Have you ever met someone who is deeply inquisitive? You know, someone who is always looking for the answer to whatever question is gnawing at them? I’m one of those people. Since a young age I’ve been trying to understand people, relationships, myself and especially God. “Why are things the way they are?” I often wonder. Why would God do this in Scripture? Why doesn’t he do that?
A text that has challenged me throughout my life is the Book of Job. In it Job and his contemporaries are approaching the question of suffering. What or whom causes it? His contemporaries come up with a variety of answers for his suffering before Job joins in. Job wonders if his suffering is a result of unfaithfulness. He calls the Almighty to answer him and if he is guilty to call him out.
It’s God’s answer to Job that has always fascinated me. God responds to Job by calling him to answer: Where were you when the earth was created? God basically tells Job, “I am God, who are you?”.
I love God’s response because it undercuts Job’s whole approach. We often take this approach as well. We talk to God sometimes as if we are on equal footing with Him and he’ll have to answer us. As I’ve grown in my faith one thing that I keep learning is just how much God is God and I am not. This sounds like something we’d learn on day one of Sunday School and be done with, but we all need to be reminded that God is God.
What a glorious thing that God is God and that we are not. Left on our own we’re not as well off as we’d like. Without God we’re lost. But God did not abandon us. He turned our wisdom upside-down when He came into this world, lived, died and was raised for our salvation! So let’s praise God that he is God and that we are not.