If this is your first viewing, please see my Introduction before reading this.
16 August. Job chapters 38-39
Most of this book has covered the arguments between Job and his companions, and of course God would have been aware of their sometimes heated philosophical discussions about the nature of the relationship between God and men. But now God intervenes. He answers them “out of the whirlwind”, maybe metaphorically “in their confusion” or “in the heat of the argument”. In a wonderful series of poetic images we are taken through all the aspects of creation – stars, sun, light and darkness, the sea and land, rain and snow, living creatures of all kinds. How can any human understand their workings? Only God does, who created them, and so these men have no right to talk about God as if they understood him.
Here is one of the basic difficulties of religion, and whoever wrote this part of the Bible – a master storyteller, but anonymous – was not afraid to tackle it. For if one believes in a creative power, by definition it (or he or she, for all these pronouns are inadequate) must be beyond the understanding of the created, else we would be equal in knowledge and power. So how can anyone claim to know anything about God? That, essentially, was the basis of what Job’s companions have been saying. Even prophets usually start by acknowledging that they are only human, and merely passing on what limited understanding they have been given beyond what they could naturally have known. The Jews (and Muslims) have always taken seriously the commandments not to make any image of God, because any image is inevitably partial, inadequate and misleading.
This is what makes Jesus’ statement so shocking when he says in John 14:9 “anyone who has seen me has seen the Father” (i.e. God the Creator). Was he claiming to be an image of God and therefore breaking the commandment by his mere existence? How can a mere man claim to represent the maker of all things, the one beyond time and space? Christian writers and preachers have tried grappling with this in many ways over the centuries and I can’t offer to add to their consideration. I would commend C S Lewis’s book “Mere Christianity” if you have not read it before. But briefly, Jesus must have known that he had within him something that others did not, an understanding of the world that came from outside it. He knew as a good Jew that to claim equality with God in any way was blasphemy under the law that God was said to have given, yet in breaking that law he also fulfilled it. In giving us an image of God by the way he loved, healed, accepted and taught, he put an end, in one sense at least, to arguments about what God is like.