God's Answer Out of the Whirlwind

Today's Reading

Read Job 38:1-7 — the long-awaited entrance: "Then the Lord answered Job out of the whirlwind and said: 'Who is this that darkens counsel by words without knowledge? Dress for action like a man; I will question you, and you make it known to me. Where were you when I laid the foundation of the earth? Tell me, if you have understanding.'"

Read Job 38:31-33 — God walking Job through constellations: "Can you bind the chains of the Pleiades or loose the cords of Orion? Can you lead forth the Mazzaroth in their season, or can you guide the Bear with its children? Do you know the ordinances of the heavens? Can you establish their rule on the earth?"

Read Job 40:1-5 — Job's first attempt at a response: "Behold, 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 I will proceed no further."

Read Job 42:1-6 — Job's final word: "I have heard of you by the hearing of the ear, but now my eye sees you; therefore I despise myself, and repent in dust and ashes."

Read Isaiah 55:8-9: "For my thoughts are not your thoughts, neither are your ways my ways, declares the Lord. For as the heavens are higher than the earth, so are my ways higher than your ways and my thoughts than your thoughts."

Read Romans 11:33-36 — Paul's doxology after eleven chapters trying to explain election: "Oh, the depth of the riches and wisdom and knowledge of God! How unsearchable are his judgments and how inscrutable his ways! For who has known the mind of the Lord, or who has been his counselor?"

Reflection

For thirty-seven chapters Job has demanded an audience. He has insisted that if God would just appear, just answer, the whole matter could be settled. He wants a courtroom. He wants the charges read. He wants God to explain.

In chapter 38, God shows up. And he does not answer the question.

Out of the whirlwind, the Lord speaks for four chapters. Not one of them addresses the question of why Job has suffered. There is no reference to Satan, no recap of the heavenly council in chapter 1, no theodicy, no concession. Instead God asks Job a series of questions about the natural world, each one structured to reveal Job's smallness. Where were you when I laid the foundation of the earth? Have you commanded the morning since your days began? Do you know when the mountain goats give birth? Can you bind the Pleiades? Can you lead forth Leviathan with a hook?

By any modern standard, this is a non-answer. The student asked a hard question, and the teacher launched into a lecture about ostriches.

And yet — and this is the strangeness at the heart of the book — Job is satisfied. He puts his hand over his mouth. He says, "I have heard of you by the hearing of the ear, but now my eye sees you; therefore I despise myself, and repent in dust and ashes." The argument that has gone on for thirty-five chapters ends not because God has won it on points but because the argument itself has dissolved.

Augustine, who wrestled with this his whole life, kept circling around the same insight: that the God human reason can fully grasp is not the God who exists. "If thou art able to understand it, it is not God." This is not anti-rational. Augustine spent his life writing books of relentless reasoning. It is, rather, the recognition that the kind of knowing that contains its object is not available to us where God is concerned. We do not stand outside God and look at him. He encompasses us. The relationship between Creator and creature is not the relationship between observer and specimen.

This is what is happening in Job 38-41. God is not refusing to give Job an explanation because the explanation would hurt his feelings. God is giving Job something better than an explanation: he is giving Job himself. The God who has, until this moment, been a topic of conversation between Job and his friends now appears in the room. The whirlwind is not a metaphor. The voice is not a symbol. The relationship between the human and the divine has changed register, and once it has changed, the original question — why — no longer has the urgency it had when Job was alone.

C.S. Lewis felt his way toward the same conclusion in his last great novel, Till We Have Faces. The protagonist Orual has spent her life with a complaint against the gods, written down, ready to be delivered. When she is finally given her audience, she finds that the words on her scroll are different from what she thought she had written. She reads her own complaint and discovers it does not say what she meant it to say — and the gods do not have to refute it. The act of speaking it in their presence is enough. "I saw well why the gods do not speak to us openly," she says. "Till that word can be dug out of us, why should they hear the babble that we think we mean? How can they meet us face to face till we have faces?" And later, even more starkly: "When the author walked on to the stage the play was over." The whole tableau in which Orual's complaint made sense was a tableau she could only sustain in the author's absence. Once he steps in, the demand to explain himself is exposed for what it always was — a demand made by a creature to its Creator that the order of things be reversed.

Lewis saw this clearly because of what had happened to him. He wrote The Problem of Pain as a confident philosophical defense. Joy died. He wrote A Grief Observed in raw fragments. And by the end of A Grief Observed, he is not in the same place as he was at the beginning. He has not received an explanation. He has received, slowly, a different kind of presence. "I had been warned," he writes near the end. "I had been warned — I warned myself — not to reckon on worldly happiness. We were even promised sufferings. They were part of the program." The change is not in the question and not really in the answer. The change is that God is in the room.

This is what Christians have always meant by the limits of theodicy. The discipline of theodicy — the formal philosophical justification of God's ways in the face of evil — is not nothing. It has its place. There are arguments worth making, and we will make some of them in the days ahead: free will, soul-making, the cross. But every Christian who has thought about this seriously has eventually said the same thing: the arguments do not, in the end, deliver what the sufferer needs. P.T. Forsyth said it most directly: "God does not give us explanations; he gives us a Son."

What does that mean for you, today, in the middle of whatever you are walking through? It means at least three things.

First, the demand for an explanation is not an unreasonable demand. Job made it. The Psalms make it. Jesus made it from the cross. God does not punish you for asking. He does not even punish Job for thirty-five chapters of asking. The demand is allowed.

Second, the explanation is, in this life, mostly not given. Christians who promise that if you just understand the doctrine of providence well enough you will see why God permitted the cancer, the miscarriage, the war — those Christians are working from a Bible Job is not in. The Bible Job is in says: he laid the foundations of the earth, you did not, and there are some things you will not understand on this side of the grave.

Third, what is given instead is presence. God in the whirlwind. God on the cross. God by his Spirit, in the dark, with you. This will frustrate you. It frustrates almost everyone. But it satisfied Job. By the end of the book the man who has lost everything says, "Now my eye sees you." And whatever that seeing was, it was enough.

Going Deeper

Read all of Job 38-41 in one sitting if you can. Pay attention to how strange the speech is. God names creature after creature — wild donkey, ostrich, war horse, hawk, Behemoth, Leviathan — as if to say: the world is bigger than your moral framework. There are forces, beauties, and terrors in this universe you have not begun to comprehend, and I am the one who made and named all of them. After the reading, sit in silence. Notice that the answer Job got was not an answer at all. Notice what it did to him anyway.