What Do You Know?

Then the Lord answered Job out of the whirlwind:
² ‘Who is this that darkens counsel by words without knowledge?
³ Gird up your loins like a man,
   I will question you, and you shall declare to me.

⁴ ‘Where were you when I laid the foundation of the earth?
   Tell me, if you have understanding.
⁵ Who determined its measurements—surely you know!
   Or who stretched the line upon it?
⁶ On what were its bases sunk,
   or who laid its cornerstone
⁷ when the morning stars sang together
   and all the heavenly beings^* shouted for joy?

⁸ ‘Or who shut in the sea with doors
   when it burst out from the womb?—
⁹ when I made the clouds its garment,
   and thick darkness its swaddling band,
¹⁰ and prescribed bounds for it,
   and set bars and doors,
¹¹ and said, “Thus far shall you come, and no farther,
   and here shall your proud waves be stopped”?

¹² ‘Have you commanded the morning since your days began,
   and caused the dawn to know its place,
¹³ so that it might take hold of the skirts of the earth,
   and the wicked be shaken out of it?
¹⁴ It is changed like clay under the seal,
   and it is dyed^* like a garment.
¹⁵ Light is withheld from the wicked,
   and their uplifted arm is broken.

¹⁶ ‘Have you entered into the springs of the sea,
   or walked in the recesses of the deep?
¹⁷ Have the gates of death been revealed to you,
   or have you seen the gates of deep darkness?  - Job 38:1-17

Job, a once prosperous and healthy man, had been reduced to sitting on an ash heap, scratching his sores with shards of pottery and being regaled by his wife and friends who urge him to either curse God or confess to wrongdoing which had brought this punishment against him.

Today, though, the reading takes a different turn. We hear from God who proceeded to bombard Job with number of questions to which Job had no answers. How could he? Job was a man of his time whose travels were probably limited to maybe a few dozen miles from his home, and who had probably no knowledge or expertise in geography or astronomy or even theology. It seems as if God had joined Job's friends in trying to wrench some sort of confession from Job, whether it was a confession of guilt or one of ignorance.

The questions put to Job would probably confound many of us who live in an interconnected and technologically advanced world. Children are taught about basic science and geography in elementary school while  physics, chemistry, astronomy and higher math are taught in secondary education. Colleges and universities delve deeper into more specialized bits of astrophysics and microbiology while television brings explanatory and exploratory programming  to viewers right in their homes about subjects that even a few decades ago were not even commonly heard words.

But for all our technology and information dissemination, we are still in sort of the same boat with Job. We can quote theories and hypotheses about how this and that happened as well as formulas and facts about when, where and perhaps why things are the way they are. What hasn't changed, though, is that despite the Big Bang and whatever theory has come after it, whatever  satellites and exploratory vehicles penetrating far beyond what we could ever imagine in the heavens, whatever sophisticated equipment capable of computing millions of figures and billions of pieces of data in the time it takes to blink an eye, and no matter how advanced and specialized things are or how much knowledge we have attained, we still don't have the answers. We know something happened but what, how and when?

Even if the Big Bang is an actuality, what caused that initial spark that began it all? Nobody's been able to give a definitive answer to that one yet. What really causes cells to go wild and form cancers?  We think it is partly environmental, partly hereditary, perhaps even partly the result of diet or some other physical factor like smoking, but why do some who have never smoked or been around smoke get lung cancer?  Why are young children stricken with brain, blood or other cancers when they obviously haven't committed any of the "sins" we would expect a cancer victim to have done. What causes the earth to move when it does? We can often speculate or sometimes even pinpoint  where the weaknesses in the earth's crust are and where an earthquake (or a volcanic eruption or a landslide or any of a number of natural disasters) is likely to happen but we can't tell for sure precisely when or where those things will occur and, as a result, many people lose their lives while we smugly call it "God's will." I wonder if we'd be so blasé about it if it happened to us? Wouldn't we want God to fix it for us?

God goes on for quite some time in his speech to Job, the whole thing taking up three entire chapters and one verse of a fourth, but Job still has no answers and God doesn't seem to be willing to let him off the hook. It wasn't that Job lacked faith; he had plenty of that or he would have fallen prey to his wife's and his friends' suggestions that he confess to something, anything that would allow God to accept his repentance and fix things.

I don't deal well with this kind of God. I am somewhat glad to read that Job is not a real character but rather a work of fiction to get certain things out in the open and some great poetry written. I don't like to think of God as playing games with people's lives either to prove a point or to possibly pull the puppet strings and make a person do precisely what God wants them to do. If that was how God wanted it, why would there have been this thing we call free will built into our DNA?

One choice I have is to read Job as a story, much like the stories our mothers told us as children, stories that had good plots and characters but which were designed to teach something without coming right out and saying it. It is possible to teach in ways other than stories, but stories are usually more fun and people are more inclined to remember fun than they are strictly factual (or presented as factual) ones.

I still can't answer God's questions, but then, part of what I learned from the reading is that I don't have to answer. I think it is enough to think about them and the wonders of the world they represent. It's always good to have a little mystery in our lives, it keeps things from being too predictable and boring.

And one more thing not having all the answers does: it makes me think more about God. I think that's a pretty good thing all by itself.


Originally published at Speaking to the Soul on Episcopal Café Saturday, September 13, 2014.