chapter here. So, alright, I'm just going to open in prayer. I'm a little scrambled, so as always. So, we're just going to pray to the one who's never scrambled.
Heavenly Father Lord, thank you for this day, thank you for your grace to us Lord and your wonderful love. Thank you that you allow us as finite human beings, scrambled human beings to share your word, that you've chosen to share your word with us Lord and that you've opened your heart to us Lord and I just thank you for doing that for us and for providing a way that we can come to you boldly and that we can worship you and I thank you so much for that. And in Jesus name Amen. Alright, so Job 38 is the chapter that I'm reading today.
They asked me for a title and I said Job 38 because I didn't think of a creative title. I guess if you want basically God's answer to Job is basically what this is. I labeled this part one because I was going to tackle Job 38 to 42 and this is a common theme through the series that I've been, oh yeah, I'm going to tackle these five, six chapters or whatever it is. And it turns out that there's so much in just one chapter or even just like three or four verses that I can't just kind of skim over that.
And so this chapter is just amazing. It's very deep, there's a lot of deep questions in this chapter and we're going to dive into them. So I'm actually going to read the chapter through completely with no comment and then we'll go back, very little comment I'll say and we'll come back and go through it. So chapter 38 starting verse one and I'm reading from the NLT.
I have kind of read it through different versions. I find this the easiest to understand and so we'll start right now. First one, then the Lord answer Job from the whirlwind. Who is this that questions my wisdom with such ignorant words?
Brace yourself like a man because I have some questions for you and you must answer them. Where were you when I laid the foundation of the earth? Tell me if you know so much. Who determined the dimensions and stretched out the surveying line?
What supports its foundations and who laid its cornerstone? As the morning stars sang together, all the angels shouted for joy. Who kept the sea inside its boundaries and burst from the womb and as I clothed it with clouds and wrapped it in thick darkness. I locked it behind baron gates limiting its shores.
I said this far and no farther will you come. Here your proud waves must stop. Have you ever commanded the morning to appear and caused the dawn to rise in the east? Have you ever made daylight to spread to the ends of the earth?
To bring an end to the night's wickedness? As the light approaches, the earth takes shape like clay. Press beneath the seal. It is robed in brilliant colors.
The light disturbs the wicked and stops them and stops the arm that is raised in violence. Have you explored the springs from which the seas come? Have you explored their depths? Do you know where the gates of death are located?
Have you seen the gates of utter gloom? Do you realize the extent of the earth? Tell me about it if you know. Where does light come from?
Where does darkness go? Can you take each to a tomb? Do you know how to get there? But of course, you know all this.
For you were born before it was all created and you are so very experienced. Have you visited the storehouses of the snow or seen the storehouses of hail? I reserved them as weapons for the time of trouble, for the day of battle and war. Where is the path to the source of light?
Where is the home of the east wind? Who created a channel for the torrents of rain? Who laid the path for the lightning? Who makes the rain fall on barren land in a desert where no one lives?
Who sends the rain to satisfy the parched ground and make up the tender grass spring up? Does the rain have a father? Who gives birth to do? Who is the mother of the ice?
Who gives birth to the frost from heaven? For the water turns the ice as hard as rock and the surface of the water freezes. Can you direct the movement of the stars? Binding the cluster of the Pleiades or loosening the cords of Orion.
Can you direct the constellations to the seasons or guide the bear with your cubs across the heavens? Do you know the laws of the universe? Can you use them to regulate the earth? Can you shout to the clouds and make it rain?
Can you make lightning appear and cause the strike as you direct? Who gives intuition to the heart and instructs the mind? Who is wise enough to count all the clouds? Who can tilt the water jars of heaven when parched ground is dry and the soil is hardened into clods?
Can you stop praying for a lioness and satisfy young lions appetites as they lie in their dens or crouch in the thicket? Who provides food for the ravens when they are young cry out to God and wander about in hunger? So chapter 38 is the first part of God's questions. He asks Job these questions.
I'm going to give a little rundown for those of you who may not be familiar with Job. Job was a man. He was a righteous man. He prayed for his children.
He prayed to God. He was blameless as far as Satan came to God and asked and presented Job and said, look at this guy. God actually presented Job to him. I'm sorry.
