i've had some time to think about it

& watch the sun sink like a stone

A sermon on God's reply to Job:

At last, God speaks up! After 36 tortured chapters of Job pleading for a hearing from God, his petition is finally granted. And God’s rejoinder here is rightly considered the climax of the book. God’s fiery speech is as compelling as it is captivating. Like Job, it leaves us rapt. The trouble, though, is once the spell of God’s speech wears off, you find yourself in as much of, if not more of, a bind than before God spoke up!

God’s speech covers literally everything under the sun and more, too! Everything that is, except Job and his claim. God’s retort never once addresses Job’s complaint or even the cause of his suffering! As far as God is interested, it would appear, Job’s concerns about law and order are totally beside the point! In fact, God seems to takes a special kind of delight in all those things that elude Job’s grasp!

The cumulative effect of this speech is to cow Job, as I suspect it does you, too. But the question must be asked, how are we going to live with a God like this? Because ultimately, for as spellbinding of a portrait of the universe as this God paints, the God who makes this speech is a God we cannot abide by. Despite all our best attempts to the contrary.

The God who speaks from the whirlwind is a God untamed as the wild prairie wind itself. This is a God who is forever beyond our control. And the thing about creatures like Job, like you and me is, we want control. And not just some control, either. We want it all.

Ever since the Garden of Eden, we, as humans, have suffered from congenital heart failure. Our hearts have grown attached to all the wrong sorts of things. And these attachments, rather than giving us life, are actually killing us!

Just look at Job. It’s his sense of the unfairness of it all that compounds his misery! It was bad enough he lost everything. But the salt in the wound is that he’s convinced he didn’t deserve it! 

Job thought scrupulous keeping all the finer points of the law had merited him at least some protection from the chaos of the world. All it took, though, was one bad day to undo that illusion. And when that fantasy of his was dashed to pieces, so was the rest of his life, too! Suddenly all that piety, rather than making Job’s life more manageable, only wreaked that much more havoc on it!

Here’s the paradox that’s worth the price of admission today: By reintroducing Job to everything that was beyond his control, God undid a little of Satan’s tyranny for Job! God’s speech reinstitutes Job for what he’s been all along, a creature! Not the creator. And this news, rather than being bad, is actually, astonishingly, good!

Job had thought his actions were the fulcrum by which the gears of history turned. And as we all know, that’s an alluring idea. The problem, though, is it’s a fatal one. For starters, it’s a lie. Like Job, all it takes is one instant to wind up on the wrong side of this illusion. For another, though, it’s a delusion that will grind you down to nothing. 

All those attempts to control your life by your own efforts is an order that never gets fulfilled! No sooner do you wrest control of one situation than another gets loose! In fact, that’s the portrait of Job you get at the beginning of the book! He’s a man chained to all his attempts to keep his life under his control. 

When God speaks out of the whirlwind, God gives Job a glimpse of the real nature of things. Creation’s outside of his control, and it’s been so all along, too! This revelation sends Job straight to repentance. And as is so often the case, his repentance leads hims straight to freedom! 

When God shows Job the limits of his control, God sets Job free! Free of an impossible burden! A burden he was never meant to bear in the first place! The burden of being God. Because being God is something God promised to do for Job all along! Moreover, God promised to do this well before any of Job’s piety made one whit of difference. And God kept right on keeping this promise even after all Job’s piety fell by the wayside, too! 

Ultimately, the God of the whirlwind frees Job to live life in reality! Frees Job to live his life right where it’s been all along, on the receiving end of God’s control, which we call mercy! And this is right where you live, too!

We have all tried to storm heaven with our attempts to play God. Haven’t we? And like Job, it’s failing to one degree or another. God, however, is not the least bit interested in all our self-interested attempts to establish our lives along the fault line of our own control. Instead, God shows up to us out of a whirlwind that cannot be harnessed. 

You should know, though, this whirlwind is not any ol’ whirlwind! No, the whirlwind of God is none other than Jesus Christ crucified! At the cross, God’s whirlwind has touched down. Christ’s cross is the very place where God meets our mad desire for control. The cross is, if nothing else, what the dead-end of all our attempts to control our own fate looks like.

What God does when God meets you in this shallow grave, though, isn’t give you a dressing down. No, what God does when God meets you there, is give you Christ himself! 

By the rushing wind of the Holy Spirit, the wild, untamable mercy of God has gotten loose in your life! In baptism, you were washed away with this storm! In the Word of God proclaimed, you have heard the sound of this wind running wild through your past, present, and future, too! And in Holy Communion, you have even seen, touched, and tasted this whirlwind in the flesh!

Jesus is the whirlwind of God’s grace made manifest in your life! By the power of the Holy Spirit, his mercy has gotten loose! You can’t control it! And that makes you free! Actually, really, truly free! Free to live your life! Live it in reality. Which is as a creature. But not just any creature! No, you are a creature who has been claimed and called by God! You are a child of God, come what may!