Preached on Sunday, October 20, 2024, the Twenty-Second Sunday after Pentecost, at Trinity Cathedral, Little Rock.

I preach this morning on our passage from the book of Job: “The LORD answered Job out of the whirlwind: ‘Who is this that darkens counsel by words without knowledge? Gird up your loins like a man, I will question you, and you shall declare to me.’”

I have to say, I preach on this passage with some caution. Not fear––I remain confident that God speaks to us from this book of Holy Scripture––but caution. And thankfully, we’re in good company. One of the great Swiss Reformers of the sixteenth century, Theodore Beza, had this to say: “I am [cautious] to expound the [book of] Job, in which … there are many dark and hard places, inso­much as I must here of necessity sail, as it were, among the rocks: and yet I hope I shall not make any shipwreck” [1]. And that feels about right. That seems to be the preacher’s task here: sailing through the book of Job, ever mindful that she or he might runaground, or worse, sink to the ocean floor, bringing down everyone else on board––that is, if said preacher is not cautious!

But perhaps some of us are new to the book of Job, and so, understandably, a uneasy with all this talk of caution and ship-wrecking. Allow me to explain.

The book of Job stands apart from the rest of the books in the Old Testament. It’s a different time and place, without any recognizable connection to or continuation of the story of Israel. Rather, this book focuses on the relationship between the LORD God and Job, a man from a land called Uz. What we know about Job is that he’s “blameless and upright, one who feared God and [always] turned away from evil” (Job 1:1). But we also know that, one day, great calamity falls upon Job by the hand of Satan. Strangely enough, the LORD God knows all about Satan’s plan. There’s a kind of deal struck between God and Satan, for Satan to see if “Job fears God for nothing,” to see Job’s integrity in action.

Scripture tells us that, at first, it all begins with what Job has: livestock stolen, servants slain, livelihood consumed by fire, and children lying dead in the dust of a downfallen family home. It’s tragic. And then, in Satan’s second round, he turns to Job himself: “inflicted [with] loathsome sores from the sole of his foot to the crown of his head.” (Job 2:7).

And if things weren’t bad enough, then enter Job’s three friends with their death-dealing words. Eliphaz asks Job, “Think now, who that was innocent ever perished? Or where were the upright cut off” (Job 4:7)? And Blidad, thereafter: “…if you [Job] are pure and upright, surely then [the LORD] will rouse himself for you and restore to you your rightful place” (Job 8:6). And then Zophar says something particularly terrible: Job, “God exacts of you less than your guilt deserves” (Job 8:6). Who needs enemies when you have friends like these?

But these words from so-called “friends” come nowhere close to the pain of the LORD’s great, deafening silence: He’s nowhere to be heard and nowhere to be seen, even as Job cries out to God, demanding an audience. At one point, Job says, “Even when I cry out, ‘Violence!’ I am not answered; I call aloud, but there is no justice” (Job 19:7).

Justice: that’s the challenge of this book, the rock around which we must cautiously sail. Where’s the justice? How is any of this fair for Job? He’s faithful––isn’t he? It would be easy for us to cast our vote with Job’s friends: surely, this man from a land called Uz did something wrong! But that can’t be. Remember, Job is “blameless and upright.” It cannot be his fault. Which brings us back to our original problem: where is the justice?

The beauty of Beza’s nautical metaphor––his image of interpreting the book of Job as navigating a ship through rocky waters––is that it helps put this “justice problem” in perspective. This whole problem is actually something from which we must steer clear. The caution required of us as faithful readers is to sail past this rock, lest we get stuck. To put it another way: the question of justice––the problem of God’s seeming injustice!––isn’t really our destination, and if we’re not careful, it can prevent us from getting where God wants us to go. We shouldn’t ignore the question of justice, but at the same time, we don’t need to linger over it too long, because God has a different destination in mind.

So, what is the destination of the book of Job? We might think that it’s the book’s ending. At the very end of this long book, God gives Job a new life: a new livelihood, a new family, doubling all Job’s earlier possessions, blessing his latter days more than his former ones, and Job dies “old and satisfied.” And maybe that makes for a good destination, or at least, good enough: no matter what God puts us through, He has something good for us on the other side. No doubt, Amen to that. But there’s still something trite about it: does a restoration of our life after it has been taken from us really comfort us? No, I think that God has a different destination in mind.

