Job 37-39

(October 19, 2014)

                Here we have the Lord’s answer to Job’s questions, and it involves a heavy dose of repetition.  As I read these chapters, I began to find my mind drifting – recognizing that I understood the concept and wondered why it had to be driven home in the manner that it was.  But then I began to think, and I realized that these were the words of the Lord and not something to be trifled with.  If He believed, in His wisdom, that repetition was important than I ought to consider why He was repeating Himself.

                As I took that different approach and went back and reread some of the Lord’s words, it really struck me that He was repeating for emphasis.  He was, in effect, trying to break through Job’s intellectual understanding of the idea that we are nothing before God so as to allow Job to really feel and understand this concept.  Job was in the same position as I was – knowing but not really knowing – and the Lord’s use of repetition was designed to change that.

                As I allowed the Lord’s words to affect me the way they were designed to, I began to better feel just what the Lord was saying when He spoke of our nothingness before Him.  His power and His wisdom are so far beyond us that we don’t even know the right questions to ask.  All we can do is to throw ourselves at Him and hope for His mercy and Grace to envelope us and bring us line upon line towards Him and towards understanding.  But we cannot understand Him while seeing through the glass darkly – much less judge Him.