Reverend Jonathan Waits
When God Shows Up (Job 38-42)
June 15, 2025
Do you remember the worst lecture you ever got from your parents? While I confess that I fall to it way more often than I should with my boys, my folks either weren’t much for lecturing, or else I’ve just forgotten all of them (which really isn’t very comforting news for all the wisdom we as parents impart to our children through the vehicle of the lecture…). Still, though, there are times when as parents we need to impart a great deal of important information to our children in a rapid-fire fashion. And, coincidentally or not, these times often happen to coincide with something they’ve done that wasn’t perhaps totally on the up-and-up, and when we are in a state of mild- to extreme-agitation. Now, if that happens to come across as a lecture, is that our fault? Well…probably…but that much is not where I want to go this morning. We’ll come back to this idea in a second.
This morning we are in the third and final part of our series, Grace in Hard Times. For the last couple of weeks, we have been taking a sprint through the Old Testament story of Job. Given Job’s experience, we have been working to glean some of the wisdom contained in these pages for dealing with hard times in our lives and in the lives of the people around us. Two weeks ago we watched with horror as Job’s perfect life fell completely to pieces, and wrestled with why horrible things seem to happen to apparently undeserving people. What we said then was that we have to keep the bigger picture in mind when thinking about things like this. There is more going on in this world than we can either see or know, and if we limit ourselves to what we can see and know, we’ll be able to make sense out of very little of life. We must keep ourselves firmly convinced of the character of God revealed in the pages of the Scriptures and not merely as we seem to encounter through our limited perspective, and trust that He will faithfully lead His people to a glorious future even if the road to that day passes through some very dark places.
Going on from there, last week, we breezed through the conversation that happened among Job and four of his friends…frenemies, really…as they wrestled together with why all these awful things had happened to Job. Well, “wrestled together” might convey the wrong idea. It was more like these four guys who were probably always at least a little jealous of Job coming to secretly delight in his misfortune, and to explain to him why it was really all his fault. I mean, they went from telling him that if he would just repent things would straighten out to telling him that his kids getting killed in a natural disaster was their own fault to asserting that God wasn’t being nearly as hard on him as he deserved. They all pridefully assumed they knew how the world worked, how God worked, and were trying to squash both Job and God into their little boxes. Job wouldn’t go which just made them angrier, but God up to this point has been silent and so we didn’t know what He thought.
By the end of the conversation, though, even Job had started to lean into pride in his assuming on His knowledge of God and the world, and while he wasn’t blaming God for anything, he was growing more and more despondent as neither of those two assumptions seemed to be holding up very well in the face of all he had experienced. What we gleaned from all of this is that there is no relief for pain in pride. When we or someone else is hurting, pride is the last thing we need. Instead, we need a humble trust that God has things well in hand even if we don’t understand it at all, and that He will one day make all things right. In the meantime, He’ll walk with us and even carry us through the hard to the life on the other side. None of that means, by the way, that we can’t still be incredibly honest about our feelings in the situation; about not liking the route He’s taking us on to get where we’re going. Even Jesus did that. Humility allows for that. As long as we remember who God is and who we are in light of that, we’ll be good.
This hard conversation between Job and his friends was not, however, the end of the story. In our stories it sometimes feels like God stays silent long past the point we would like Him to speak up. In Job’s story, God was silent for a long time, but eventually He did speak up. After listening to Job and the bozos try to work out why all of this bad stuff had happened to him long enough, God finally broke into the conversation Himself. But rather than coming with gentle comfort and reassuring answers to all of Job’s hard questions, God had something else in mind: a withering barrage of rhetorical questions aimed at making a point. Now, if we’re not careful in our reading, it can come off an awful lot like a lecture. But I think there’s something more important going on here; something that if we can get our minds around, we will find ourselves in a much better place when it comes to facing hard times in our life, whatever form they happen to take. You’ve got to see this for yourselves. Grab a nearby copy of the Scriptures and find your way with me to Job 38.
From Job 38:1: “Then the Lord answered Job from the whirlwind. He said…” Okay, hold up a second. What whirlwind? We don’t know. But somehow there was a whirlwind and God spoke out of it. We don’t know if Job’s friends were still there. We don’t know if they could hear this too. We don’t really know much at all about what this would have been like. But the point is that God finally broke His apparent silence on the situation and Job was able to hear it. And what does God say? Well, let’s just say that you and I probably wouldn’t have wanted to be in his feet.