We learn of God’s intended destination not at the book’s end, but here in our passage for today from chapter 38. Job’s life hasn’t yet been restored to him, no, but this is when God finally responds to Job. This whole time, Job has demanded an audience with God. He has trusted God, yes, but he has also insisted on getting some answers––an experience with which we can resonate, I’m sure. And finally, God shows up, “[answering] Job out of the whirlwind,” Scripture tells us (Job 38:1). But not with answers Job or any of us would expect! No, God answers with questions of His own.

“Who is this that darkens counsel by words without knowledge? Gird up your loins like a man, I will question you, and you shall declare to me. Where were you when I laid the foundation of the earth? Tell me, if you have understanding. Who determined its measurements—surely you know! Or who stretched the line upon it? On what were its bases sunk, or who laid its cornerstone when the morning stars sang together and all the heavenly beings shouted for joy?”

And so the list of questions goes on. Now, notice that all of these questions are unanswerable, unanswerable “because Job’s knowledge and experience are limited to his existence. He can only know what he knows” [2]. As Judy Fentress-Williams puts it, “God’s questions alert [Job and all of us] to the vastness of the created world, in a way that amazes and decenters the experience of this one human being” [3]. That’s what comes to Job and comes to all of us from out of the whirlwind: there are things in this life that are simply beyond us, beyond our limitations, beyond our power. And, amazingly, Job comes to accept this, acknowledging God’s power and his own limitations. This is what he says in just a few chapters:

“My ears had heard about you, [O LORD],” Job says, “but now my eyes have seen you. Therefore, I relent and find comfort on dust and ashes” (Job 42:5–6). 

It is only from God’s divine disclosure, God’s decision to speak from the whirlwind, that Job is able to understand what Robert Alter calls “the incommensurability”––the inequality–– “between his human notions of right and wrong and the structure of reality” [4]. Job’s quest for answers leads to something else––in acknowledging his limitations he also can…perhaps find some comfort in the unknowability of our existence.” Judy Fentress-Williams tells it like it is: “Sometimes our only option is to choose the relationship [with God] over knowledge” [5].

This is the destination of our voyage through this dark and murky book of the Bible; that’s the comfort given to us by the God of Holy Scripture here. It’s not a comfort we might have asked for ourselves, but it is, indeed, a comfort: a profound disruption and decentering of how we would make sense of things, and a invitation to rest in the deep things of God, the One Who laid the foundations of the earth, the One Who determined its measurements, Who laid its cornerstone when the morning stars sang together, the One Who sends forth lightning and Who numbered the clouds. Yes, our hope is in God, not in our knowledge or understanding, not in our ability to make sense of things, and in fact, not in anything that has to do with us, but in God, and in God alone. The Bible has a little shorthand word for all this: “faith.” Faith is resting in the utter sufficiency of God and the insufficiency of our own limitations. Faith is that strange activity in which we don’t do much at all, simply letting God be God, which is to say “letting God be our hope.”

Wherever we find ourselves today, wherever we are in the rough places of life’s way, may we come to the shores of such faith, may such comfort be ours, not a comfort the earth can give us, not a comfort we can conjure up for ourselves, but a comfort given to us by the Good God Who holds our souls in life and our time in His hands, the God Who is always “more”––always “beyond us”––the God Who bids us to lay down every caution and fear we carry, in Whose grace we trust, and in Whose fullness we find our rest. Amen.

[1] Theodore Beza, Commentary on Job, 1587.

[2] Judy Fentress-Williams, Holy Imagination: A Literary and Theological Introduction to the Whole Bible (Nashville: Abingdon Press, 2021), 160.

[3] Fentress-Williams, Holy Imagination, 160, italics mine.

[4] Robert Alter, The Hebrew Bible: A Translation with Commentary (New York: W. W. Norton and Company, 2019), 577.

[5] Fentress-Williams, Holy Imagination, 161.