NOTES for Job 38:1-21

After Elihu, who declared that he could perfectly well replace God for Job because, supposedly, Job would hear from God the same thing he heard from him, Elihu, God Himself finally spoke. And it would seem that He said nothing new to Job. But the matter is not only what is said; the matter is also who says it. And sometimes even first of all who says it. Job finally heard the One who can say all the right words with authority and with knowledge of the matter. He heard the voice of God. And the very first question God asks Job makes Job fall silent. What do you know about My world? Do you know it as I do?

The question is not idle and not rhetorical. Though the answer to it is obvious. But it makes one think. After all, God places in one row the change of day and night, the changing face of the earth, and judgment over the wicked. And if this is so, what can a person really know about the evil in which the world found itself after the fall?

Of course, a person knows the evil of the world. Just as he knows the change of day and night and the changes that take place in nature. He knows them insofar as they concern him personally. Everything else is only extrapolation, and therefore theory, abstraction, something a person does not really know, but knows only speculatively. But for God the whole world is real. In all its fullness. For Him there is nothing abstract or speculative in the world. Nor does He need extrapolations: He sees all the possibilities of the world He created, all its paths and all its dead ends, and He sees them not as certain models of possible reality, but as the reality of different ways in which the world exists and the possibilities laid in it are brought to fulfillment. For God, even hell, which He did not create, is more real than it is for those because of whom that hell appeared.

God perceives the evil we create more fully and vividly than we do, we who create it. And He certainly knows better than any of us what to do with that evil. Only the One who knows the world in its fullness knows how to free it from what hinders that fullness. This is exactly what God says to Job. Of course, his friends had said something of the same kind to him. But when such words are spoken by people, they are more apt to make one think that those who say them are merely trying to fence themselves off from the problem, to shut themselves away from it with correct words that obligate them to nothing. It is another matter when they are spoken by the One who created the world and knows everything about it. The One who is responsible for the destinies of the world and does not remove from Himself responsibility for it. Such words can be believed.

The Lord addresses the one who asks Him questions. It must be harder for someone who has formed a clearly defined idea of God to hear Him, the Incomprehensible One who surpasses all things, than for someone who, like Job, is perplexed but open toward God.

The Lord rejects Job's speeches, calling them words without meaning. But His address to Job does not sound like words of accusation. Only the Lord sees the full picture of everything happening in the universe, while any human judgments are based on extremely limited initial data. Therefore He is the only One able to reveal the Truth.

We have no right to judge the fullness of the structure of the universe, and therefore no right to claim that we understand the full meaning of everything that happens to us, because all this does not fit into inevitably limited human thinking. And yet the Lord addresses Job not as some insignificant creature that can be ignored, but as one who understands little and is nevertheless endowed with the dignity that God does not reject. The words calling Job to answer, gird up your loins now like a man, testify precisely to this.

Before us once again is revealed the twofold unity of man, who, for all his weakness, sinfulness, and limitation, is the summit of Creation, called to stand before God.

The question asked by God to Job rings ironically and even a little mocking. The fact that the question is especially rhetoric is not necessary to speak: it is obvious by itself. But why God asks it? Certainly, we could explain all this by the simple desire to show Job his place in the universe, which doesn’t give him the right for global generalizations, even when it concerns the questions of good and evil or even his own fate. But is it only in this the problem? If it is so, hardly Job would have repented: because he repents quite sincerely, to such repentance impossible to force neither by strength, nor by the demonstration of personal greatness. And maybe, it is particularly here that we find the answer to all the questions and the accusations of the righteous who suffers?

Certainly, Job, as every person, doesn’t know everything and is not to him to judge of the justice in the scales of humanity. Yes, and he can understand his own destiny, as we see, only partially. This is particularly what the friends of Job repeated to him not once. But such an answer is good for a successful theologian, and not for a suffering righteous, for whom it is not easier from this type of answers.

However we can understand God's question otherwise too: you were not there, when I created the world; but here is, I speak with you, I address you, and you, who was till then a grain of sand in the universe, became a part of My world and My plan. Is this not more important? And as we can see, for Job the rhetoric question given to him by God really becomes the answer to all questions. Or at least the promise that there is an answer and sooner or later it will be absolutely received.