And Satan said, yes, I know. But he will curse you if you take these things away from him. So God permitted Satan to take away Job's health, his wealth, his family, all these things. Job was going to be a very brief summary of these chapters.
Job has a few friends who try to console him. They're not very good at it. He's one other friend who's a little better at it, we'll say. We get to hear.
Job has said a lot of things. He said a lot of things that are true. He said a lot of things that are assumptions. He's made some mistakes along the way.
God comes in and God is the last one to speak. And he is the one who corrects Job. So the first accusation that God lays before Job here. It says in verse 2 in the NLT, who is this that questions my wisdom with such ignorant words?
The original or the ESV that I was reading from before it as well says, who is this who darkens counsel without knowledge? This basically just means speaking without knowing what you're talking about and accusing God when you have no idea what's actually going on. This is something that Job did. And I think the main offense on this is that it's an attack on the truth because it's speaking as though you're speaking the truth when you don't actually know the truth.
This is a very essential, this is basically attack on God himself. An attack on truth is an attack on God himself. And we face this a lot in this day and age. There is a lot of attack on truth.
There is my truth. There's your truth. Everyone has their own truth. They want to believe in their own truth, their own reality.
They want to believe that a man can be a woman, a woman can be a man. And things like that, there's lots of different things. I want to believe that it's okay to do certain things that are not okay to do. And I'm no different.
I haven't been different. I'm not born from a different humanity than these people. I'm someone who's a sinner. And I want to have my own truth a lot of the time.
And I'm raising two young, very young children. And the two of them, they want to have their own truth. And they want to behave in a certain way. They want to do things a certain way.
And you can really see the nature of humanity when you have little children because it's just they're born that way. It's crazy. You can try as hard as you can to make them not born that way. I mean, they're very cute.
So it's you know, makes it a little easier. But so this is human nature. We want to have our own truth. And when we want to have our own truth, that in and of itself is sin.
When we want to go our own way, we turn from God. This is what I say it's 53 talks about. We have all just like sheep turned to our own way. And this is a sin in and of itself because we are not acknowledging God.
We are not loving God explicitly with all our hearts, soul, and mind and strength. And that's where humanity sits. We don't do that. And so this is no different.
This is a very, it's a fundamental thing. It's the truth. The truth of God and his power, his word. So that's the first thing.
He says, who is this? Who darkens counsel without knowledge? Who questions my wisdom with such ignorance words is what the NLT says. Jesus came into the world to testify to the truth, to be a living testimony of God, of his father.
And so that's what Jesus said when Pontius Pilate asked why he came into the world. He said that. He didn't say to save people from their sins. He didn't say to die and across.
These are all true. These are all things that he did come to earth to do. But his main objective is to testify to the truth, be a testimony, be an example of his father. And in order to do that, we have to be submissive.
And that's what Jesus was. So that's the first little section, verse two. Verse three is an interesting one. In the NLT, it says, brace yourself like a man because I have some questions for you and you must answer them.
I like how, so there's a few different ways of saying this, bracing yourself like a man. Gird up your loins is one of the versions that I read. Dress for action, which I think is my favorite one. Put on your hockey gear, bud.
You know? And why? Why does Job need to brace himself? Why does he need to gird up his loins?
Why does he need to dress for action? Because what is God about to give him? He's about to give him his word, which is a sharp two-edged sword. Job needs to be prepared for this.
And as little as you can be prepared for this, God is about to come at Job with his words and set things straight. And this is very important for us. When we go out, we need to understand that we have a two-edged sword. We have God's word with us.
We have the truth. It's more powerful than anything. We also need to understand that God's word speaks against sin and speaks against sinners. And we need to understand that we're at his mercy.
And so more on that later. We're going to continue through. I don't know if anyone's ever watched the show Planet Earth. It's a, yeah, basically a narrated documentary of the Earth.
And it's all in high definition. And they send helicopters to these really remote areas of the world, like the Bay of Fundy. No, like anywhere. Actually, there is an episode of the Bay of Fundy.
It's really neat. It's with Wales. But that's just a little thing. This is just like watching Planet Earth.
There's so much here. It's from a perspective that obviously we don't really understand because it's from God's perspective. He's the one who brings it about. It's an even better perspective than a helicopter flying over the Sahara desert.
