Job 37:14-18 and 12:7-10
Consider carefully the many wonders of God. Can you explain why lightning flashes at the orders of God who knows all things? Or how he hangs the clouds in empty space? You almost melt in the heat of fierce desert winds when the sky is like brass. God can spread out the clouds to get relief from the heat, but can you? . . . . .
If you want to learn, then go and ask the wild animals and the birds, the flowers and the fish. Any of them can tell you what the Lord has done. Every living creature is in the hands of God.
This is the second in this series of messages relating the words of scripture to our current climate crisis. These two brief readings come from the book of Job, which, I have to admit, before I started this series, I would not have thought of as an ecological book.
I can’t begin to explain the theological complexities of the book of Job in this brief message and that’s not my point today anyway. I’ll just remind us that it all started when God and Satan were talking one day (?) and Satan made the claim that people aren’t really good because they are naturally good, but only because God rewards them for being faithful. Take away the rewards and there goes faithfulness, out the window.
So God points out Job as an example of faithfulness and tells Satan to do his worst so they can see if Job remains a good, faithful man. So Job suffers terrible losses for no humanly discernable reason, and then “friends” come to condole with him and end up arguing that he must somehow be responsible for the terrible things that happened since God is clearly “punishing” him, while Job continues to insist that he is blameless. These are beliefs that fit into a “reward and punishment” mindset. Do good, you’ll be rewarded. Do wrong, you’ll be punished. This mindset is, unfortunately, still quite commonly found in our cultures today.
Along the way, in this extended argument, which is the whole book of Job, we get some interesting statements about who has rights attached to this created world – and that’s the point I’m interested in today.
One of Job’s so-called friends asks the questions of the first part I read in the reading today: Consider carefully the many wonders of God. Can you explain why lightning flashes at the orders of God who knows all things? Or how he hangs the clouds in empty space? You almost melt in the heat of fierce desert winds when the sky is like brass. God can spread out the clouds to get relief from the heat, but can you? The implication being that God can do whatever God wants with his creation — which, of course, includes Job.
These are interesting questions asked by the “friend” and there are many more of this type of question asked throughout Job -- and they should all make us stop to think. We humans have a tendency to think we are the crown of creation and all that is belongs to us. But we are wrong. We are not masters of the universe. We are one part of God’s creation – created by God’s love just like all the other parts – the animals, stars, trees and hills and rivers. We didn’t create anything here.
We can’t control the weather or the seasons or cause the sun to rise or set. We can’t create new moons or raise up mountains. It is a sad fact that, in terms of the creation, we are much better at destroying than we are at creating. Poisoning our lakes and rivers, decimating our forests, fouling the air we breathe, killing off whole species for our pleasure. Yet, it rarely seems to occur to many of us that we are living here, not by right, but by pure gift -- and we should perhaps take better care of this gift.
If we are trying to expand our ecological understanding, with the aim of lessening the damage we do and perhaps trying to repair some of what has already been done, we could do worse than a reading through the book of Job. The storyline is annoying (at least it always annoys me) but all through the arguments that make up the bulk of this book, there are some wonderful questions regarding our actual place in the world — questions that may challenge us to re-consider how we humans should be living here in accordance with God’s will for God’s beautiful planet. Maybe some humility might help.
AMEN.
I can’t begin to explain the theological complexities of the book of Job in this brief message and that’s not my point today anyway. I’ll just remind us that it all started when God and Satan were talking one day (?) and Satan made the claim that people aren’t really good because they are naturally good, but only because God rewards them for being faithful. Take away the rewards and there goes faithfulness, out the window.
So God points out Job as an example of faithfulness and tells Satan to do his worst so they can see if Job remains a good, faithful man. So Job suffers terrible losses for no humanly discernable reason, and then “friends” come to condole with him and end up arguing that he must somehow be responsible for the terrible things that happened since God is clearly “punishing” him, while Job continues to insist that he is blameless. These are beliefs that fit into a “reward and punishment” mindset. Do good, you’ll be rewarded. Do wrong, you’ll be punished. This mindset is, unfortunately, still quite commonly found in our cultures today.
Along the way, in this extended argument, which is the whole book of Job, we get some interesting statements about who has rights attached to this created world – and that’s the point I’m interested in today.
One of Job’s so-called friends asks the questions of the first part I read in the reading today: Consider carefully the many wonders of God. Can you explain why lightning flashes at the orders of God who knows all things? Or how he hangs the clouds in empty space? You almost melt in the heat of fierce desert winds when the sky is like brass. God can spread out the clouds to get relief from the heat, but can you? The implication being that God can do whatever God wants with his creation — which, of course, includes Job.
These are interesting questions asked by the “friend” and there are many more of this type of question asked throughout Job -- and they should all make us stop to think. We humans have a tendency to think we are the crown of creation and all that is belongs to us. But we are wrong. We are not masters of the universe. We are one part of God’s creation – created by God’s love just like all the other parts – the animals, stars, trees and hills and rivers. We didn’t create anything here.
We can’t control the weather or the seasons or cause the sun to rise or set. We can’t create new moons or raise up mountains. It is a sad fact that, in terms of the creation, we are much better at destroying than we are at creating. Poisoning our lakes and rivers, decimating our forests, fouling the air we breathe, killing off whole species for our pleasure. Yet, it rarely seems to occur to many of us that we are living here, not by right, but by pure gift -- and we should perhaps take better care of this gift.
If we are trying to expand our ecological understanding, with the aim of lessening the damage we do and perhaps trying to repair some of what has already been done, we could do worse than a reading through the book of Job. The storyline is annoying (at least it always annoys me) but all through the arguments that make up the bulk of this book, there are some wonderful questions regarding our actual place in the world — questions that may challenge us to re-consider how we humans should be living here in accordance with God’s will for God’s beautiful planet. Maybe some humility might help.
AMEN.
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