Incomprehensible – Job 38

Transcript (Auto-generated)

This transcript has been automatically generated, and therefore may not be 100% accurate.

Job, chapter 38 then the Lord spoke to job out of the storm. He said, use this that obscures my plans with words without knowledge. Brace yourself like a man. I will christian you, and you shall answer me. Where were you when I leaned left the earth's foundation?

Tell me you understand. For what dimension? Surely we know who stretched the measuring line across on what were his footing stairs or who laid his cornerstone. While the morning stars sang together and all the angels shouted with joy. He shut up the sea behind doors when it burst forth through the room.

And I made the clouds his garments corrupted big darkness when I could slim it and set his doors in barges. When I said, this far you may come, but no farther. Here is where your proud waves fall.

Will you ever give orders to the morning or show the dawn shake the wicked up? The earth seems shaped like clay under a steel. Its features stand out like those of a garden of the seal walked in recessive deep. Have the gates of death being shown to you? Have you seen the gates of Peter's dark?

Have you comprehended the most expenses of the earth? Tell me, what is the way to be abode of light? And where does the darkness reside?

You know the past. Surely you know you were already born. You have lived so many lives.

Have you entered the storehouses in the snow or seen storehouses of the hail which I observed for times of trouble, for days of war and battle? What is the way to the place where the lightning is one place where the east winds are scattered over the earth? All comes in Charlotte sprout with grass.

Does the rain have her father? Who are fathers the drops of dew? From whose womb does come the ice? Who gives birth to the frost from the heavens? When the waters become the hardest stone?

When the surface of the deep is frozen?

Can you bind the chains of the Pleiades? Can you loosen Orion's belt? Can you bring forth the constellations in their seasons or lead out the bear with its cubs? Do you know the laws of the heavens? Can you set up God's dominion over the earth?

Can you raise your voice to the clouds and cover yourself with a flood of water? Do you send the lightning bolts on their way for their report to you? Here we are. Who gives the ibis wisdom or gives the cockerel understanding? Who has the wisdom to count the clouds?

Who can tip over the water jars of the heavens? When the dust becomes hard and the clods of earth stick together?

Do you hunt the prey for the lioness and satisfy the hunger of the lions when they crouch in their dens? Or lie in wait in a thicket. Who provides food for the raven when it's young? Cry out to God and wander about for lack of food. This is the word of the Lord.

Thanks be to God. Catherine, thank you so much for reading that for us. If we haven't yet met, I'm Ben. I'm one of the team here. It's really lovely to see you.

I would normally say, let's have coffee after the service. Obviously, with APCM that's slightly curtailed, but I would really love to say hello. So do grab me at the end of the service, if we haven't yet spoken. It would be really, really helpful for me and for you, if you can grab one of those new bibles in the pews in front of you. Do turn to page 538 to that reading that we've just heard.

That's God's word. That's him speaking. That's infallible. And so test what I'm saying against that, because that's true and my words are my own and they are true in that they hold to what God's word says. So do you test it against that?

We are in. For those of you who are joining us for the first time, we're in a series, a time when we're thinking a little bit about ways in which God is different to us. We started off last week that God is immeasurable, and today we're thinking about God being incomprehensible. But let me lead us in a prayer and then we'll have a bit of a think about that. And job 38.

Heavenly Father, thank you so very much indeed that we can come and we can hear you speak. Thank you. That, though we've got all sorts of questions, we can know that you truly speak to us in your word, because you say you do, you tell us that you do not lie, and we know that to be true. So, father, I pray that now, by your spirit, show us more of who you are, that we would realise how little we know. Father, would that be good for our souls?

Especially in difficult times. Amen.

Well, it happened, didn't it? Finally, the big ball of gas and the Oompa Loompa finally reached a settlement. Some of you guys are thinking, I know we're talking about incomprehensibility, but I've got no idea what you're talking about, Ben. Of course I'm talking about the sun newspaper and, of course, Hugh Grant, who this week we found, finally reached a settlement in the big dispute about the phone hacking scandal. I wonder how you feel about that phone hacking scandal?

If you're anything like me, it makes you quite angry at the idea that an actor, that their private life could be so impinged upon. That's outrageous, isn't it? We all deserve a private life. And yet, at the same time as that, there is a reason that the son allegedly hacked into his phone. The sun did that because it sells papers.

Because people, we want to know. We want to know the real Hugh Grant, don't we? Is he really small and orange? Well, of course not. But we want to find out.

