Answers

Do you know the time when the wild mountain goats bear young? Or can you mark when the deer gives birth?     -Job 39:1

Life’s pace is a strange thing, especially as it moves towards and past days of significance. It is much like looking at a landmark as you speed along the highway. There is a dual sense of stillness - your eyes fixed so wholly on the particular thing - and awareness of the speed at which you are moving. All the other objects in your peripheral are simply blurs in the noise of it all. But you are not stopping to look at the landmark. Life does not allow such a thing, not really. There may be a moment longer where you can gaze at it; perhaps you turn your head as the thing moves across the horizon of your view. But it is there, and then it is not, and then you are left back among all the things that were so inconsequential.

This experience is not unique to a particular kind of living, or a particular busyness of life. Time itself - the very act of living - tends to create these landmarks, especially as the inevitable difficulties of life stack up. And then they are repeated, year after year: the holidays that remind of a broken family, the birthday of a lost child, the anniversary of a marriage gone quiet. You stare at the thing, thinking of the last time you were here. You remember the tears you were mopping off your face this exact moment last year, or three years ago, or when you were a much younger person. You enter again into the shock you lived through, the way your heart pounded during that conversation, and the feeling of looking around a room for answers. You remember again how heavy it all was, and all still is.

It is in this realization of time’s passage that a new kind of shock develops. Things have indeed changed. The seasons have come and gone, the days really do move along, and people are different from what they were. How changed the world is from just a few months ago (Is such a statement not true of any stretch of months?).

But simultaneously, how can any of the things which have changed really matter to you? Has life not just carried on in a sort of deafening, unchanged constancy? Is it not all like white noise? In fact, this might be the crux of the difficulty: even if something substantial has happened, does that substance actually compare meaningfully to the scope and size of what you’ve gone through and now live in? You changed jobs - the crib is still empty. Birthdays come for your children - the family is still broken. There are new friends, new patterns, new babies in the world - none of it seems even close to the significance of what you were struck with.

These things don’t just seem small compared to the footprint of your hardship. They actually make the hardship more central, and more meaningful. It is only larger. Ground 0 is more awfully obvious. The occurrences are not indicators of doing more life, or of change, or growth. They are simply proof-points of how traumatically substantial the weight of struggle is. Does an amputee really forget that they’re without both legs? Of course not, they simply see that their life is going to be defined by the thing.

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God’s answers to Job (Job 38-41) pose many questions, but one of the most confusing is rather simple: how are such speeches actual answers to Job’s suffering?

Job has put God on trial, as it were. He spends dozens of chapters calling God to give an account for what has happened: Job claims himself to be a righteous man, even if he knows he is not a good man. He refuses to accept the logic of his friends and cave to the assertion that his complete downfall - and it is truly complete - is because he has done wrong. “Explain Yourself, because I am not in the wrong!” he screams at the sky.

God then comes in a hurricane (Job 38:1) and spends four chapters telling Job about the most random assortment of things: the sea, snow, the constellations, the hunting lions, wild goats, donkeys, ostriches, and sea monsters. Job responds to all of this with bowed face and humbled speech:

I know that You can do everything,
And that no purpose of Yours can be withheld from You.
You asked, ‘Who is this who hides counsel without knowledge?’
Therefore I have uttered what I did not understand,
Things too wonderful for me, which I did not know.   -Job 42:1-3

Most interpretations see Job’s response as a confirmation of God performing a kind of Divine discipline. He sets Job in line, like a foolish child, by berating him with the grandness of His power. For all the poetic flourish, it is the equivalent of God shushing Job with a lesson in Holy power.

But how is such a thing actually satisfactory to the man who has lost everything? Would such a thing truly give an account for all that Job has lost? Is it comforting to be told, “You are not God. Be quiet.” Better yet, how is such a thing different from Job’s friends, the ones whom God says have spoken wrongly of Him (Job 42:7-8)?

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There is a telling thread in the book of Job. Both Job and the Satan at the book’s beginning use the language of “trapping” or “entanglement” or “hedging” when describing how God is working upon and around Job. Satan calls God out for putting a hedge around him, around his household, and around all that he has on every side (Job 1:10). He claims that Job’s loyalties are all due to God having constructed a neat, picket fence that separates Job from all the horrible things of life.

Job, in turn, wrestles with the feeling of being “entangled” by his own humanness, and “trapped” by a holy God (Job 3:23; Job 7:12; Job 16:9; Job 19:8). What good is it being a good man if God can simply trigger the trap of life’s horrors, completely justified in any situation because mankind is always deserving? Does that not doom man, Job proposes, to a life of cowering fear - would it not be better to not be born (Job 3:3-26)?

