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Introduction
We are nearing the end of our study in Job. Our journey has taken us through all of the human speeches in which Job, his three friends, and a young man named Elihu wrestled with why Job has suffered so tragically.
The three friends and Elihu argued that the solution to Job’s suffering was found in confession of sin and repentance. But Job insisted that the solution would come in a meeting with God so he can present his case.
He believed that God was treating him unjustly. This is because their view of the justice system is that God rewards the righteous and punishes the wicked.
Job is righteous, yet he and his friends believe that God has treated him as unrighteous as indicated by the loss of his livelihood and all of his children. But Job knows he has not done anything to deserve the sort of suffering he has experienced.
The worst part of all of this is the broken relationship with God that Job has experienced. He is filled with shame because his god has rejected him. So, the only thing he could think to do is to confront God, which he did throughout his speeches, most directly in his final speech.
He made an oath that if he did commit terrible sins, then God better act or speak up now against him. Otherwise, through God’s inaction or silence, Job will consider himself to be innocent and it is assumed that God has acted unjustly toward him.
Well, we are about to see that God does not stay silent. And, the silence is broken not with the vindication that Job seeks, but with rebuke.
God gives two speeches and Job responds briefly to both of them. We will look today at the first speech and then in two weeks we will look at the second speech.
In the first speech, God peppers Job with rhetorical questions about Job’s relative lack of understanding compared to God.
There are many ways to interpret and understand this first speech. In some ways it is difficult because it seems to be just a random list of questions. I want to draw our attention to the way God describes his wisdom, power, and love in how he governs creation.
He seeks to convince Job that he created the world in wisdom and that he governs it wisely, in justice and with compassion.1
The purpose of this message is for us to rightly orient our perspective of our unworthiness and of God’s power. With that introduction, let’s start by looking at God’s wisdom as described in this speech.
God’s Wisdom
“Then the Lord spoke to Job out of the storm.” Job 38:1 (NIV)
I’ll come back to this opening verse again at the end to discuss the name used here for God, but for now I just want to draw our attention to the way God is speaking to Job.
He is speaking from a storm. Which is interesting because in 9:16–17, Job said, “Even if I summoned him and he responded, I do not believe he would give me a hearing. He would crush me with a storm and multiply my wounds for no reason.”
The Hebrew word for storm is sʿā·rā. It is quite a common word throughout the Old Testament and can be translated as whirlwind, windstorm, tempest, wind, or gale. It is understood as a powerful weather event accompanied by high winds and clouds.
Here are a few examples:
2 Kings 2:11 “As they were walking along and talking together, suddenly a chariot of fire and horses of fire appeared and separated the two of them, and Elijah went up to heaven in a whirlwind.”
Isaiah 29:5–6 “Suddenly, in an instant, the Lord Almighty will come with thunder and earthquake and great noise, with windstorm and tempest and flames of a devouring fire.”
Jeremiah 23:19 “See, the storm of the Lord will burst out in wrath, a whirlwind swirling down on the heads of the wicked.”
Zechariah 9:14 “Then the Lord will appear over them; his arrow will flash like lightning. The Sovereign Lord will sound the trumpet; he will march in the storms of the south,”
By showing up in this way, God not only speaks but is also visible, yet obscured in the storm.
One commentator says this about God showing up in storms:
The clouds protect the audience from being consumed by the divine holiness. Those who behold such a display are filled with dread and wonder. The awe strikes the beholder dumb. Each worshiper, drawn out of his self-centered existence as by a powerful magnet, bows reverently before his God.2
Showing up in a whirlwind is a demonstration that God controls creation and is present in the midst of trouble.
Let’s keep reading a portion of God’s speech. [38:2-7; 18-21]
God is doing two main things. First, he is describing himself as the master architect of a world that is so wonderfully complex that it is impossible to fully comprehend for anyone but God himself.
And second, God shows Job’s lack of understanding. He is shifting his perspective, revealing that it is not only justice, but divine wisdom that is foundational to the right ordering of the universe.
Proverbs 3:19–20 helps us interpret these rhetorical questions as God pointing to himself as wise: “By wisdom the Lord laid the earth’s foundations, by understanding he set the heavens in place; by his knowledge the watery depths were divided, and the clouds let drop the dew.”
And in Proverbs 8:22–23, Woman Wisdom speaks of her origins: “The Lord brought me forth as the first of his works, before his deeds of old; I was formed long ages ago, at the very beginning, when the world came to be.”
