Job's Journey

Mid-summer, we take our interns to the game park.  This is a weekend for them to get away from Bundibugyo, to get perspective on what God is teaching them, to avert their eyes for a few days from the relentless suffering of Africa and be awash it the continent’s beauty.  When Job’s friends exhausted themselves trying to explain his problems in a cause-and-effect obedience-and-blessing universe, God finally steps in (chapters 38 to the end) and basically takes Job on a safari.   Can you hunt prey for the lion?  Can you mark when the deer gives birth?  Did you set the wild donkey free?  Will the wild ox be willing to serve you? Does the hawk fly by your wisdom?

As an answer to Job’s distress,  God’s tour of the wild wonders of His creation seems to point to His power, His beauty, His creativity, His being GOD.

But this weekend, I saw another side to this lesson.  Over and over God takes Job on a journey of the animals and nature to point out:  Job can not control them.  Nature is unpredictable, untamable.  Camping in the wilderness we experience this first hand.   We drove through the park with our interns piled on top of our truck. At some points we were awestruck by the splendor:  in the pre-dawn darkness, a majestically powerful leopard stretching his night-weary limbs, slowly rising, regarding us interlopers and then sauntering off into the bush.  Restless elephants trumpeting, semi-playfully pushing each other in slow-motion splendor with their ponderous strength.  The flash of jeweled orange as a tiny malachite kingfisher flits up from the reeds.  But at other points we drove and drove and drove, watchful, not seeing anything.  A large grey male lion trotted away after barely a glimpse in the distance, lying down concealed in inaccessible bushes, tantalizing but unreachable.  There was nothing we could do to make animals appear where we wanted, or wait for us to see them well.  They are, after all, wild. This is a savannah, not Disney World.  The experience is not humanly orchestrated.  Sometimes we will be disappointed.

Driving home today, I began to think this was the real point God was making with Job.  Yes, nature shows how creative He is.  But what He was trying to point out, is that nature shows how wild He is.  How Other.  How beyond being orchestrated by human desires and ideas.  We want formulas that work, like Job’s friends we want to put our good intentions in and see God’s abundant blessings flow out, measure for measure.  But God tells Job, look around.  You can’t tell the wild donkey where to go, nor can you control the details of your own life.  God is God.  He does not show up on our schedule.  His actions may not correspond to what we would want.

Like Job, we need to be pushed to break out of the mold of a God-in-our-image, a God who acts as we would, who does whatever we plan.  The inexplicable suffering of Bundibugyo and the untamable beauty of the African plain both shake us out of our illusion that we can predict, let alone dictate, God’s actions.  Like the leopard we saw this morning, He defines Himself on His own terms:
I will be gracious to whom I will be gracious, and I will have compassion on whom I will have compassion.  (Ex 33:19)