Job finally gets it.
After all the chapters of wrestling. After all the questions. After all the back and forth with his friends. After all the why is this happening to me and if only I could argue my case before God, Job finally lands here.
I was talking about things I knew nothing about.
He is not being sarcastic. He is not defeated. He is humbled. He is finally in the right place.
Because God has just spoken. From chapter 38 all the way through chapter 41, God asks Job a series of questions that basically boil down to: were you there when I laid the foundations of the earth? Do you know where light lives? Have you commanded the morning? Can you tell the ocean where to stop? Do you feed the wild animals? Can you catch a leviathan with a hook?
God does not answer any of the questions Job had been asking.
He just reveals Himself.
He shows Job who He actually is. And Job realizes he has been way out of his depth this whole time. He had been demanding answers from someone he could not even begin to comprehend.
And Job's response is beautiful.
I was talking about things I knew nothing about, things far too wonderful for me.
That is a good response.
Because how often do we do this?
How often do we question God like we are owed an explanation? How often do we act like He should justify Himself to us? How often do we sit in our finite understanding and shake our fist at an infinite God as if we know better?
I have done it. So many times.
Why did You allow this. Why did You not stop that. Why is this taking so long. Why did You not answer this the way I asked. Why does that person get to walk in that blessing and I do not. Why. Why. Why.
And underneath a lot of those whys is a quiet assumption that I am owed an explanation. That God should sit down and answer to me. That I have a right to know before I will trust.
But I am not the one on the throne.
He does not answer to me. I answer to Him.
That is not a harsh thing. It is actually a really freeing thing when I let it land.
Because if I were owed an explanation for everything God does, I would have to be big enough to understand the explanation. And I am not. My mind cannot even hold the smallest sliver of what He knows. He is running the entire universe across all of time. I am trying to figure out what to make for dinner.
Job finally saw it.
He was not a bad man. He was not disqualified. He was not being scolded. He was just being reminded of who he actually was in the presence of who God actually is. And that reminder brought him to a place of peace that all his questions had not.
Things far too wonderful for me.
I love that phrase. Because he is not saying God's answers were bad. He is saying they were beyond him. Too big. Too glorious. Too wonderful for his human mind to hold.
That is a good place to recalibrate to.
I want to get there faster than Job did.
I want to stop demanding explanations for things I could not even understand if God gave them to me. I want to trust that when He does not answer my questions the way I want them answered, it is not because He is uncaring. It is because He knows things I never will, and I am safer in His hands than in my own understanding.
Faith is not needing all the answers.
Faith is trusting the One who has them.