Irrelevant Relevance
On the cover of your bulletin today, you will find two pictures of a tiny slice of our universe. In the first picture, you can see the relative size of the nine planets… O.K., officially eight planets… that circle our sun. Pluto, as you know, is no longer officially a planet. Earth, one of the smaller planets, is in the front row on the far left. In the second picture, you can see some of the suns in our galaxy. There are two in the back and six in the front… although our sun, on the far left of the front row, is just a pencil dot… barely one pixel in size… and Jupiter, the largest ball in the first picture, is invisible in the scale of the second picture.
Antares, the largest ball in the second picture, is one of the most brilliant suns in the Milky Way… our galaxy… one of many galaxies in the universe. Antares guides us to one of the great constellations of the sky, Scorpio, the celestial scorpion… one of the few constellations that actually looks like what it represents. Antares, a class M red supergiant gleaming at the scorpion's heart, has a color similar to Mars. This magnificent first magnitude star, shining opposite Betelgeuse, its counterpart in Orion, is ranked the fifteenth brightest star in the sky. Its great distance of 600 light years from us reveals that it is truly luminous… about 10,000 times brighter than our Sun. Antares is so large that its diameter is larger than the orbit of Mars and three-fourths the size of the orbit of Jupiter. It is so big and so bright that we cannot even see its companion star, a fifth magnitude blue-white star, unless Antares itself is hidden behind the moon. Antares probably does not have much time left to it. It is massive enough to develop an iron core and eventually explode as a brilliant supernova, completely changing our nighttime sky. Not that you and I will see it, for the blink of an eye in astronomical time is a million years, give or take, of our time.
Why do I show you these pictures today… or have you think about the vastness of our universe? Who cares that there are stars larger and brighter than our sun… or universes beyond our universe? What relevance does that have for our text today… for the story of Job? What relevance does it have for us?
Many people think that the story of Job is the story of a godly man unjustly condemned by God simply so that God could win a bet with Satan. Not true. Some think it is the story of patience in the face of long suffering. Not true. Some think it is the story of ungodly friends who attempt to lead a godly man into sin. Also not true. That’s not to say that all those things are not present in the story. They most assuredly are! But the focus of the story is not Job at all… it is God. The real questions are “Who is God?” and “Who are we?” and “What is faith?”
The best estimates of the age of the Book of Job put it somewhere between 500 and 600 years before Christ. This is important because in the minds of those who were struggling with the concept of who God is in the Book of Job, there was no baby in the manger… no itinerant preacher… no miraculous healer… no man condemned to die on a cross… no crucifixion… and no resurrection. There was no concept of love and salvation in the way in which we understand it today. There was only a transcendent… omnipotent… mysterious… omnipresent… omniscient… almighty God… who created the world… and who spoke through the prophets. God… was a Being apart… holy and righteous… magnificent and terrible… above all… and through all… and in all.
When I read the Book of Job, I think about God sitting up in heaven, looking down and listening to some of our discussions of God and the things that what we attribute to God. Certainly, as Job’s wife and friends attempted to rationalize the many reasons why Job should curse God and die, God listened to the discourse with equal parts amazement and anger… because we know how God responded. So, I wonder, what does God think of all the things that we talk about… or write about… God today? I personally don’t think much has changed between the time the Book of Job was written and today. We make the same mistakes that Job made when we try to talk about God. And it is those mistakes that condemn to the same fate as Job… being blasted by our Creator for our arrogance.
There were basically two things wrong with Job’s discussion of God… and those same two things are present in our discussions of God today. In the first place, Job thought that whatever transgressions he may have committed against God were minor ones… and that he was not deserving of the punishment… if it indeed were that… that he was suffering at God’s hands. We, too, never believe that our transgressions against God deserve punishment. Oh we may have slipped here or there… you know, told a white lie or two… wanted something that our neighbor owns… gossiped about an acquaintance… but we have never killed anyone… or hurt our children… or abused our parents. We are basically good people… and a prayer or two of confession should cover all the sins that we may have committed since the last time we thought about it. We don’t deserve to be punished… at least, not the way that Job was punished. He didn’t deserve to have his entire family murdered… his lands taken away…his sheep and cattle slaughtered…his crops ruined.his houses destroyed. And neither do we deserve any of the challenging times that come our way in life.
