25 ¶ Who hath divided a watercourse for the
overflowing of waters, or a way for the lightning of thunder; 26 To cause it to rain on the earth, where no
man is; on the wilderness, wherein there is no man; 27 To satisfy the desolate and waste ground; and
to cause the bud of the tender herb to spring forth? 28 Hath the rain a father? or who hath begotten
the drops of dew? 29 Out of whose womb
came the ice? and the hoary frost of heaven, who hath gendered it? 30 The waters are hid as with a stone, and the
face of the deep is frozen. 31 Canst
thou bind the sweet influences of Pleiades, or loose the bands of Orion?
32 Canst thou bring forth Mazzaroth in
his season? or canst thou guide Arcturus with his sons? 33 Knowest thou the ordinances of heaven? canst
thou set the dominion thereof in the earth? 34
Canst thou lift up thy voice to the clouds, that abundance of waters may
cover thee? 35 Canst thou send
lightnings, that they may go, and say unto thee, Here we are? 36 Who hath put wisdom in the inward parts? or
who hath given understanding to the heart? 37
Who can number the clouds in wisdom? or who can stay the bottles of
heaven, 38 When the dust groweth into
hardness, and the clods cleave fast together? 39 Wilt thou hunt the prey for the lion? or fill
the appetite of the young lions, 40 When
they couch in their dens, and abide in the covert to lie in wait? 41 Who provideth for the raven his food? when
his young ones cry unto God, they wander for lack of meat.
In God’s rhetorical interrogation of
Job He asks several questions which may seem perplexing to us. In verse 25 a
connection is made between lightning and thunder, which we know now that one
causes the other. Aristotle, as late as the third century BC, attributed
thunder to a collision between clouds. The disturbing, again, implication in verse 25
is that even when there is flooding, God disperses overflowing water as He sees
fit. This is a frightening prospect if we consider what the Bible is telling us
that even in a seemingly random process God is in control. Did you ever imagine
that?
If you remember the old Zen koan, “if
a tree falls in the forest and no one is around to hear it, does it make a
sound?” Here, God speaks about how He causes all things, even where man is
nowhere around to witness the things. It rains in places where man is not to
soak the parched ground and cause plants to grow that man will never see. Think
about this. From the dense forests of Borneo to the jungles of Brazil there is life
and there are events happening that we will never know about experientially.
There are things happening a million light-years from us that we have no knowledge
of now or at any time in our lives. Man is not the measure of all things. The universe
God built for Himself. We are a part of His plan. But, we are not the only
part.
Verse 28 places God squarely as the
author of every drop of dew. Think of that. Imagine it, if you will. Every
snowflake, the ice on a pond, the frost on the ground, all of it, every
microscopic piece of it created by God, not just the result of a random
process, an, “accident of nature,” but a direct execution of divine will. It
staggers the modern mind.
The anthropologist, Susan Friend
Harding, wrote, “The membrane between disbelief and belief is thinner than we
think.” (41) Most Christians in America seem to believe in a caretaker God,
like a gardener, watching over life processes and natural events that He can
only affect in a minimal way by exerting Himself from outside of the process,
by interrupting the process, like a landlord we call on to fix the plumbing in
our apartment when it leaks. American Christians, even fundamentalists, can’t
wrap their minds around the God presented in the Bible. They can wrap their
minds around the God presented in their culture. That God is a sort of manager,
or at times a warrior-king, or at times a big brother, and at times even a
benefactor, but He is most certainly not the God presented in the Bible who
controls every moment everywhere in His universe. He is neither surprised nor
at a disadvantage when a thing happens. He either made it happen or permitted
it to happen. Period. And that is just and right and as it should be, your
fear, your grief, your pain, your discomfort notwithstanding.
God now moves masterfully in His
speech to the farthest reaches of outer space, to the nearby atmosphere of
earth, and into the human heart, the spiritual heart of understanding, emotion,
and reason, to underscore His sovereign reign over the sum total of reality. He
even speaks of causing clods of dirt and providing food for wild animals and
birds. He does this, Himself. He is the author of it.
This is a different earth, a
different universe, than what we are used to imagining. Be honest with
yourself, when the snow piled deep in your yard you didn’t think of it being a
direct act of God any more than when you started your car did you think that.
We have lived for several hundred
years in a universe we thought was governed by blind forces. The only
difference between many Christians and atheists have been that Christians
thought there was a benevolent and powerful entity who wound up those forces
and who would intervene occasionally to interrupt those blind forces on the
Christian’s behalf. Both are wrong. Dead wrong.
(41) Susan Friend Harding, The Book of Falwell: Fundamentalist Language
and Politics (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2000), 58.
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