Who Are You to Question God? Lectionary Reflection for Pentecost 22B (Job 38:1-7, (34-41))

 

Job 38:1-7 (34-41)

38 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?

                *****************

                Job, the righteous one, went on a lengthy defense of his innocence in the face of his humiliation, a humiliation permitted by God. He refused to curse God, but he also had a touch of bitterness in his defense. In making his defense, Job maintained his integrity, but also declared that “the Almighty . . . made my soul bitter” (Job 27:2). He refused to follow his wife’s suggestion that he curse God and die (Job 2:9). Of course, she had reason to complain since she shared in at least some of his suffering. After all, she watched ten of her children die and the family fortune disappear. Now, she had to watch her husband tortured in body and soul. Death would be merciful. But Job wasn’t ready to die. Instead, he was ready to contend with whoever would engage with him, whether it was his so-called friends or even God.

                The Revised Common Lectionary provides four readings from the Book of Job. We’ve already encountered the first reading from Job 1-2, where we learn of the wager Satan made with God, leading to Job’s suffering, just to prove God’s point that Job is righteous. From there we moved to Job 23, where Job defends himself against suggestions by his friends that he confess the sins that led to his predicament while complaining that God was absent. Nevertheless, he still refused to curse God.  After giving a lengthy, and bitter, defense of his integrity, Job was confronted by another “friend.” After the three friends failed to convince Job of his sinfulness, a younger figure named Elihu showed up. Elihu attacks Job for his unwillingness to confess his sins, but he also attacks the three friends for not offering a better defense of God in the face of Job’s complaints (Job 32-37). Elihu criticizes Job for contending with God. Ultimately, Elihu wants to defend God’s honor and goodness in the face of Job’s complaints. In essence, Elihu tells Job: Who are you to question God?

                After Elihu completes his sermon, condemning Job and his friends (for different reasons) and defending God’s honor, God jumps into the fray. Job 38 and 39 provide us with God’s diatribe. When we get to Job 40, Job offers a brief response before God continues to question Job. It is only in chapter 42 that Job finally gets to speak and when that moment comes, he gives in to God. Our reading for the day provides a portion of God’s response to Job’s complaint. The final reading in this series takes us to Job 42 and Job’s response, but first God’s diatribe.

             You have to sympathize with Job and his wife because their distress is due to a wager between God and Satan. He also must deal with the less-than-supportive words from his so-called friends. Now that he has engaged in a lengthy back and forth with the “friends,” God steps into the conversation for the first time since the opening chapters, even there, God didn’t speak with Job, just Satan. God appears to Job in the form of a whirlwind. This whirlwind serves as a form of theophany. It is a way that the author can depict God’s presence and emphasize power and authority. After all, as we have seen in recent weeks, storms have power. The use of this form of theophany seems an appropriate accompaniment to the words God shares with Job.  

                Rather than comfort Job in his distress, God seems to taunt him. God opens the diatribe with a question: “Who is this that darkens counsel by words without knowledge?” Then God tells Job to “Gird up your loins like a man.”  Perhaps The Message captures the sentiment best:

“Why do you confuse the issue?

    Why do you talk without knowing what you’re talking about?

Pull yourself together, Job!

    Up on your feet! Stand tall!

I have some questions for you,

    and I want some straight answers.

Yes, God wants to ask Job questions and God wants straight answers. So, as the song declares: “Walk like a man, talk like a man” [Four Seasons]. God is going to ask the questions, and if God leaves room for an answer, Job will do the best he can. The truth is God doesn’t leave much room for a response.

                 The lectionary creators decided to give us a taste of this conversation. So, we begin with verses 1-7 and then skip down to verse 34 and conclude with verse 41. Most likely the first seven verses will suffice, but if you need further confirmation of God’s supremacy, by all means, read the whole thing. God begins the questioning in verse 4 by asking Job where he was when God laid down the foundation of the earth (please don’t take this as literal science). The obvious answer is that Job wasn’t born at the moment of creation. This and the other questions are meant to be rhetorical. God already knows the answers. Verse 5 continues the questioning about God’s creative activity, asking Job who determined the earth’s measurements. One what did God sink the bases of the earth or lay its cornerstone? It’s clear, at least to me, that the author is not speaking scientific terms, at least not modern scientific theories. So, where was Job when “the morning stars sang together and all the heavenly beings shouted for Job?” Obviously, he wasn’t born at that moment.