It's God himself who created this, who knows this better than anybody. And he has just this infinite wisdom. So he's showing this Earth. It's amazing just his, the poetry in this, the just in and of itself, the writing is just amazing in here.
Not just the writing, but the actual account that God is giving here is just fantastic. But that's not the most important part. That's not even an important part of this. The important part is the questions that God is asking.
So we're going to continue here. The main thing that I noticed through this chapter is that none of these things that God mentions, technically they are, but none of them are like miracles, as we would see miracles. These things are all natural processes. This is a lion hunting for food for its children.
It's the sun rising in the morning. It's the ocean and the boundaries of the ocean. It's all these things are normal natural processes. These are not anomalies.
And I remember having a conversation with a guy on the street one time and he's an atheist and a very militant atheist. And he said, I've just never seen any evidence for a God. Why should I believe in God? And the correct answer is actually he's seen plenty of evidence for God.
Sometimes it's in the simplest things. Sometimes it's in the most easy to understand things that God is present in those things. It doesn't have to be spectacular miracles, as we call them. It can be simply the sun rising in the morning.
Wow, the sun rises. Who does that? Who can do that? And we talk about things like the human mind.
God actually talks about the human mind here. Do we even understand that? I don't think humanity actually understands the human mind. I don't think we do.
It's funny because we're using the human mind to try and understand the human mind. And that's just like, how do you do that? You're pulling yourself up by your bootstraps. It has to be this infinite God who understands everything and he created everything.
So that's something that stuck out to me a lot. And when you think about this in the context of the chapter, Job is questioning God related to suffering, relating to suffering. He's suffering and he's questioning God and he's accusing God with regard to his suffering. I'm suffering.
Why does God allow this to happen? Why does God allow these things to happen? Why does he allow suffering? Why does he allow evil in the world?
So many people ask that question. I don't know how many people we've encountered on the street. And in my cabin as a counselor, a kid's asked that question. I've had so many people ask that.
And that's maybe the most common question we get as Christians, from non-Christians. Why does God allow suffering? Why does he allow evil in the world? Job, the book of Job comes pretty close to answering that.
It doesn't really answer it directly. But what it does is it shifts our focus into another question. Not about why does God allow suffering. Why does he allow evil?
Why does God allow anything at all? That's what we're reading here. Verse 8 says, who keeps the sea inside its boundaries? And as a burst forth from the womb, God chooses every day to set a boundary for the ocean.
He chooses to do that every day. He does it actively. He's controlling the ocean every day. It says in verse 12, have you commanded the morning to appear and cause the dawn to rise in the east?
This is God's command. This is God's purposeful, deliberate command. He's commanding the sunrise in the morning. This is an every day occurrence.
It's something that we probably look at and wake up and say, oh, yeah, there's the sun. Sometimes it's really beautiful and we take note of it. But other times we wake up, it's time to go to work. That happens because God chose to raise the sun today.
Verse 22, all the way down, verse 22. Have you visited the storehouses of snow or seen the storehouses of hail? I reserved them as weapons for the time of trouble, for the day of battle and war. This is speaking of the weather, God controlling the weather.
Yesterday it was 28 degrees and humid. It was probably about 14. We went to, yesterday we were outside most of the day. Today it's a little darker, a little wetter and a little colder.
God chooses every single day to control the weather. He stores up snow. For the future. Actually I love snow because I have kids now.
We just take these things for granted a lot of times. God does this every day. He purposes to do this. So why is this significant?
Where does this relate to what we're talking about here? Why does he allow me to exist at all? Why does he allow me to take my next breath? Why does he allow me to sin?
Why did he allow sinners to literally kill him? This is one of these questions that there's a lot of questions that the Bible has many answers for. There's a lot of questions that are hard to answer from Scripture. I think this one is actually a relatively easy question to answer from Scripture.
It's because of God's mercy. This whole book, Job, is a testament to God's mercy. He is up in heaven or he's in the whirlwind. It says in the beginning of this chapter.
So he may have been in the whirlwind the whole time in Job's present. God is everywhere too. But he's there and he's waiting patiently. He's listening to all of these people speak.
He's listening to Job crying out. He's listening to his three friends, completely butcher trying to comfort him. He's listening to Elihu, where Elihu is pretty good. He's got it pretty good.
