fell on Job in chapters 1 and 2. And we saw that it is Such Wonderful Knowledge that God speaks, as God speaks out of the storm, probably the storm that Elihu spoke about in chapter 37.
We saw last week that God not only created everything, but orders the creative. As He ask Job if he had ever once ordered the dawn.
12 Have you ever in your life commanded the morning or assigned the dawn its place,
Job 38:12
12 Have you ever in your life commanded the morning or assigned the dawn its place, 13 so it may seize the edges of the earth and shake the wicked out of it?
We also saw that God is also Lord over the evil as pictured in the seas, the clouds, and the thick darkness and determined their boundaries.
10 when I determined its boundaries and put its bars and doors in place, 11 when I declared: “You may come this far, but no farther; your proud waves stop here”?
Job 38:10
We saw that evil — that is bad things have a useful purpose in God’s creative order. And it is to direct our attention to God, not to necessarily be rescued from the evil, but in order to trust God because He is — and this is to His glory.
God has set before Job a deep and penetrating portrait of the structure of the universe. It’s a cosmos that is deeply and ultimately good,
28 We know that all things work together for the good of those who love God: those who are called according to His purpose.
And yet even the evil has a necessary function to bring about the good God has ordered.
How can we be sure that evil is a part of God’s creation and under His control?
How do we know there’s not some lurking autonomous power of evil that might threaten the good purposes of God? That’s addressed in the next two passages.
God knows the place of the Dead.
16 Have you traveled to the sources of the sea or walked in the depths of the oceans? 17 Have the gates of death been revealed to you? Have you seen the gates of deep darkness? 18 Have you comprehended the extent of the earth? Tell Me, if you know all this.
Extremes fascinate humans. The highest, the farthest, the smallest, the biggest, the deepest — the extremist — man presses to the extremes.
The sources of the sea, the depths of the oceans — very few have climbed Mt. Everest. Even fewer have dived to the depths. Some have gone into space, even walked on the moon. Yet there is a place that no man has yet gone and returned — the place of the dead. Verse 17
Have you been there, Job? God asked Job.
The gates of death, the gates of deep darkness, the extent of the earth. These are what lies at the extremes, beyond man’s touch — and there’s something beyond that — the place of death.
Job may feel that he has in all the sufferings he has been knocking on these gates of death.
Many people feel the same way when they are to the point where the can’t take any more, whether it’s pain, or sorrow, or darkness, or whatever trouble. We have a family member who lost her baby of 36 weeks and another who lost their son at 43 to probably a drug over dose. How do you cope with this? How do you get through this? And this is what Job has been crying out to God about? And God says, “Job, you haven’t been to the gates of death and returned that you can tell Me about it.
The Lord knows about these nether regions, the darkness that threatens the goodness of His creation. He knows about the ultimate triumph of His purposes —
12 even the darkness is not dark to You. The night shines like the day; darkness and light are alike to You.
How comforting is this? That God knows the deepest of deep, darkest of dark, worst of the worst, the extremest of extreme. And though they lay outside of Job’s knowledge, they don’t lay outside of God’s. Though they lay outside of our control, they don’t lay outside of God’s control.
So — there is no shadowy nook, no dark cranny of the universe — visible or invisible — that lies outside of God’s knowledge or control.
Do you see how tremendous this is?
But it gets better!
Though no man has been to such depths and darkness of evil, One man has been to, and right through the very gates of death — And Returned Victorious!
55 Death, where is your victory? Death, where is your sting? 56 Now the sting of death is sin, and the power of sin is the law. 57 But thanks be to God, who gives us the victory through our Lord Jesus Christ!
1 Corinthians 15:55
And the beauty of it is — that now that Christ has won the victory, that victory is now given to us through our Lord Jesus Christ. The terrors of death need terrify the Christian no more.
God controls light and darkness
19 Where is the road to the home of light? Do you know where darkness lives, 20 so you can lead it back to its border? Are you familiar with the paths to its home? 21 Don’t you know? You were already born; you have lived so long!
Job 38:19-21
Job is now taken to another extremity , the extremities of light and darkness. Poetically stated, there is a dwelling place, the home of light somewhere over the eastern horizon. And over the western horizon is the home of darkness. The Lord asks Job if he has been where light dwells and where darkness lives. “So that you can lead it back to its border.”
You know, since you have lived so long! What are you Job 65 years old?
But of course he cannot.
Snow and Hail
22 Have you entered the place where the snow is stored? Or have you seen the storehouses of hail, 23 which I hold in reserve for times of trouble, for the day of warfare and battle? 24 What road leads to the place where light is dispersed? Where is the source of the east wind that spreads across the earth?