“Who is this who obscures my counsel with ignorant words. Get ready to answer me like a man; when I question you, you will inform me.” Can we just utter a collective, “Yikes,” here? Yikes! What do you do when God comes to you and basically says, “Suit up, Junior. I’m going to ask some questions for you to answer now.”? Well…I guess you suit up and hang on tight. Listen to this: “Where were you when I established the earth? Tell me, if you have understanding. Who fixed its dimensions? Certainly you know! Who stretched a measuring line across it? What supports its foundations? Or who laid its cornerstone while the morning stars sang together and all the sons of God shouted for joy? Who enclosed the sea behind doors when it burst from the womb, when I made the clouds its garment and total darkness its blanket, when I determined its boundaries and put its bars and doors in place, when I declared, ‘You may come this far, but no father; your proud waves stop here’? Have you ever in your life commanded the morning or assigned the dawn its place, so it may seize the edges of the earth and shake the wicked out of it? The earth is changed as clay is by a seal; its hills stand out like the fold of a garment. Light is withheld from the wicked, and the arm raised in violence is broken. Have you traveled to the sources of the sea or walked in the depths of the oceans? Have the gates of death been revealed to you? Have you seen the gates of deep darkness? Have you comprehended the extent of the earth? Tell me, if you know this.”
On and on and on He goes. Did you make the world? Do you know how it works? Can you care for it by yourself? How about the creatures in it? Did you design them? Do you understand their natures and know well their needs for survival? Jumping to chapter 40, God is just rolling on Job. “Will the one who contends with the Almighty correct him? Let him who argues with God give an answer?” Well, Job can’t answer these questions any more than we could. He finally meekly offers a promise to keep his mouth shut in 40:4: “I am so insignificant. How can I answer you? I place my hand over my mouth. I have spoken once, and I will not reply; twice, but now I can add nothing.”
Surely the Lord hears him, but He’s not done yet. He goes on to ask Job about two specific creatures, the Behemoth and the Leviathan (probably a hippopotamus and a crocodile), which are given semi-mythical descriptions as creatures vastly more powerful than us but which are nonetheless fully submitted to God. If Job is not mightier than these powerful creatures which are fully submitted to God, then how could he hope to meaningfully question Him or anything He does?
Well, let’s go with that for a minute and hold off on questioning God, but I do have a question of my own, and it’s one you very well may be asking too: What on earth are we supposed to do with this? Job has been asking a lot of hard questions about God hoping to get some clarity on his situation. I said this a bit ago, but let’s make the point again: When God finally answers, it’s with this unrelenting barrage of rhetorical questions whose collective weight makes a very clear point: “I’m God and you’re not. Until you know what I know and can do what I do, don’t think you know better than me what’s just and what’s not. You can’t see past your own base convenience. In questioning Me like this, you’re so far above your pay grade you can’t even see it anymore.”
I don’t know about you, but at first blush, this strikes me as a kind of debate shut-down from God. As I have wrestled with this text, it took some time to get beyond this initial impression. We shouldn’t question God at all but should merely take whatever He gives good, bad, or otherwise, give Him a big “thank you,” and sit down with our portion. Where’s the compassion? Where’s the help? Where’s the love we naturally associate with God? I’ll be honest…in these chapters that’s all pretty hard to see. If this is really just a sit-down-and-shut-up from God, that doesn’t really make us want to turn to Him in our troubles. And yet…I don’t think that’s where God is pointing here. I don’t think that’s what He’s trying to do to Job. I’m convinced this is the case for a couple of reasons.
First, that’s not how Job receives it, and if he doesn’t, we don’t have any business receiving it like that. That would be kind of like people who lose their faith by watching someone else go through an apparently unexplainable tragedy even though the victim doesn’t lose their own faith through the experience. If I don’t lose my faith because of these bad things that have happened to me, what sense does it make for you to lose yours?
The second reason is that while God does challenge Job’s presumptuous assumptions to know how God works, He doesn’t ever condemn him for asking the questions in the first place. This is a rather different response from God than Job’s friends got when they were told to beg Job to intercede before God on their behalf in hopes of receiving forgiveness for their pride.
What God is really doing here is essentially saying, “You’re asking big questions there, Job. Take a look at things from my perspective.” Job’s response? Flip or swipe over to Job 42:2 with me: “I know that you can do anything and no plan of yours can be thwarted. You asked, ‘Who is this who conceals my counsel with ignorance?’ Surely I spoke about things I did not understand, things too wondrous for me to know. You said, ‘Listen now, and I will speak. When I question you, you will inform me.’ I had heard reports about you, but now my eyes have seen you. Therefore, I reject my words and am sorry for them. I am dust and ashes.” In other words, “I see things more clearly than I did before. There’s a whole lot more going on than I understood or that I can handle. You be God; I’ll be Job.”
