This isn’t a particularly pleasant fact to realize, for Job or any of us. I don’t have a wide enough vantage point to accuse God of incompetence, and I never will. This means all of our claims to evaluate God’s rule over human history are always limited, and will therefore fall short. It’s impossible for any human to know such things or have such a perspective. But from a wider vantage point, there may be a vast network of factors that make the same tragedy fit into a larger cause-effect pattern that brings about the saving of many lives. There may be evil and suffering in God’s good world that from one perspective may seem needless, tragic, and unjust. This seems to be the point of God’s first speech. The parent has a wider range of available information that makes the same action (throwing a chair out the window) become the morally necessary thing to do. But if the parent knows there’s smoke coming from the adjacent room and that this window was the only way out, all of a sudden the broken window becomes a life-saving escape route. From a six-year-old’s point of view, this is precisely the kind of behavior that would earn a time-out, grounding, or worse. It’s similar to a child observing their parent throw a chair at a window to shatter it. However, from a wider perspective, those same events look entirely different. God’s perspective is infinitely broader, which means he may allow or orchestrate events that from one perspective look morally suspicious, or just plain wrong. His brain has only a finite capacity to understand cause and effect from his point of view. When Job critiqued God’s knowledge and ability, it was based on the limited horizons of his life experience. Rather, the first divine speech makes clear that God does know everything that transpires in his world, and his perspective on the universe has a wider range than any human will ever have. The goal of the book was never to offer us that information. Job never does find out why he suffered and neither does the reader. Whatever reasons God has for having allowed Job’s suffering, neglect is not a viable option. This is an important moment in the story so far. As it turns out, God is intimately familiar with every molecule and creature in his world and knows more about them than Job can comprehend. Job’s many accusations of divine neglect or incompetence have failed. At the end of God’s invitations to dialogue, Job comes up short in his first response: As it turns out, Job doesn’t know as much as he thought, even about the world he lives in and should be familiar with. Maybe Job and God can have a stimulating conversation about Job’s knowledge of war horses, and the aerodynamics of an eagle soaring on thermal air currents. He asks Job if he’s ever provided food for lions, or seen an isolated mountain goat give birth? No? Well, perhaps Job understands the feeding patterns of wild donkeys that roam the hills, or ostriches and their strange ways of caring for their young. In fact, God is privy to all kinds of perspectives and details that Job has never even imagined and never will.įollowing the cosmic tour, God takes Job on a corresponding virtual tour of part of the world he actually does inhabit, the earth (Job 38:39-39:30). God’s response is indirect, and it shows how his attention is actually on every single detail of the operations of the universe. The point seems to be this: Job claimed that God has fallen asleep at the wheel in running the universe, and because of this divine neglect he’s had to endure unjust suffering. I don’t know the answer to any of these questions. “Can you lead out a constellation in its season?” (38:32).Īnd of course, the correct response to all these questions is for Job to say, “No I don’t command the universe. “Where does light live, or where does darkness reside?” (38:19). “Have you ever in your days commanded the morning light?” (38:12). “Where were you when I Iaid the foundations of the earth?” (38:4). God asks Job all of these impossible questions, like: The first offers a “virtual tour” of the cosmos (Job 38-39). His present suffering is no longer endurable (Job 30:24-31), and he demands that God provide an explanation (Job 31:35-37).Īnd so, after enduring the long-winded words of Elihu (Job 32-37), God himself speaks up and responds to Job in a series of speeches that form the climax of the book so far (Job 38-41). He laments the days of his past when his body was healthy and his life filled with family and friends (Job 29:1-11). Eventually, Job and his friends have nothing to say to each other anymore (Job 3-27), and Job takes up his final position before God in chapters 29-31. To gain some context for this essay, it will help to read our previous blog, where we looked at the book’s introduction (Job 1-2), and the dialogue Job has with his friends about the meaning of his suffering. In this blog, we’ll explore the final chapters of the book of Job, which are puzzling and profound.
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