Where Were You?

Over the past year or so, I've found that my heart and mind are being drawn to the book in the Bible known as Job.

Specifically, the last little bit of Job, where God comes out of the whirlwind and tells Job to "gird his loins" and basically get a tongue lashing from above.

And it's taken me some time to figure out why this passage speaks to me.  Why do I keep coming back to God's series of questions for Job over and over again.

Certainly it has something to do with the imagery.  God asks some very impressive questions.  Questions like:

 

Where were you when I laid the foundations of the earth? (38:4) 

Have you entered into the springs of the sea,
     or walked in the recesses of the deep? (38:16) 

Can you bind the chains of the Pleiades,
     or loose the cords of Orion? (38:31 - maybe my favorite) 

Can you draw out Leviathan with a fishook,
     or press down its tongue with a cord? (41:1)

The rest of God's response to Job is similar to these questions.  There are three chapters filled with lots of questions to which Job is unable to answer.

I love each and every one of them.  And I have no idea why I love them.

Or I didn't until I was reading Rob Bell's What We Talk About When We Talk About God.

Great book.  Picture from Amazon.com

In the second chapter, Rob Bell talks about how we as humans are driven to have the answers to everything.

We need to know how things work.

We need to know why things work.

We need to know everything about everything.

And our need to know isn't bad.

In fact, our need to know has brought us great scientific achievements.  It's brought us modern medicine.  Great architectural structures.  Cars.  And my personal favorite, the iPhone.  

But, we get ourselves into trouble with our insatiable curiosity.  We think that everything can be explained.  And that everything will be explained if we just think on the problem hard enough for long enough.

But, as science is quickly teaching us, there are some things we will just be unable to explain.  Ever.

Just observing something to see how it acts (here's looking at you quantum mechanics) changes how that object acts.

So we will never know how or why things behave even at their most basic level.  

We will always have unsolved mysteries.  

And I think this is why I love God's response to Job.  

Job just wants to know why bad things happened to him.  He lost everything and there wasn't a reason for it.

Job needs to know.

And God shows up and says, essentially, "You will never be able to understand.  This is one great big mystery.  And you need to accept that."

"I am God, and you are not."

God basically tells Job that life is mysterious.  Things happen, good or bad, and they aren't punishments or rewards, they're just things.

Bad things happen to the good and bad alike.  

Good things happen to the bad and good alike.

And they don't have any bearing on God's presence or activity in the world.

God is intimately involved in all of these wonderful and terrible things.  Providing comfort and grace.  Giving hope.  Being life.

And any attempts to understand these great mysteries without making room for God to provide comfort and grace, hope and life is just going to leave us banging our heads against the wall.

We just can't comprehend how deeply God is present in all of these situations. Because we weren't there.  

We weren't there when God made the foundations of the earth.

We (for the most part) haven't been to the recesses of the seas.
We can't bind the Pleaides.
We haven't caught a Leviathan.

We are not God.  We cannot fathom being present in all things - especially when most of us have trouble being present in the here and now.

And the good news is we don't have to know how all of these divine and eternal mysteries work in order for them to work.  My chair is still going to sit here and be a "chair" whether I understand the physics of it or not.

God is still going to be present in my day to day life, even if I don't always know where or how.

And that's enough.