We want to know about this private life of this individual. And yet that's what makes today's way that God is different to us. Slightly tricky, isn't it? If God is incomprehensible, that means, to put it bluntly, that God has a private life. I wonder how we feel about the idea of God having a private life.

In one sense, logically, we can get our head around it, can't we? Or at least we can get our head around the fact that we can't get our head around it. Last week, we saw that God was the alpha and the amiga, the beginning and the end, the one who has no start or no end. Now, if that's true, then logically we can't understand him because everything that we know has a start or an end. That's the world we live in.

We can get the idea of something not having a start or an end, but we won't heaven know what that's truly like. It's understandable that there might be things about God that we don't know that we will never know. And this can be a bit of a problem for us. We can fall off two sides of a horse when we come to this. At one side of the horse that we fall off is we say, well, if I can't know everything about God, then I can really know nothing about God.

I mean, what if he has kind of skeletons in his closet? What if there are things that I don't understand, I don't know, and that come out and I don't like them? I can't know anything about God. And yet, actually, when we read the Bible, we see that the God who is perfect is able to perfectly speak truths about him that we can know truly without knowing fully. And that's going to be really important as we go through our time today.

We can know God truly without knowing him fully. The other side of the horse that we can fall off with this is we say, no, no, God's not incomprehensible. I can get my mind around him. As Beth was saying earlier, I've got a box in which God sits and that's great. I was chatting to somebody only a few weeks ago who was saying they were struggling to get their along.

They talk about a different church to this one. It's not part of this church family, but they were really struggling to get their son along. And the things that he would say is, I know it. You've told me already, I've got God down. I understand who he is.

You don't have to keep telling me.

And of course, that leads us to a place of real pride, doesn't it? Because we think, I've got this God guy. I know how he should act. And in fact, often it can lead us to a place of real pride where we say, not only do I know how God should act, but actually, I could probably do a better job of it than he has. We wouldn't say that out loud, but that's often how we can think.

And yet, if I can know God truly but not fully, that has huge payoffs for me pastorally. And we're going to look at two today. Let me just very quickly tell you one, and that's the one that is brought out mainly in the book that we're reading. That means that we will never exhaust the goodness of God. It means that I can never fully get to the bottom intellectually of God, however much I study him, however much I kind of enjoy him.

It's never that. I get to the end of the series of God's goodness and need to go back and start again because. Well, because I know it all. No, I'm never going to get to the end of him. And that's really exciting because we're going to spend quite a bit of time with God.

If you're here and you're a Christian, you will be with God for all eternity. And that's great, because in a thousand years, you and me, we're going to know God way, way better. But do you know what? In a thousand years, you will still have just as much of God's goodness to enjoy as you do today, just as much to still discover of the depths of who he is, of what he is like, whether that's intellectually getting your head around him or trying. There'll be more to discover, whether that's, in terms of understanding emotionally, his goodness.

There's more to discover. CS Lewis talks about that time like being a never ending book, where each chapter is better than the last. But if that's one payoff, there's another, and that's that. It's deeply humbling to know that there's a God who I can know, truly, but not fully. It's humbling in a really helpful sense.

And that's because there are going to be times in life when we have all sorts of questions, all sorts of. And often these are hurts that come, and they will challenge our faith, and we will say, these things really hurt. And I've got all these questions, and actually, it's really helpful to have a God who I know that I don't fully get my head around. You'll have questions, won't you? A few years ago, a very good friend of mine had abdominal surgery, and as they were lifting the sedation, he coughed.

It was what he did a lot. He had cystic fibrosis, and it ruptured. The bowel. That they'd just been repairing his was the very first funeral that I ever took. We have questions, don't we?

Things that hurt us, and we say, God, I don't get this. I don't understand this.

If I've got questions, you'll have them, too. That business that was providing for so many and seemed just to collapse like that overnight.

That half hour appointment with the doctor that I walked into and my world shattered, that loved one who's no longer with me, that news that's come out again, and I just don't understand. What are you doing?

If I've got questions, you'll have them. If they're not at the forefront of your mind today, they will come.

And so what do we do with those difficult questions? The book of job actually is a great place to go. You see, job. Job lived through that. He lived through his business collapsing under him, through the death of child after child, through hearing his wife, the one who would be with him, say, curse God and die.

He lived with the prospect of ongoing pain. And James, he's surrounded by a bunch of friends who all kind of give him. They're a bit like me. I find myself in James friends far too often. They want to give an answer.

