The God Who Owns Everything
Job 38:1-42:6
St. John’s United Church of Christ
Greeley, Colorado
May 7, 2023
Rev. Juvenal Cervantes
Here’s the sermon in one sentence: The God who created all things calls us to trust Him in life and to be good stewards and demonstrate affectional care for our planet as he cares for us.
You remember Job, do you not, and his story?
A righteous man, he had family and he had wealth and respect and health and then through a series of tests that came, all of these things were taken away, one after another.
He lost his wealth, he lost his children, he lost his own health. He found himself in chronic pain and he could not possibly understand why this was happening to him because he believed, like his world believed, and how people still believe in our world, that bad things just don’t happen to good people.
And he was a righteous man and these things were happening to him and all he could think of was, “There must be something wrong in my life.”
He had four friends who came to visit him, who came to comfort him: Eliphaz the Temanite, Bildad the Shuhite, and Zophar the Naamathite and Elihu the Buzhai. They just came to comfort him and they did a very smart thing for a week, they just sat in silence to comfort him and said nothing. But here was their friend, suffering these things and all of their piddling theology told them that he wouldn’t be suffering if he hadn’t had some great sin in his life.
And so they begin to speak to Job and they are not comforters. They just offered to him their awful theology and they just said, “Just admit it, confess your sin, turn it over to God and be forgiven and all things will be restored,” and Job argues back with them and protests his innocent and for thirty-six chapters, Job and his four friends wrestle with these tidy ideas right in the midst of his agony and his chronic pain, he called out for answers. He called out to God, “God, I need an answer from you, I need to know why this is happening to me. I’d take you to court, if I could, but if I did, guess who the judge would be?”
So, Job is feeling small and insignificant and confused and feels he is suffering unjustly. He wanted God to answer him. And finally, in chapter 38, Job got what he wanted.
It says, “The Lord spoke to Job out of the storm” (Job 38:1).
When God spoke to Job, in the middle of his suffering and all of his questions, he didn’t say, “Job, I’ve come with answers for all your questions,” He said, “I’ve come with questions for all your answers.” Then the next three chapters, God floods Job’s heart and mind with a torrent of questions that fall from heaven on Job’s head and they challenged Job’s wisdom and the wisdom of his friends, and of his culture and they challenge our wisdom as well.
In the midst of suffering, he offers Job a different perspective: His perspective as Creator of the universe. Seventy-one questions fall from the throne of God and pound on Job’s heart and mind, one after the other. They are questions Job cannot answer. I’m not going to read all of them, but several of them. Listen.
Where were you when I laid the earth’s foundation? Who marked off the dimensions? Surely you know. Who stretched the measuring line across it, on what were its footing set? Who laid it’s cornerstone while the morning stars sand together and all the angels shouted for joy?
“Who shut up the sea behind doors when it burst forth from the womb, when I made the clouds its garment and wrapped it in thick darkness, when I fixed limits for it and set its doors and bars in place, when I said, ‘This far you may come and no farther; here is where your proud waves halt’?
“Have you entered the storehouses of the snow or seen the storehouses of the hail, which I reserve for times of trouble, for days of war and battle?
What is the way to the place where the lightning is dispersed, or the place where the east winds are scattered over the earth?
Who cuts a channel for the torrents of rain, and a path for the thunderstorm, to water a land where no one lives, an uninhabited desert, to satisfy a desolate wasteland and make it sprout with grass?
“Can you bind the chains of the Pleiades? Can you loosen Orion’s belt? Can you bring forth the constellations in their seasons or lead out the Bear with its cubs?
Do you know the laws of the heavens? Can you set up God’s dominion over the earth? “Can you raise your voice to the clouds and cover yourself with a flood of water? Do you send the lightning bolts on their way? Do they report to you, ‘Here we are’?
Who gives the ibis wisdom or gives the rooster understanding? Who has the wisdom to count the clouds? Who can tip over the water jars of the heavens when the dust becomes hard and the clods of earth stick together?
“Do you hunt the prey for the lioness and satisfy the hunger of the lions when they crouch in their dens or lie in wait in a thicket?
Who provides food for the raven when its young cry out to God and wander about for lack of food?
“Do you know when the mountain goats give birth? Do you watch when the doe bears her fawn? Do you count the months till they bear?
“Who let the wild donkey go free? Who untied its ropes? I gave it the wasteland as its home, the salt flats as its habitat. It laughs at the commotion in the town; it does not hear a driver’s shout. It ranges the hills for its pasture and searches for any green thing.
“Will the wild ox consent to serve you? Will it stay by your manger at night? Can you hold it to the furrow with a harness? Will it till the valleys behind you? Will you rely on it for its great strength? Will you leave your heavy work to it? Can you trust it to haul in your grain and bring it to your threshing floor?
“The wings of the ostrich flap joyfully, though they cannot compare with the wings and feathers of the stork. She lays her eggs on the ground and lets them warm in the sand, unmindful that a foot may crush them, that some wild animal may trample them. She treats her young harshly, as if they were not hers; she cares not that her labor was in vain, for God did not endow her with wisdom or give her a share of good sense. Yet when she spreads her feathers to run, she laughs at horse and rider.
“Do you give the horse its strength or clothe its neck with a flowing mane? Do you make it leap like a locust, striking terror with its proud snorting? It paws fiercely, rejoicing in its strength, and charges into the fray. It laughs at fear, afraid of nothing; it does not shy away from the sword. The quiver rattles against its side, along with the flashing spear and lance.
“Does the hawk take flight by your wisdom and spread its wings toward the south? Does the eagle soar at your command and build its nest on high? It dwells on a cliff and stays there at night; a rocky crag is its stronghold. From there it looks for food; its eyes detect it from afar. Its young ones feast on blood, and where the slain are, there it is.”
That’s a few of the questions. It doesn’t sound much like an answer to Job’s suffering, does it? Not a single statement that God gives Job in his answer begins with, “Because…” or “Let me explain..,” or “Let me help you understand.” Instead Job is asked to ponder questions bigger than his brain.
Carl Sagan, the astrophysicist, atheist, who several years ago hosted a popular show called “Cosmos,” used to try to demonstrate our apparent insignificance by pointing out that our sun was only a moderately-sized star in the corner of the milky way galaxy, a system of one-hundred billion stars, which was only one of a hundred billion galaxies and planet earth was just a speck of dust in that. And each one of us seven billion people on the planet is only a speck of dust on the planet who lives only 75, 80, 90 years, which is a split second compared to cosmic time.
That makes you feel a little insignificant, doesn’t it? It’s a little bit of what Job was expected to feel right there and he’s supposed to understand as we are, that this is not all about us.
To think that a creature of our size and our brief experience, could comprehend the order and the maintenance of the creation of this vast universe in its details and the intricacies of life in just this planet, much less the universe, to think that we could do so, would be foolish. God seems to think so. And as he heard God’s questions, Job began to think so too.
When we read that barrage of questions that fall on Job, we should also begin to question our own wisdom, the piddling orthodoxy of our own world that says, “This whole creation is for us of what we’ve come to call ‘natural resources,’ meaning things that we can access and use, however we wish to use them.