Day 14: Job 38-39

Welcome to 5 -Minute Bible, your daily guide for your daily reading. Today is

January the 14th and we'll be reading Job 38 -39. Now today's reading is the moment that the entire book of Job has been moving toward.

After chapters of silence and argument and protest and human reasoning, Job 38 -39 marks the point where God finally speaks.

Now we're still in the patriarchal world, no law, no temple, no priesthood, but now the conversation decisively shifts.

God does not respond to Job's logic, he responds to Job's assumptions about how the world actually works.

The world when arrives, it's a theophany, which just means a physical appearance of the manifestation of God.

And it arrives not to explain Job's suffering, but to correct a false view of reality.

You see, in Job 38, God answers Job out of the whirlwind with a relentless series of questions about the foundations of the earth, the boundaries of the sea, the pathways of light, the storehouses of snow, the governance of the entire cosmos.

These aren't riddles that are meant to humiliate Job, they're actually revelations meant to reorient him.

In Job 39, God turns to the animal world and he talks about wild goats and donkeys and oxen and ostriches and horses and hawks and eagles, creatures that Job himself does not feed, creatures that he does not command, creatures that he does not restrain or even fully understand.

Together, these chapters present a world that is ordered and purposeful, yet staggeringly complex far beyond the reach of human calculation or imagination.

So as you read today, ask yourself the following questions. What if reality itself is far too complex for me to judge

God's actions within it? You see, Job, like his friends, assumed that the world was simple enough for them to interpret it morally from their own vantage point, that they could make assumptions about the state of the universe based off of their own lived experience and say that, yes, good people are always blessed and yes, wicked people are always cursed.

And the fact of the matter is, is that they don't understand the world at all. God doesn't deny

Job's righteousness or even his own holiness and justice. Instead, he exposes how limited both

Job and his friends' field of vision truly is. The central tension in Job 38 -39 is the collapse of human competence.

Job and his friends assume that the world operated on a manageable moral system, one that they could observe, assess, and evaluate.

And yet God responds by taking Job on a tour of the universe. From the fastest moving stars to the smallest crawling creatures, from the ocean depths to the mountain heights,

God shows Job a reality that is so vast and so interconnected and information -dense that no human mind could ever grasp it.

Job cannot even fully understand his own moment in history, he can't even understand everything that is happening all around him, much less the infinite layers of cause and consequence and timing and purpose that govern

God's creation. And if Job lacks the data to govern whether or not animals are fed and fish are kept alive at the bottom of the ocean, then he certainly lacks the data to pass judgment on God's wisdom.

Silence in this moment is not surrender, it's a return to sanity. Now these chapters point us directly to Jesus Christ by exposing the limits of human reason and the necessity of divine wisdom.

The God who overwhelms Job with the complexity of the cosmos is the same God who later enters that cosmos in the person of Jesus Christ.

Job is shown that only God can rule with wisdom because only God possesses all knowledge, and in Christ, that infinite wisdom takes on human flesh.

The one who actually does hold the galaxies together is the one who submits to an even greater suffering than Job, and he doesn't explain it.

Jesus trusts the Father perfectly, not because the suffering makes sense from below, but because it is governed wisely from God above.

The cross proves that God's wisdom operates at a scale and on a level that we cannot possibly understand, and yet the resurrection confirms that God's wisdom never fails.

As you read Job 38 -39 today, I want you to resist the urge that you have as a human to demand answers before you get to a place of trust.

Let God correct your confidence before he corrects your circumstances, because once we admit that the world is far too beautiful and complex for us to rule over it, judge it, or even explain it, then faith finally has the room to breathe and trust in a sovereign

God, and tomorrow Job's response will show us what true humility looks like when a man realizes that he does not need to know all of the answers to trust in this most trustworthy

God. And with that, I want you to read your Bible carefully, devotionally, and joyfully, and may the

Lord use His Word to sanctify you completely, and we will continue our journey tomorrow.