God is sovereign even over chaos, danger and wildness (Job pt 10)

From 38v39 throughout chapter 39 God focuses Job’s attention on a wide array of animals.  Asking the same questions to draw Job into seeing God’s care, attention to detail and goodness.  From the lions who God satisfies, and the mountains goats who God sees. The wild donkey who God gave freedom to and provides for.  The wild Ox, the weird and wonderful ostrich, the warhorse with its might and power, to the hawk and eagle who fly because of God’s wisdom.

God created each of these animals, he cares for them, provides for them, watches over them.  Whether they are clean or unclean animals, God delights in them.  There’s a sense of divine wonder in what he’s made in God’s description of all these animals.  God is pleased with what he’s made even post fall.  But notice the focus in the animals God chooses to direct Job’s attention to.  It’s not the funny loving puppy, the tame pony, or the loveable hamster.  These animals are wild and powerful, untameable and dangerous.  This is nature red in tooth and claw.  God is showing Job that in his good world that he’s made there is death and danger.  There is chaos in creation but not out of his control or without purpose or design.

And God is good; providing for and caring for even those creatures than would make Job fearful.  Do you see the implication if God cares even for these things how much more for you, Job? 

God allows a wildness in his creation.  He doesn’t deny it exists, he doesn’t look at creation through rose tinted glasses.  But God doesn’t immediately stop every threat, every danger, God allows pockets of chaos within his created order. 

The presence of pain and chaos in the world God has made doesn’t declare God’s absence or call into question his sovereignty or his goodness.  But God cares in the chaos, he rules over it, we can trust in his goodness in it.

Job is being invited to re-examine and re-evaluate his dark imaginings about God and the world that he has made in the light of what he now knows.  Will we do the same?  Will you expose your darkest imaginings about God to these questions?  Will you see God in all his glory and goodness and wisdom and gracious loving kindness as you look at the world he made with it’s wild, dangerous, beautiful majesty.

(40v1-5)Show us Job’s response.   Job acknowledges that he can’t compare to God, he’s humbled.  That it was wrong to talk of putting God in the dock.  That there’s so much more than he realised.  Pain and suffering had diminished his horizons, but now God has opened his eyes and expanded his horizons.  God hasn’t answered his questions but has shown him the flaw in his thinking behind those questions.  Now he sees creation is declaring the goodness of God in it’s wonders and it’s death and danger.

Where he was tempted to see it all as broken, an arena of suffering absent God’s control and goodness.  Now he sees God’s wise foundations, his delight in its goodness, and his sovereignty even over suffering.  And so he withdraws his accusation.  He isn’t yet ready to repent because one question remains, if God is sovereign over everything then what about God’s relationship with evil?  We’ll see God’s answer to that next week.

But for now, God is calling us to hold in tension the truths of his word.  How do you see creation?  It is both full of both goodness and garbage, pain and joy, beauty and suffering.  It declares to us that God is wise and his plans are good in his establishing of stability, in his providing order, and even his care and sovereignty over it’s brutality at times.

That in no way makes evil OK, it will one day be brought to justice, because God cares about that too, more than we do.  God knows every word spoken, every action taken, every thought imagined and it will be judged.  But not yet.