Tuesday: The Lord as Creator

Read Job 38:4–41. What questions does God ask Job, and what is the purpose of those questions?

If Job expected some detailed explanation about why all these calamities happened to him, he didn’t get it. Instead, what he got was a flow of rhetorical questions contrasting the Lord in His creative might to the transience and ignorance of poor Job.

“ ‘Where were you when I laid the foundations of the earth?’ ” the Lord begins (Job 38:4, NKJV). After echoing some of the earliest images in Genesis—for example, the origins of the earth, the sea, light, and darkness—God says to Job (basically) that, of course you know all these things “because you were born then, or because the number of your days is great” (see Job 38:21, NKJV).

The Lord then points to wonders and mysteries of Creation, again with a series of rhetorical questions that cover not just the foundations of the earth but also the mysteries of the weather and even of the stars themselves. “ ‘Can you bind the cluster of the Pleiades, or loose the belt of Orion?’ ” (Job 38:31, NKJV). He then points Job back to the earth, to everything from human insight (Job 38:36) to the lives of wild animals (Job 38:39–41)—a theme that is fleshed out in much more detail all through Job chapter 39, as well. Had the book been written today, the Lord might have asked, “Who binds the quarks in protons and neutrons?” “Where were you when I first measured out a Planck mass?” “Is it by your wisdom that gravity bends space and time?”

The answer to all these questions is the same: of course not. Job wasn’t there for any of those events, and he had little knowledge about any of the phenomena the Lord referred to. God’s point was to show Job that even with all his wisdom and knowledge and even though he spoke “right” (Job 42:7) about God in contrast to these other men, Job still knew so little. And his lack of knowledge was best revealed by how great Job’s ignorance of the created world was.

If Job knew so little about the creation, how much could he understand about the Creator? What a powerful contrast between the Creator and the created, between God and humanity. Though God contrasted Himself to Job, any other human being (with the exception of Jesus) would have sufficed, as well. What are we in contrast to God? And yet, look at what this God has done to save us and to offer us the hope of eternal fellowship with Him.