So you see, this is actually a great deal more hopeful a response to Job than it initially appears. God wasn’t simply lecturing Job as we parents far too often do with our own kids. He was giving Job a gift: a glimpse at the bigger picture. In spite of our occasionally pridefully assuming otherwise, running the universe is a much bigger job than we can even begin to fathom. If we could really see things from His perspective, all of our concerns—even the biggest of them—would immediately seem utterly petty by comparison. That God even bothers to listen to us, to allow us to bring questions to His throne, much less to even consider answering them, reveals Him as humble beyond our ability to grasp. God designed and created the universe. He sustains it. We sometimes can’t even handle managing our own lives. And yet He desires a relationship with us. It is literally impossible to overestimate what an incomprehensibly glorious truth that is.
Friends, God welcomes our hard questions when our circumstances are painful beyond our ability to reconcile because it means we are seeking Him. The child who comes to his mom or dad with hard questions about life’s difficulties is doing so in pursuit of a relationship. The child who has no desire for a relationship doesn’t bother asking in the first place. So we should absolutely bring God our hardest questions, but we should do it with two things in mind.
First, we’ve got to stick around for the answer. Too many folks ask hard questions of God, and then reject Him to run off on their own without giving Him the courtesy of waiting for an answer as if the asking itself absolved them of their duties to Him. What good is it to ask hard questions if we don’t really want an answer? It’s dishonest. If we are only using them as a smokescreen for our prior rejection of God, shame on us. Better to be honest and simply say we’ve rejected Him than to ask a bunch of questions we don’t really want answered in the first place. Because rest assured: there isn’t a question you or I could ask that hasn’t been asked before and answered. As the wisest man to ever live once wrote: “There is nothing new under the sun.”
Second, we can’t forget who God is. We serve a God whose ways and thoughts are higher than ours. Job learned this in a particularly powerful way. God is infinite. We aren’t. And just so we’re clear: the difference between infinite and finite…is infinite. God is the Creator of everything. He doesn’t owe us anything, not even an answer to our hardest questions. We are foolish to expect anything from Him. Anything we receive from Him is a gift. But He does want our hearts; more, in fact, than just about anything else in the world. He created us for the purpose of sharing Himself with us in a loving relationship. If we are willing to give Him that, He’s glad for us to wrestle with Him because He understands our limitations and the angst those can easily cause us. He experienced those directly in Christ. For our part, we need to get to a place where we are satisfied with the affirmation that He is God because sometimes, like Job experienced, that’s the only answer He’s able to give us because we’re not able to handle anything more. If we can receive that with grace, we’ll find ourselves in a pretty good spot.
And you know, as I thought about a way I could leave you with a single idea that you could take with you and would help you keep all this in mind, this occurred to me: When trouble comes, let God be God. When trouble comes, let God be God. Here’s the truth: you stink at being God. So do I. You don’t run the world. Neither do I. You won’t be able to make sense out of most of the things that happen in life. Neither will I. But God doesn’t, He does, and He can. So why not just let Him have the job?
When trouble comes, let God be God because He knows what’s going on and sometimes, when the situation allows for it, He does let us in on the bigger picture. We see a glimpse of that in Job’s life. At the beginning of his story, we saw a behind-the-scenes look at what was going on (which, incidentally, didn’t help us make a lot more sense of it, shedding a bit more light on the wisdom of God in not giving us that view very often). Here at the end, we don’t find out what happened to Satan (that comes by the end of the whole book, though). We do, however, find out what happened to Job. Look at Job 42:10: “After Job had prayed for his friends, the Lord restored his fortunes and doubled his previous possessions. All his brothers, sisters, and former acquaintances came to him and dined with him in his house. They sympathized with him and comforted him concerning all the adversity the Lord had brought on him. Each one gave him a piece of silver and a gold earring. So the Lord blessed the last part of Job’s life more than the first. He owned fourteen thousand sheep and goats, six thousand camels, one thousand yoke of oxen, and one thousand female donkeys. He also had seven sons and three daughters. He named his first daughter Jemimah, his second Keziah, and his third Keren-happuch. No women as beautiful as Job’s daughters could be found in all the land, and their father granted them an inheritance with their brothers. Job lived 140 years after this and saw his children and their children to the fourth generation. Then Job died, old and full of days.” Pretty happy ending, no? God restored Job and made everything right once again. He rewarded him with even more material blessings than he had to start with. We do indeed serve a just God who will always make things right in the end…and sometimes even before the end.