Earlier in the series, I talked about how God is the creator of justice and therefore he determines how he will execute it. It’s not as though there is a justice system that existed before God and he must operate within it. The same is true about wisdom. God created wisdom when he created the universe.
In this speech, God is reorienting Job’s perspective because Job does not have the wisdom required to understand the nature of his suffering. In order to have this wisdom, he would have had to have been there at the moment of creation. But he wasn’t.
The rhetorical questions are a call to humility and reverence.
While humans have a privileged place in creation, being made in God’s image, we are still a little lower than God, as it says in Psalm 8:3–4: “When I consider your heavens, the work of your fingers, the moon and the stars, which you have set in place, what is mankind that you are mindful of them, human beings that you care for them?”
This posture is what God is after for Job and it will be a primary theme as we finish up the series in the book of Job and enter Philippians in September.
In his suffering, Job began to question God’s justice, wisdom, and power. He was developing the attitude that he knew better than God. God is reminding Job that God is the source of wisdom and he knows the right ordering of creation.
Anything and everything that God does is wise and just, for wisdom and justice find their source in God.
God’s Power
We now turn to God’s power, which is a different sort of power than what we see in the world.
The world is filled with a grasping, fighting, and dominating sort of power. People spend their whole lives in pursuit of more power so that they can arrange their lives and even society to suit them.
This leads to the abuse of natural and human resources.
In a recently published book titled Empire of AI, journalist Karen Hao draws a parallel between the race to develop Artificial Intelligence technologies and colonial empires of old.3
The AI companies extract resources, labour, and data from around the world under the banner of progress or goodwill. In Kenya, for example, content moderation workers were significantly underpaid and subjected to emotionally traumatizing content in an effort to train the artificial intelligence systems. In Chile, huge AI data centre cooling systems threaten precious water supplies—all to fuel the insatiable appetites for power.
Hao suggests that AI, as an empire, imposes itself on populations and ecosystems, bypassing democratic accountabilities. Ultimately, she worries, we lose collective agency when decisions are made in boardrooms rather than public squares.
An important question in light of this and other technological advancements is, when power is held in the name of progress, who gets to define what that progress is, and are we paying a steeper price than we’d like to admit?
This brings us to the power of God. And while we will only touch briefly on this in Job, it points us once again to hold a posture of humility.
Read Job 38:22–27, 31-33.
As I said before, the rhetorical questions are meant to shift Job’s perspective by showing that God is in charge of the world he made, and he knows every part of it. Nothing is outside God’s care. He even sends rain to the empty wilderness where no one lives.
Humanity is becoming increasingly powerful, which in and of itself isn’t a bad thing. But this power, left unchecked by God’s wisdom, is abusive. We are going into the wild areas of the world, redirecting and using the water in the name of progress, damaging natural systems.
But God provides for everything he’s made, showing his wisdom in how he sustains the whole earth. God is saying to Job, you don’t understand, so stop jumping to conclusions. God is not absent from suffering. He is powerful over the forces that seem uncontrollable.
And while we can exert our power over the forces of nature, we do so without wisdom and often without love, which is the final characteristic of God I want to highlight from this speech.
God’s Love
Read Job 38:39–39:10.
If God looks after wild animals in the middle of nowhere, how much more does he care for us? That’s what he wanted Job to understand. God had been with Job in his days of blessing, and he was still with him in his days of pain. Job’s suffering didn’t weaken God’s rule.
It didn’t mean God had stopped being just. It was all happening under his wise and careful watch, even when Job couldn’t see it.
Go back to Job 38:1 “Then the Lord spoke to Job out of the storm.”
Throughout the Bible, various names are used for God. The most common is Yahweh, which is the name God used for himself in Exodus 3 when God revealed himself to Moses in the burning bush.
The other most common name for God is Elohim, which is more of a generic word for a deity used by ancient people who spoke Semitic languages, meaning, the languages of those who descended from Noah’s son, Shem. (These languages include Hebrew, Aramaic, Ugaritic, Phoenician, and Akkadian among others.)
But, the name Yahweh was exclusive to the Israelite people. This is significant because of how God’s name is used throughout Job.
In chapters 1 and 2, Yahweh is used. Throughout chapters 3 to 37, the name Yahweh is not used; God is called El Shaddai, God the Almighty.
In the book of Job this has become a way of speaking of God as detached and distant. Then, in 38:1, Yahweh is once again used.
The God whose name ‘Yahweh’ is associated with his personal presence of care, steadfast love and faithfulness to the people of his covenant, this God speaks to Job.4
In chapter 23, Job cried out in search for God:
Job 23:3, 8-9 “If only I knew where to find him; if only I could go to his dwelling! But if I go to the east, he is not there; if I go to the west, I do not find him. When he is at work in the north, I do not see him; when he turns to the south, I catch no glimpse of him.”