Storehouse of snow and hail, the source of light (probably lightening), the source of the east wind — God uses the first two for bringing trouble and war. He threw down hail on the Amorites in that killed more than Israel’s swords. He used hail in a plague against Egypt. God used snow as a weapon in , as Napoleon and Hitler both found out in their attacks on Russian.
11 As they fled before Israel, the Lord threw large hailstones on them from the sky along the descent of Beth-horon all the way to Azekah, and they died. More of them died from the hail than the Israelites killed with the sword.
14 When the Almighty scattered kings in the land, it snowed on Zalmon.
The lightening, the wind — indicate storms. Job have you been to where they all begin. In other words, do you control these? Have you ever sent them? Of course not.
Can you explain why rain falls on the uninhabited land?
Job 38:
25 Who cuts a channel for the flooding rain or clears the way for lightning, 26 to bring rain on an uninhabited land, on a desert with no human life, 27 to satisfy the parched wasteland and cause the grass to sprout?
The channel cut by flooding rains is not by chance, God directed it.
Why does rain fall where no man lives?
As humans we think everything revolves around us, but God is busy providing for all His creation. What is happening right now 20 trillion light years from earth? And why?
Water in different forms?
28 Does the rain have a father? Who fathered the drops of dew? 29 Whose womb did the ice come from? Who gave birth to the frost of heaven 30 when water becomes as hard as stone, and the surface of the watery depths is frozen?
Job 38:28-
Here we see water in it’s different forms — rain, dew, ice, frost, frozen water over the threatening deeps.
But what is more intriguing is that God is seen as the father of the rain and dew — and giving birth to the ice and frost. It demonstrates an intimacy that the Creator has with all forms of water — water that brings life and death. The point is God is intimately involved in His word, bring both life and death. We cannot credit God with life giving water and not also acknowledge that He also sends death-dealing ice and frost. He is sovereign over all.
The heavenly Governor
31 Can you fasten the chains of the Pleiades or loosen the belt of Orion? 32 Can you bring out the constellations in their season and lead the Bear and her cubs? 33 Do you know the laws of heaven? Can you impose its authority on earth?
Pleiades and Orion are well known constellations. But who could ever tie them up or loosen them — but God?
The Holman translates what the ESV transliterates, Mazzaroth, but it refers to the constellations in general — and the Bear and her cubs — God brings them all out. God controls them all.
Laws of heaven and authority on the earth itself — God decreed them into existence, created them, and controls them still. Job does not.
Life-Giving Water
34 Can you command the clouds so that a flood of water covers you? 35 Can you send out lightning bolts, and they go? Do they report to you: “Here we are”? 36 Who put wisdom in the heart or gave the mind understanding? 37 Who has the wisdom to number the clouds? Or who can tilt the water jars of heaven 38 when the dust hardens like cast metal and the clods of dirt stick together?
They are looking for water on other planets hoping to find the one life-giving source. But the earth is the only precisely ordered place where the complexities of life can exist. And verse 36 indicates who has the understanding of the complexities and preciseness to give exactly what is needed of water for life not only to be but to continue.
Man has no control over any of this. And yet, many scientists foolishly believe men are doing things to upset the delicate balance. They didn’t no more put a cloud in the sky, send rain, send the lightening bolt than they gained wisdom. They prove this every day with their foolish talk they demonstrate they have no wisdom, no understanding.
The point is no human has authority over the life-giving rain. No human can command it, nor stop its destruction. And the point is no human can avoid suffering or ensure constant blessing. It wasn’t within Job’s power and it’s not within our power.
So, let’s think about all of this.
How do respond to this?
Here’s something we can observe — Job has no answer, and neither do we.
The Lord uses rhetorical questions rather than just straight statements. God could have simply said, “Job, you don’t know this, but I do.” But what the rhetorical questioning does is cause us to internalize the questions and make the truths their own as it makes these truths answer themselves.
But the main response is to drive us to think more deeply about how God sovereignly extends His sovereignty over evil. We must rid ourselves of any idea of an independent or autonomous power, like luck, fate, chance, human wisdom or reasoning. Job is forced to consider the strange but wonderful understanding that evil is created to serve the purposes and glories of God and that in some mysterious way even darkness is necessary to sho forth the splendid light of God’s goodness. There is a goodness in the mixed good and evil creation that lies below the surface and becomes fully evident when God’s pure kindness and utter goodness totally vindicate for all to see.
Job can’t yet comprehend or grasp the goodness in the midst of suffering and evil. A deeper faith in the absolute supremacy and universal sovereignty of God is beyond Job — unless God reveals Himself to Job. And He is doing it through the suffering to draw Job not to what God can do to alleviate the pain, but to see God.
God is who we need, not necessarily healing.