But that's not God. So God is sitting there and he's listening the entire time and their job is going through his this hard time. And he comes out and he speaks to Job finally at the end. And this is also a mercy in and of itself.
Him giving us an answer, giving us his word. These things are due to his mercy. So God has shown mercy to every single person on the planet. He's shown mercy to tremendous mercy to all of us, to every single person in this room.
I believe he's shown mercy to people who are not saved, people who are saved, because he's allowing them to live. He's allowing them to take another breath. He's giving them a chance. And I believe that there is a purpose for, I'm not going to say the purpose because I don't know the mind of God.
I don't want to darken counsel without knowledge. I don't want to speak out of turn here. But I do believe that one of the big reasons for humanity to exist is that God can put his mercy on display. He can actually show his mercy because we're sinners and we fall short of his glory.
We fall short of him. So he reveals his mercy by showing mercy to us as sinners. So I hate to break it to you all, but we're the bad guy. That's the thing.
Humans are the bad guy. We're the ones that God has shown mercy too. And not only mercy, but there's another one as well. And that's restoration or redemption.
Mercy is withholding punishment from people who deserve punishment. Redemption, you know, and mercy could be just delaying that punishment. Redemption is taking that punishment away, paying the price. And this is what he did.
He did that on the cross. So it's amazing God's word can really display the gospel. It's through any chapter. He reads Job 38 and it displays the gospel.
God's mercy. This is the main reason why God has allowed this to happen. So why does God allow suffering? Same reason he allows anything at all.
He allows Job to suffer. He allows Job to take another breath through his suffering. And this is merciful. God is showing Job.
He's teaching him. He's giving us his word. He's giving us this account of how and educating us on being able to worship God and not speak out of turn and to be slow to speak. So I do want to share the gospel right now because I think that's an important part of this.
God has shown his mercy. But the other reason why the other thing that I think I should mention is that God also shows his justice with humanity. And he is a just God. He is, if you're a sinner, he's a scary God.
He's a just God. And I believe that he has wrath stored up for people who do not surrender to him. Romans 1 8, it speaks about God's wrath against all ungodliness and the unrighteousness of men. God commands us to love him with all our hearts, souls, minds, and strength.
And this is what I mentioned at the beginning. We fall short of that. We don't live up to that. For all of sin and fall in the glory of God.
That implies that the glory of God is the standard. That's it. If we don't hit that, then we fall short and we will be punished in our sins. And so people will say to me, well, then how do we come before God?
How do we, you know, who can actually, like nobody, nobody loves the Lord with all their hearts, soul, mind and strength. Nobody loves the Lord continuously every day, explicitly everything they do is dedicated to God. So therefore God has to, if God is going to welcome anybody into heaven, he has mercy. Yes, it has to be through his mercy, not through anything that we can do.
So God did that. He sent his son to this earth to die in a cross to rise again to conquer death. And we can surrender to God. That is the most important thing.
Whoever shall call on the Lord on the name of the Lord shall be saved. This is a very important truth. It's very simple. It's a matter of surrendering to God, repenting of your sins.
And I think it's very important. It's just the most important message. This chapter, it's amazing how God has this kind of sarcastic tone through this chapter to Job. And it just shows how God takes his truth seriously.
He takes his word very seriously. And he seems almost harsh to Job in a way, in some ways, in this chapter. And I think it's important to realize the weight of what Job has done and his mistake before God. That he did not, I'm not going to say mistake.
I'm going to say sin. I'm going to say his sin before God. He accused God. And this is important for us to realize that we should not speak out of turn.
And we should be very aware of God's truth. And he commands us to know his truth and to share it in love. And yeah, so I think with that, I'll close in prayer and then we'll sing. Heavenly Father, thank you for this day.
Thank you for your word. Thank you for your truth and for your love and most of all, Lord, for your mercy. This impacts us tremendously. Lord, we can live, not just, not just live another day, Lord, but we know that through your Son and through your mercy, we can live forever with you, Lord.
And I pray that you would just help us to trust you fully, Lord, help us to consider your truth, consider your word and to not take on any other truth, Lord, not to try to have our own truth or anything else, Lord. I just pray that you would help us protect us from the evil one and from our own ideas, Lord. And I just pray that you would help us go forward and do the same. We're going to sing.
Who will I?