They want to respond, hey, do you know this is the reason why you're going through this, Job, let me give you an answer. Let me tell you what's going on. And again and again, job, as he's going through the book, goes, no, no, no. You don't have the answer here. What I need is I need to have this out with God.

I need God to turn up so I can have a chat with him. And then at the end of the book of Job, God does turn up. And God does a really interesting thing. You see, it's not that the book of Job is a book where God gives job the answers. He doesn't turn up at the end and say, x, y, z.

This is why that happens. But what the end of Job does is God speaks to job in a way that takes away a wrong but very enticing answer. And that is the answer, that God is somehow in the wrong. And that's what often those questions lead us to say. When my friend Henry died, it was very easy for me to say, God, what are you doing?

Here's my plans for how the next six months were going to look. It's very easy for us to say, God is in the wrong. And what God does at the end of job is he helps us take that off the table. He gives us a right and a helpful humility that will help us. Keep your finger in job 38, but just turn in the page to job 40.

Read this. It says this. The Lord, or Yahweh said to Job, will the one who contends with the almighty correct him? Let him who accuses God answer him, saying, look, jabe, you're accusing me of wrongdoing here. And what's Jabe's response?

Having spoken to God, then job answered, yahweh, I am unworthy. How can I reply to you? I put my hand over my mouth. I spoke once, but I have no answer. I spoke twice, but I will say no more.

Job realises that accusing God of wrongdoing off the table, he stands down, his inner prosecutor. Why? Well, because what God does is he shows him that Job knows things truly, but not fully. And he actually starts with the world around him. He says, look, job, you know this world around you.

You know it truly. You live in it, you experience it. So, verse four of chapter 38. Where were you when I laid the earth's foundation? Tell me if you understand who marked off its dimensions.

Surely you know who stretched a measuring line across it on what were its footing set and who laid the cornerstone while the morning stars sang together and the angels shouted for joy. Listen, what God's doing here is he's not doing that thing. You know, in that first Matilda film, you might have watched it growing up, where the dad kind of says to Matilda, I'm big, you're small, I'm smart, you're dumb, I'm strong, you're weak. Essentially, I'm big, you shut up. God's not doing that.

He's doing something much more subtle here. He's taking things that job knows the world around him, and he is showing job there is a bigger picture, that there's more going on than you realise. So he says, look, job, you're limited. You're limited in terms of time. Where were you when I laid the earth's foundation?

You know this earth, but you weren't there when it was created. If I was to ask in this room about events leading up to World War One, I'd get lots of information from people, wouldn't I? But none of us were there. If I say to you, how did it feel when that happened? We'd say, well, I can guess, but I don't know, because we're limited in terms of time.

God says to job, look, you know, but you're limited. He says, okay, don't just think about the time. Let's look at the sea. Verse eight. Who shut up the sea behind the doors when it bursts forth from the womb, when I made the clouds its garment and wrapped it in thick darkness, when I fixed the limits for it and set the doors and bars in place, when I said, thus far you may come and no farther, here is where your proud waves halt.

He says, look, job, you know the sea. You've probably seen it. You might have swam in it. Job, you might know something of the way in which the moon interacts with the. With the water to create tides and springs and neaps and different times and the rule of twelfths and all that stuff that you learnt about in geography.

But here's the question, Job, do you know why I created Cardigan Bay in just that shape? Job, do you know why it is that Bonsai beach is so beautiful? Not how it is, but why? Why did I create it that way? Why did I say, here's where the sea will stop?

Job, you know truly about the sea, but you don't know fully. Job, did you know that there's a depth to the sea, a depth that you don't understand? Verse 16. Have you journeyed to the springs of the sea or walked in the recesses of the deep? We saw last year, didn't we just how dangerous it is for us to go to, even just to the depth of the Titanic?

As that Titan sub disappeared, do you remember the way the whole world kind of paused for days not knowing what happened? What happened to a submarine that we knew approximately where it was? One submarine in one part of the world, there's a depth to the sea that we don't understand. We know more about the surface of the moon, I'm told, than the depths of the sea. God says, do you know what?

That's where I take my afternoon strolls. Verse 16. He's walked in the recesses of the deep. You know truly, but you don't know fully of the gates of death being shown to you. Carries on.

Have you seen the gates of the deepest darkness? Job says, I know death. I know death too well. I put too many coffins in the ground that I never thought I would see. I know the strange pain of death, that dullness to life as a church family.

We felt that too many times recently. And yet we, like Job, would have to say, we know it vicariously. We know it only from one side. We haven't actually been there. God says, I've been to the gates of the deepest darkness.