But God is listening to this. In His opening speech, God uses the same language to describe not Job, but the birth of the Sea:

“Or who shut in the sea with doors,
When it burst forth and issued from the womb;
When I made the clouds its garment,
And thick darkness its swaddling band;
When I fixed My limit for it,
And set bars and doors;
When I said,
‘This far you may come, but no farther,
And here your proud waves must stop!’   -Job 38:8-11

It is worth noting that the Sea is the mythological symbol across cultures for all that is not God: chaos, darkness, confusion, disorder.

God’s answer to both Satan and Job is much more than either of them thought possible. He has not set an atmosphere of protection around Job, nor is He waiting to trap Job in his own shortcomings. He traps Chaos itself, and commands it to stop and start. He has cut out Light from Darkness, like so much clay for a sculpture. And that is not all: He knows the birthing seasons of the wild goats, and the reasoning of the stupid ostrich (Job 39:1;13).

He is, to put it simply, both knowing and acting. There is not just presence with Him, there is direction and meaning and purpose. He holds and moves the narrative of all things, from the sea monster Leviathan to the wild ox.

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And what is this to Job? It is everything. It proves that God is neither of the most natural conclusions:

1. He is not ignoring Job’s suffering, as if there were bigger things to deal with. God’s eye is not preoccupied with other things such that He cannot come to speak with Job. Job’s suffering is not inconsequential. Even within that - Job’s suffering is not of only fractional value. It has caught His attention; God is watching. The Divine God does not have a barometer or threshold for seeing hardship. If he cares about the mane of the horse, He cares for the tears shed on a Thursday.

2. He is not out to get Job, or to discipline him enough to get back in line. God is not some schoolteacher who sees Job for all that he is - sinner and struggling saint - and consequently uses suffering to put him back in his place. The details here are very important. God has never been about putting people back where they were. He is much more interested in moving them to a place they have never been, and a place that - call it a paradox of goodness if you will - they could not have come to without the hardship they are in. This is not to say that the terrible things of life are themselves good. Nothing could be more sinister. Of course the death of Job’s children is horrific. Of course the years of abuse are heartbreaking. But God has no interest in getting you back to what you were before that horror. Be honest, is that really what you want? Or, like Job, do you come to realize that backwards is not where answers lie? Even if there is stumbling somewhere in Job’s speech, God has no interest in the one-dimensional retributive justice that Job’s friends lay out. He is looking for Job to become something, not return to something.

The answers God gives, then, are aimed to show Job the very thing he has asked for - making sense of the horror by giving it reason. And what is God’s answer? It is the confirmation that Job’s story is part of a larger story. Or better emphasized: it really is part of a larger narrative. It is not inconsequential; it matters.

Notice, God’s answer is not to give Job all the threads that will spin from the wool of his struggle. It is, rather, the proof that none of that wool is wasted. It is the affirming that Job’s cries are like little seeds in the soil of the world, and none of those seeds will die. God cares enough to make order out of not-order. God is powerful enough to not just make sense of what Job has been through; He is infinitely more than that - He is able to hold back Chaos itself.

That is who this God is. He answers Job with the most obscure details, because Job knows his own life ought to very well be just that: some obscure sentences in one line of one page of one book of one volume of a billion. Why ought God care for that? Because it is part of His narrative. He intends to do something worthwhile with it. Job does not have to see all those things to be convinced that such a thing will be done.

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This is real comfort: Your hardships are not just another part of life. Neither are they some Divine resetting of bone. They are meaningful - for your own soul, and for the world around you. They have real substance, real value, and real purpose - for yourself and for others. They are to be gathered and used for something; for somethings. And you need not see all of those things for such a thing to be true. What might come from your grief? What might be born of your tears?

To give up in despair, or to say, “This is all worthless,” in word or deed is to challenge this way of thinking. It is to claim that you have weighed all that your suffering could be against all that you perceive it to be, and the proper conclusion is imbalance. But is your judgement that sound? Are you that all-knowing? Are you able to see that far?

If you are not, then you risk selling your pain short. You will cut off what you are now from what you could become, and is that not the worst care you could show your own person? Is that not damning your own self because you cannot see what your self could one day become? Is that not the road to hell - refusing to let all that you are become all that you could be?

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There seems to be really only one thing that people want: to matter. Significance is the fuel of a soul, and the safe haven in every kind of weather. It is this that God gives to Job’s suffering: significance and meaning. Perhaps most beautifully, this is not a dismissal of Job’s hardships. The terrible things really are terrible. The horrors of life - at every level - are not little. In fact, God says the very opposite. It is to every kind of pain that God extends this offer of meaning.

Does he keep track of the births of the mountain goats? How much more is He attuned to your cries and your tears and your heartbreaks. He is not absent because you cannot hear Him. Quite the opposite: He is at work to do something with all of it.