Now, just so we’re clear, things don’t always end that way in this life. Sometimes a hard story ends hard, and we are stuck waiting a long time before finding out why it went the way it did. Sometimes we don’t find out on this side of eternity. But sometimes…sometimes we get a gift. Remember the story of the missionaries from a couple of weeks ago? Jim and Nate and the three other men were working to spread the Gospel among the Huaorani people, a notoriously violent Ecuadorian jungle tribe and were massacred for their efforts, leaving behind their wives and children to make sense of and move on from the apparently senseless tragedy. I told you then I’d tell you the rest of the story…and so, as we wrap up this series, I will.
After a period of mourning for their lost husbands, Elizabeth Elliot, Rachel Saint (Nate’s sister), and their children journeyed back to the place their husbands and fathers and brothers had been killed…and continued their Gospel-proclaiming work. Shocked by the fact that women and children were now doing the work men were doing, but also by their courage and boldness, eventually a great many of the Huaorani became Christians. The powerful example of forgiveness extended to them by the grieving family members of their victims was overwhelming in its effectiveness.
There’s more. Nate’s son, Steve, spent a great deal of time visiting his family members and spending time with them among the Huaorani people. Eventually the Gospel began to penetrate his own heart, and when he had made a confession of faith in Jesus Christ he was baptized by a Huaorani tribesman named Mincaye. Steve’s baptism was a bit more powerful a proclamation of the Gospel than usual for a very special reason. Mincaye was the one who had actually killed his dad, Nate. His father’s killer was completely transformed by the Gospel his father had come to share, and now was baptizing the son of the man he murdered. When Mincaye murdered Nate, he arrived safely in the arms of Jesus. Now, his own son would one day join him with the help of the very man who had unjustly sent him there in the first place, and who would himself be there to celebrate with them when the time came. Steve and Mincaye were best friends the rest of their lives. Short the power of the Gospel, there’s simply no way to explain that. The murder of Jim and Nate and the others was an apparently unmitigated tragedy…until God pulled back the curtain on the bigger picture. When trouble came, they let God be God, and what a job of being God He did.
Believe it or not, though, there’s even more. Years later, Steve was following in his father’s footsteps as a missionary pilot, bringing the Gospel to hard-to-reach people groups. One day, he found himself lost in Africa and in need of a ride. He was pointed in the direction of a local Christian pastor who would be willing to help him. Upon inquiring as to the pastor’s story, the man shared how when he was growing up, he and some friends would often steal vegetables from the garden of a local missionary. They knew he was supposed to forgive them and not turn them over to the authorities. Eventually they were caught in the act, but instead of throwing the book at them, the missionary made them stay and help him work the garden. Along the way he taught them to read and shared the Gospel with them.
This particular pastor was driven to accept Jesus as Lord and Savior and to become a pastor because of a story he read in a book the missionary had shared with him. The book was a collection of stories about Christian martyrs. The young man reasoned that if these folks could follow Jesus in spite of all they had been through, then surely he could as well. And of these stories, there was one that had always stood out to him as the most powerful of the bunch. It was the story of a group of missionaries who were killed while trying to bring the Gospel to a notoriously violent tribe in the jungles of Ecuador. Then, after the murders, the families of the martyrs came back to the tribe with a message of grace and forgiveness and the Gospel. If these people—including one named Nate Saint—could serve Jesus in the face of such hostility, surely he could do no less than to commit his whole life to doing the same.
Are you with me? Here, decades later and on the complete other side of the world, Steve was given the gift of seeing the even bigger picture behind the unfair and unjust death of his father. When tragedy strikes, there is a bigger picture. And if we’ll let God be God, one day we’ll get to see it.
When trouble comes, let God be God and trust Him to do it. If He could bring such good out of a situation like that, if He could see the Gospel ripples from one act of tragedy met with trust spread that far and wide, what can’t He do? Indeed, as Job exclaimed, “I know that you can do anything and no plan of yours can be thwarted.” Trouble will come in this life because sin is still on the loose. But we serve the God who can not only absolutely carry us through the trouble, but who will advance His kingdom through us because of it. When trouble comes, let God be God. He won’t fail you.