For those of us whose faith is tested by the darkness and the apparent absence of God, the great reassurance of the story of Job is that God speaks. The Lord does come! God has, in truth, been present all along. And in the whirlwind, God speaks and his presence is made known.
Job’s (and our) Unworthiness
God ends his first speech with a challenge. He knows that Job’s intent in his demand to meet God face-to-face was to give him a speech about how he has been treated unjustly. So, God invites Job to do that at the end of this speech.
Job 40:1–2 “The Lord said to Job: “Will the one who contends with the Almighty correct him? Let him who accuses God answer him!”
God’s point in his speech to Job was this: you can’t judge my rule by what you see on the surface. You don’t know enough to understand why everything happens the way it does.
So you have a choice. Trust me and believe I rule with wisdom, or keep accusing me and put yourself above me. The decision was Job’s to make.
How can Job answer? Clearly, God’s wisdom and power are beyond Job’s comprehension. Who is he to tell God how to govern the world.
Yet, God is not just wise and powerful, he is also loving. He reveals himself to Job, not with answers to his questions, but with his very presence.
This is what we need more than anything. Explanations are not going to satisfy our deepest need. Only the wise, powerful, and loving presence of God will satisfy what we are truly after.
We have the tendency to see power as something grasped, consolidated, and protected. It’s competitive and expansionist, often justified with noble language but ultimately serving our own interests.
This kind of power hoards and shields itself from accountability, operating from a posture of scarcity and threat. The power of God, ultimately demonstrated on the cross, flips that entire script. In Philippians 2 it says that Jesus, “being in very nature God,” did not cling to equality with God but emptied himself.
Rather than securing dominance, he expressed power through humility. Rather than self-protection, he gave himself to be broken. Where human power says, “My strength is measured by what I can control,” the cross says, “My strength is revealed in what I’m willing to give away.”
Where human power fears vulnerability, the crucifixion embraces it—trusting that life and justice will ultimately come through death and resurrection, not coercion.
I want to close by reading some passages, starting with Job’s response. After each passage, I’ll leave a bit of space for reflection.
Job 40:4–5 “I am unworthy—how can I reply to you? I put my hand over my mouth. I spoke once, but I have no answer— twice, but I will say no more.”
Matthew 8:5–8 “When Jesus had entered Capernaum, a centurion came to him, asking for help. “Lord,” he said, “my servant lies at home paralyzed, suffering terribly.” Jesus said to him, “Shall I come and heal him?” The centurion replied, “Lord, I am not worthy to have you come under my roof.”
John 1:26–27 “I baptize with water,” John replied, “but among you stands one you do not know. He is the one who comes after me, the straps of whose sandals I am not worthy to untie.”
Luke 18:10–14 “Two men went up to the temple to pray, one a Pharisee and the other a tax collector. The Pharisee stood by himself and prayed: ‘God, I thank you that I am not like other people—robbers, evildoers, adulterers—or even like this tax collector. I fast twice a week and give a tenth of all I get.’ “But the tax collector stood at a distance. He would not even look up to heaven, but beat his breast and said, ‘God, have mercy on me, a sinner.’ “I tell you that this man, rather than the other, went home justified before God. For all those who exalt themselves will be humbled, and those who humble themselves will be exalted.”
Job 40:1–5 “The Lord said to Job: “Will the one who contends with the Almighty correct him? Let him who accuses God answer him!” Then Job answered the Lord: “I am unworthy—how can I reply to you? I put my hand over my mouth. I spoke once, but I have no answer— twice, but I will say no more.”
All of these people, who considered themselves as unworthy of God, were commended for their faith.
What separates those who become worthy and those who don’t is whether or not you are willing to admit your unworthiness and trust God to make you worthy.
- John E. Hartley, The Book of Job, The New International Commentary on the Old Testament (Grand Rapids, MI: Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing Co., 1988), 515. ↩︎
- Hartley, 490. ↩︎
- Hani Richter, “Karen Hao on how the AI boom became a new imperial frontier,” https://www.reuters.com/lifestyle/karen-hao-how-ai-boom-became-new-imperial-frontier-2025-07-03, accessed August 10, 2025. ↩︎
- David Atkinson, The Message of Job: Suffering and Grace, ed. J. A. Motyer and Derek Tidball, The Bible Speaks Today (Nottingham, England: Inter-Varsity Press, 1991), 139-140. ↩︎