I know death in a way that you don't.

God says, what about the weather, Job? Let's take something a bit more trivial. We're English. We like talking about the weather, Job. You know all those piles of snow that you hope you see in the Alps over the winter season?

Those tonnes and tonnes of snow that are there metaphorically. I keep them in the shed out the back at the storehouses laden with snow.

We know the truths of snow, its properties, but we don't know it fully. He says, what's the place that the lightning, verse 24, is dispersed? Or the place where the east winds are scattered over the earth? And again we say, oh, we know something of this one. Yes, we've got this one.

Yeah, we know. It's actually got to do with the wind and the way in which the sun charges and ionises particles and you get these big, massive charges and that's where the lightning comes from. And God says, yes, but can you pinpoint where that lightning strike is going to come from? And we say, in 2024, with all the supercomputers in the world, we can't pinpoint exactly where the lightning will come from. Not tomorrow, not the next day.

God says, you know what? I don't just know that, but verse 35, I send the lightning bolts on their way. They report to me. I love the way that you read this, Katherine. I love the way, because it's like God says, hey, do you know, just like the kids at registration in school, God's like, good morning, lightning.

And they're like, here we are.

It's a beautiful picture, but it's a beautiful picture of something we know truly, but we don't know fully. You see, as God again and again takes things that we know and says there is a depth to these things that you do not understand fully. It becomes a wonderfully humbling thing, because as I look at the world with all my questions, God says it's okay to have questions. You don't even understand this world fully. You don't understand yourself fully.

How do you understand me fully? You can know me truly, but not fully, just as you can know truly the sea and the world around you, and yet not fully. And what that does is it means that I do. I begin to stand down, my inner lawyer that starts prosecuting God because I say, God, I don't have the information here to blame this on you. I don't understand.

But if that's all this does, then it just leaves us with question marks, because this does a lot more than that. Because it doesn't just say that God is incomprehensible, it says, but this world is comprehended by him. Did he see the way in which he spoke? He said of the coming together of the world, of it being put in. He said, verse seven, while the morning stars sang together and the angels shouted for joy.

He speaks of the world, and he talks about it in motherly and fatherly ways. Verse 28. Does the rain have a father who fathers the drops of dew from whose womb comes the ice? Who gives birth to the frost of the heavens? And the answer to all of that is, is God.

God is the one who has a mother like father, like care for this creation, who knows it fully, who understands it fully, who understands you fully. And that means that whilst I've got all sorts of questions about it, I know that the one who understands this world in a way that I don't is still good, actually knows where things are going in a way that I can never. Alongside my humility, I see that he has truly got, that he truly understands. He truly knows I will never know him fully, but I know him truly. And if I want to know him, and if I want to be convinced of his goodness and his father like care for this world, what do I do?

I see the way that that father, like care, understands death, as Jesus Christ himself came to this world and saw the gates of death, who endured the deepest darkness so that God could die in my place, taking my punishment, showing that. Do you know what? I might have all sorts of questions, but I can know truly, my father cares and has redeemed me.

The incomprehensibility of God humbles me. It should humble you. It should humble us, actually, before one another. I can't judge other people. I don't know them fully.

I know them truly, but not fully. It should humble me in front of the world. I don't know. I don't know what God's going to do about Iraq and Syria. I don't know what he's going to do about the Middle East.

I don't know what he's going to do about climate change. I don't understand those things fully, understand why things have happened in the past. I don't to this day know why God took Henry when he did. But I can trust that he is the one who knows, who understands fully and that he is good because I know him truly, even though I. I don't know him fully.

I'm going to lead us in a prayer and then we're going to sing a song. It's an older song. I stand in awe of you. It's probably a good one for us to sing quietly. Feel free to stand or sit when we come to it, but why not use it as a time of saying, do you know what, God?

I don't know you fully and there are questions that I might never know the answer to, but I truly know that you are good. Let's pray. Oh, heavenly Father, I'm sorry for those times that I presume to know you, or even those times I presume to say, well, God's done this in order that. That.

Father, this world is more complicated than I can get my head around. I am more complicated than I can even understand myself.

And, father, whilst I will never understand you, I thank you that you understand me and this world, Father, help me to rest in the knowledge that you are good, even when I don't understand what you're doing. Thank you that in Jesus I can know truly a father, the father who would taste death, that I might come to know him.

I thank you for these things. In Jesus name, help me to live them out. Help us to live them out, I pray. Amen.