In the second place, Job thought he deserved the right to present his case directly to God… that he was important enough to address his Creator face-to-face… as an equal… or close to it. And we, too, think that we have the right to plead our case with God… to address him face-to-face… to stand in his presence… before his throne. Which is why I believe that God’s response to us today would begin much as it began in our text today… with the words, “Who is this that darkens counsel by words without knowledge?” Who do you think you are anyway? What do you know? What gives you the right to talk about me at all?
Think about it for just a moment. We are talking about the Almighty God who made heaven and earth… the one who created humankind… the one who created not only this world and all that is in it… but all the other worlds that we know of… and thousands more that we have not discovered yet. We sit here on the surface of one of the tiniest planets in our solar system… which is one of the smaller solar systems in the galaxy… which is not the largest galaxy in the universe… nor the only universe in the cosmos… we sit here and have the audacity to claim that we know something about this God. What could we possibly know that would even begin to scratch the surface of knowledge of God? All of our knowledge of God wouldn’t even fill a thimble… compared to the vastness of who God is. This is the one who makes each bird… each flower… the one who makes each of the four billion people on this planet unique… yet the one who knows each of us by name and has numbered every hair on our heads. And we are talking about the Holy One… the One who cannot abide the presence of sin…the One who is totally and completely pure and righteous… the One for whom sin… in any form… is an abomination. Yet, somehow we believe that we can enter the Holy of Holies and stand alone in his presence… covered with the sin and dirt of our lives… and address him by name? What gives us that right? How can we… in our daily converse… possibly know enough about God to even begin to discuss God or God’s ways with anyone else? And yet, we, like Job and his wife… Job and his friends… argue daily about who God is and why God acts… or does not act… in certain ways… at any point in time. The sheer chutzpah of doing that is amazing! It’s a wonder God doesn’t zap all of us for daring to open our mouths on that subject.
The message of Job is very clear. God does not have to explain anything to anyone… least of all to us! God is God! God has been from the before the beginning of time… and God will be after the close of the age… and we are virtual gnats in the grand scheme of the cosmos. God does not answer to us… nor will he. Period. Look at the stunning evidence that God presents to Job through an ancient wisdom teaching tool of asking rhetorical questions: Verse 34: "Can you lift up your voice to the clouds, so that a flood of waters may cover you?” No. Verse 35: “Can you send forth lightnings, so that they may go and say to you, 'Here we are'?” No. Verse 36: “Who has put wisdom in the inward parts, or given understanding to the mind?” Only God. God continues… Can you do this? No. Can you do this? No. Who can do this? Only God. This goes on for verse after verse, chapter after chapter… each question and each answer driving home the point that Job is a nothing… a nobody… that Job has no business questioning God… the ruler of the universe.
Does all of the evidence that God presents change anything? No, it doesn’t. All of the evidence that God presents does not reveal anything to Job… or to us… that we did not already know. It doesn’t change one single thing. God is God! We already knew that. It doesn’t change anything at all. The whole litany is irrelevant. The facts about God that God presented, Job already knew… and we already know. Nothing is different after God’s questioning. Everything remains the same. Nothing has changed. Nothing that God has said has made a difference. It is irrelevant.
And yet… isn’t that precisely the point? God hasn’t changed. God doesn’t change. God is the same… yesterday… today… and tomorrow. It is the unchanging nature of God that allows us to trust in God… to put our faith in God… for we know that whatever God has been in the past… God will be in the future… and however God has acted in the past… God will act in the future. God claimed a people… and made a covenant with them… that he would be their God and they would be his people. Through ages untold, God has always provided for his people. If we are God’s people and we know that God has always provided for his people in the past… then we can have confidence that God will provide for us… now and in the future. After all, God is God! The very facts that are irrelevant because they don’t change anything… become the only things that are relevant because they are the basis of all that we believe. God is God… unchanging… forever and ever the same. And thus it is in God we trust. For our God is an awesome God. Amen.
Job 38:1-7, 34-41; Mark 10:35-45