NOTES for Job 39:19

In the concluding part of the poem on the Creator's might, the author of the Book of Job speaks of the strength of the creatures God has made, of horses and birds of prey. The horse's strength and the eagle's precision reveal the extraordinary vitality of all creation, beside which human abilities are very slight. The main theme of these verses is the Creator's superior strength; the next chapter will return to this with still greater clarity.

Of course, the point is not that God is frightening Job with His strength: why frighten Job still more when he is already crushed by all the calamities that have befallen him? Yet in the context of the book, it is fundamentally and supremely important that no one and nothing surpasses the Creator in strength and might. No one and nothing could have forced Him to answer Job—at least, nothing in the created world. The reason why God addresses the sufferer, so unexpectedly for the reader, lies within God Himself; beside this, the extensive description of creation's grandeur recedes into the background. The Creator's might proves entirely different from the might of petty Eastern rulers familiar to human beings. Those rulers try to exalt themselves by humiliating their subjects and demanding that people address them only while lying face down in the dust. God is free of this rulers' inferiority complex; He speaks with Job because the sufferer's cry is intelligible to Him.

A certain mystery lies hidden here: freely, without compulsion, God answers Job because He understands and cares about what Job is saying. Thus, in the author's view, God is, if one may put it this way, interested in Job himself and in the subject of their conversation. The author does not venture to speculate on why the Almighty's gaze turns towards suffering. Human thought, especially religious and philosophical thought, persistently insists on the impassibility of the Deity, on suffering being utterly foreign to Him by His very nature—as we imagine it. This phenomenon is characteristic of almost all religions, Christian thinkers being no exception; it is quite likely to be explained by psychological causes. A person seeks some realm of paradise where they might hope to leave their suffering behind, and so, from a logical point of view, it matters to them to affirm apathia, impassibility, in the divine realm. Yet the Book of Job, like many other biblical texts, contains the revelation that God is compassionate, that the pain of loss, the torment of unrequited love and the grief of a life being taken away are known to Him: God understands what Job is crying out about.

It is striking that the Lord Jesus quotes this chapter of the Book of Job in His conversation with the disciples about the end of the world on the Mount of Olives. Of course, we cannot rule out the possibility that Christ says, ‘Where the corpse is, there the eagles will gather,’ simply because He thinks in biblical language and this quotation comes to mind. For us, this may testify to the divine inspiration of the text written by the author of the Book of Job. But perhaps, in His conversation on the Mount of Olives, Christ recalls the Book of Job not merely in its wording: He is speaking of God's purpose, which human beings are powerless to overcome.

It is highly significant that Job humbly ‘lays his hand upon his mouth’ and declines to answer the Lord's words. Many of us, delighted by the opportunity, would begin feverishly listing our complaints and requests. For Job, however, only one thing matters: his fate has not slipped from the hands of the Almighty.

Among His other creatures, God points Job to the war horse (vv. 19-25). Unlike the ostrich or the wild donkey, the war horse is not only God's creature but also the work of human hands. Yet even the horse is not truly subject to a person unless God makes it subject to him. The power a person needs from the horse was placed in the horse by God; it is the same natural power that exists in the wild ox. And by itself it is just as little subject to a person. If God had not made the horse obedient to the rider, the rider would never have become a rider. It turns out that even what appears to have been created by God directly for human beings can be used by a person only with God's help. A person can do nothing by himself; he always needs the Creator's help. Otherwise he is powerless even where he would seem to feel at home. This human powerlessness is the answer to Job's question about righteousness and about the rights the righteous person has before the face of God.

Righteousness is unquestionably important to God; for Him, the righteous person and the sinner are not the same. But human righteousness is only a reflection of God's righteousness. And even the reflection becomes possible only because God Himself polishes the human being, making him a mirror of His righteousness. Righteousness does not belong to the person; he does not make himself righteous. Therefore no one can present his righteousness to God as a claim to certain special rights or a special position before God. Righteousness may be characteristic of a person, but a person does not belong to himself. Everything best in him, including righteousness itself, is God's gift, just as the ability to use everything in the world that God has prepared there for humanity is God's gift. Religious consciousness does not understand this. A religious person is sincerely convinced that he can become righteous, even if with God's help, and then present himself to God as a kind of gift that God will receive with joy. But God wants to explain to Job that a person can do nothing by himself, that righteousness is a path shared with God and a work shared with Him for the transformation of human nature, which a person cannot direct in any way. Righteousness is not a person's gift to God, but a task given by God to a person and freely accepted by that person. And all a person's deeds and actions, his whole life and death, and even the whole world, are only an instrument given by God to the person for solving the task set before him.