Scripture Daily

Context No. 1352 of 4322 · Job

Context · Reflection

Job 26:1-14: in context

1Then Job answered, 2“How have you helped him who is without power! How have you saved the arm that has no strength! 3How have you counseled him who has no wisdom, and plentifully declared sound knowledge! 4To whom have you uttered words? Whose spirit came out of you? 5“The departed spirits tremble, those beneath the waters and all that live in them. 6Sheol is naked before God, and Abaddon has no covering. 7He stretches out the north over empty space, and hangs the earth on nothing. 8He binds up the waters in his thick clouds, and the cloud is not burst under them. 9He encloses the face of his throne, and spreads his cloud on it. 10He has described a boundary on the surface of the waters, and to the confines of light and darkness. 11The pillars of heaven tremble and are astonished at his rebuke. 12He stirs up the sea with his power, and by his understanding he strikes through Rahab. 13By his Spirit the heavens are garnished. His hand has pierced the swift serpent. 14Behold, these are but the outskirts of his ways. How small a whisper do we hear of him! But the thunder of his power who can understand?”

Job answers his friends with heavy irony, then lifts his eyes to the greatness of God in creation. Sheol lies naked before God; he stretches out the north over empty space and hangs the earth on nothing; he binds the waters in his clouds without their bursting; he has drawn a circle on the face of the waters at the boundary of light and darkness; the pillars of heaven tremble at his rebuke. And then Job says the thing the whole passage is building toward: these are but the outskirts of his ways, and how small a whisper we hear of him. But the thunder of his power, who can understand?

The line to carry away is the last one: these are but the outskirts of his ways; how small a whisper do we hear of him. Job has just surveyed the wonders of creation, the earth hung on nothing, the waters bound in clouds, the vault of the sky, and then he says that all of it, everything we can see and name of God's work, is only the outer fringe, the faint edge of what God is. What we perceive is a whisper; the full thunder of God is beyond anyone's grasp. That is a humbling and a freeing thought at once. Humbling, because it puts our confident opinions about God in their place; if the whole visible creation is only the outskirts of his ways, then our understanding of him, however much we have learned, is a whisper of the whole, and we ought to hold it with humility. And freeing, because it means God is always greater than our grasp of him, never exhausted by our theology or contained by our categories, an ocean of which we have seen a shoreline. Job speaks these words in the middle of his suffering, when God's ways toward him made no sense, and there is comfort in them even there: the God whose dealings we cannot understand is the God whose greatness we could never fully understand anyway, and the fact that his ways exceed us is not a sign that he is absent but that he is God. We hear a whisper; the thunder is real, and it is his.

Do I hold my understanding of God with the humility Job counsels, knowing that all I grasp is a whisper of the whole, and can I find comfort even in my confusion that the God whose ways exceed me is greater than I could ever contain?

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