NOTES for Job 39:1-18

Continuing to speak to Job, God shows him how God's providence works in nature. He points Job to the fact that the meaning God has placed in His creation is far from always clear to those whom He has created. Strength and understanding are different things. The wild ox is strong, but it will not plow for you (vv. 9-12). Its strength is useless to a person, and the wild ox itself does not even know about it, but God knows why He needs the wild ox with its strength. The ostrich does not care for its offspring, but God cares for them, having not given the ostrich the understanding needed for such care (vv. 13-18). Much in the world happens without human participation, just as the wild animals bear their young without it (vv. 1-4). There is much in the world that was not made for human beings and is not intended for them (vv. 5-8).

At first glance, all this may appear to have no relation to the questions Job asks God. But with careful reading, it turns out that the connection is still there. Indeed, the essence of all the questions Job asks God comes down to a search for the meaning of what happens in the world. For him, that meaning is inseparably bound to the human world; if something has no significance for human beings, then from Job's point of view it cannot have meaning at all. But God lets Job see that for God there is nothing in the world that is without at least some meaning. Of course, a person can see this meaning only when God Himself reveals it to him. Moreover, there are things in the world that, not being intended for human beings, will remain meaningless to them until the end of time. But for God nothing in the world is meaningless, and therefore a person still has hope even when there seems to be nothing to hope for because absurdity, wickedness, and injustice are triumphing all around. Of course, Job's friends had more than once said the same thing to him, or at least something very similar.

But it is one thing to hear something like this from people who may be relying only on someone else's words, and quite another to see and experience everything oneself, receiving revelation from God, who speaks with the questioner face to face. The answer received from God gave hope: the world is not absurd; blind chance and faceless force do not triumph in it. It is moved by God's providence and therefore full of meaning, although that meaning is not always easy to see at once. This means that the righteous person also has hope that his righteousness will not vanish without a trace, that it is not an accident in a world where evil triumphs, but a part of the providence that moves this world.

Thus, easily and quickly, the illusion so characteristic of fallen man, a kind of distorted anthropocentrism, is destroyed. We have all, of course, read in the Bible that God gave the world into the hands of the man He created. But fallen man understood his power over the world in a very peculiar way. He decided that the world exists not so much around him, as around its spiritual center, as for him in the most utilitarian sense of the word. After the fall, man really did cease to be the spiritual axis of the universe that he was meant to be from the beginning. For one can be a spiritual axis only as long as one remains the image of God.

And when one largely ceases to be that image, one begins to perceive the world exactly as we most often perceive it today: purely utilitarianly. Even when we simply "love nature," we usually do this utilitarianly too, meaning that, among other things, nature can also become a source of aesthetic pleasure for us, and for that we "love" it. Deep down we usually deny nature the right simply to be, to be not for us but in itself. The assumption is that if something in nature exists in that way, then this is our unfinished business: we simply have not yet gotten around to such "useless" nature.

By its nature the world does not depend on man at all. It exists quite well in itself, for the most part. In essence, only a tiny part of the universe has been given into man's power. But what then are we to do with the fact that God gives the world into man's administration? The answer is simple enough: the world exists according to God's plan and intention for it, and it is given to man precisely for administration. For administration in accordance with that same plan and within the context of that same intention. Man's power over the world is, in essence, a divine-human reality.

Refusing to acknowledge God's sovereignty over his own life, man loses power over the world as well. And this concerns not only nature, but man himself. In particular, it concerns his relation to other people. Judgment over man does not belong to man. Just as judgment over nature and the disposal of the forces hidden in it do not belong to man.