                On and on God goes asking questions Job cannot answer. If we jump to verse 34, we have more questions about clouds and floods, storms and hunting. God is the one who makes the world go round. Job doesn’t have anything to do with it. He’s just a man, yes just a man. He might be righteous, but he doesn’t have divine power. God is ready to let him know this fact.

                God’s speech continues through Job 40:2. In that final verse, God asks Job: “Now what do you have to say for yourself? Are you going to haul me, the Mighty One, into court and press charges?” (Job 40:2 MSG). Given an opportunity to speak, Job offers a meek response: “See, I am of small account; what shall I answer you? I lay my hand on my mouth. I have spoken once, and I will not answer; twice, but will proceed no further.” (Job 40:4-5).  In other words, Job is speechless. He can’t answer God. In other words, he’s a beaten man. With that admission, God picks up where the divine speech left off and continues to the end of Chapter 41.

                When we look at the divine speech, we see that God focuses on the act of creation and God’s provision. The questions are rhetorical because, of course, Job wasn’t present for any of these events. In his response to his friends, Job doesn’t claim to be God. He just wants to defend his integrity. God doesn’t seem to address Job’s concerns. Then again, according to the story, God is in large part responsible for Job’s plight. Could it be that God isn’t angry with Job, but simply being ironic? Ron Allen and Clark Williamson, drawing on the work of Gerald Janzen, suggest that what God does here is “prompt Job to realize that God approves of Job’s questions.” At the same time, they note that Carol Newson suggests that God’s speech is a reminder that we “should honor the boundaries of our own knowledge and figure out how to live creatively within them” [Preaching the Old Testament, p. 159]. If we read this in that way, God isn’t shutting down the conversation, but simply redirecting it. Therefore, we can read this as God urging Job to keep asking questions, even if there are no final answers to be found.

                Of course, it’s always difficult to discern the tone of a conversation. God could be ignoring Job’s complaints or God could be addressing Job’s friends/tormenters. The story of Job is always difficult to interpret. Is it responding to the idea that suffering is a sign that one is a sinner? That seems to be the suggestion of the friends. But Job seems to be a rather good person. God doesn’t rebuke Job for his sins but does seem to cast doubt on Job’s ability to ask questions of God.

                As for us, the story of Job raises important questions about the nature of God, including the goodness of God. Elihu is rather certain that God is great and wonderful. He simply wants Job to acknowledge this truth. If he does then everything will be wonderful, at least for Elihu. The problem the friends have is that Job’s predicament, and his defense of his integrity, undermine their worldview. How can Job be righteous and suffer? It made no sense to them. As for God’s response, it seems as if God doesn’t want to be questioned. But, if as noted above God’s response is ironic, such that the goal here is not to shut down conversation, but stir it up, then we have a different situation.

                While Job (and we as well) might not have been there “when the morning stars sang together and all the heavenly beings shouted for joy,” it is good to know that there was joy at the beginning of creation (vs. 7). While God’s response may seem odd, God does respond to Job and his friends. Job 38 reminds us that God chose to speak to Job. If we take what God says to Job not as a critique but as a witness, we are reminded here of the vastness of the universe, which God created. As J. S. Randolph Harris notes: “For all of our seeming inconsequence, we are the ones to whom God has spoken, the ones to whom God holds out the promise of conversation about the design of creation.” Therefore, “God is not dismissing Job, but is reorienting Job within a larger awareness of God’s good creation” [Feasting on the Word, p. 175]. Thus, the God who speaks from the midst of the whirlwind invites Job to look at the world with a sense of awe, reminding Job that he doesn’t control the universe. Perhaps what this passage does is remind us that the universe is a lot bigger than we are, so some questions, including the ones Job asks, can’t be answered. As for the friends, their answers, while sounding pious, are insufficient as well. The silver lining here is that even if Job doesn’t get his questions answered God does engage in a conversation (of sorts) with Job. At the end of the conversation, Job is humbled, but so are his friends, whom God suggests had not spoken correctly of God, unlike Job (Job. 42:7). In other words, God welcomes our responses, even if they carry a sense of bitterness.  

Image Attribution: Blake, William, 1757-1827. Lord Answers Job Out of the Whirlwind, from Art in the Christian Tradition, a project of the Vanderbilt Divinity Library, Nashville, TN. https://diglib.library.vanderbilt.edu/act-imagelink.pl?RC=57704 [retrieved October 13, 2024]. Original source: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:The_Lord_Answering_Job_Out_of_the_Whirlwind_Butts_set.jpg.