NOTES for Job 39:9-10

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.