Job 37

When we gather together to worship God, our hearts are directed toward Him and away from ourselves. While we come there to find peace, not every moment in His presence is equally peaceful. Some of the things that we hear from His Word are supposed to make us tremble. This is also true of life. There is a difference between our experience of a broad meadow on a day of gentle sunshine and the feelings we have in that same place when the thunder and lightening of God are all around us.

Job has heard the thunder of God. Destruction came down from heaven upon his household. When lightening strikes so close, it may take some time to recover from the shock of the experience. Then we look around to see if anyone was hurt. When we are able to feel the magnitude of the loss, this naturally is our focus for some time. Eventually we may be capable of thinking about the Power who gives life and who takes it away. Our eyes one day focus less on ourselves, and we find a more glorious sight to behold as we tremble before God.

This trembling before the Lord's majesty in worship and in life can be accompanied by a simultaneous awareness of the goodness of God and of His amazing ability to work out His purposes through things that are very evil. There is much wickedness and trouble everywhere. We can look at the distressing actions of people in bringing harm to others, or we can consider the forces of nature at work in a powerful storm, and we must insist that oppression and overwhelming winds of death are not good things in their essential nature. Yet we know that God is sovereign over everything, and He is good. He thunders wondrously with His voice. He does great things that we cannot comprehend. To embrace this truth is to move toward health. When we allow ourselves to think about more than the damage brought about by the storm, we can consider the One who has the power behind even the worst tragedy.

Lightning can seem to fill the entire sky. The thunder that swiftly follows may be too much for our ears to take. We run for shelter along with every wild beast. God can bring a whirlwind or a river of ice from the sky that brings down the trees of the field. Do we imagine that these events have nothing to do with the Almighty, that they are simply the result of natural forces without any divine purpose? How then will we ever find peace when we see that our loved ones have lost their lives in that storm? Was God unaware? If the Lord is the Almighty God of heaven and earth, He must be the One in charge of life and death. The storm is not God. The Lord is God over the storm. Look at Him. Consider His power and His greatness. Tremble before Him, and eventually, find peace in Him. We do not know all of what He is doing in the storm. We cannot understand whether He is correcting His people, or whether the worst loss we experience is a secret design for the securing of some everlasting mercy, or if both of these goals are at work in the same frightening trial. But we do know Him, and we know that He commands the storm. Otherwise the storm is more of a God than the Lord, and all is lost.

Consider the wondrous works of God. We don't know how He does them. To faithful science belongs the trembling thrill of examining the secondary forces at work that bring the hurricane. This is a sacred charge, to look hard at the facts of nature, to make hypotheses, and to consider ways that theories can be tested with experimentation. But beyond every second cause of every storm, whether in the heart of the earth or in the secret recesses of a child's mind, there is the first Cause of all things. We must turn to Him for healing.

Even when we think God's thoughts after Him and discover the way that weather patterns function, can we actually make weather for the earth? Even if we could do that, are we able to place the galaxies in motion? Can we do these things and still live? Will others live after our efforts to control the world have run their course? Do we think that we can teach the Almighty? Have we found the flaws in His handiwork, and discovered good solutions that will not themselves eventually cause even greater troubles?

What if a man could come from heaven who would actually have the mind of God with all that divinity somehow resting in His person? What would such a Man be like, who with His divine nature could have knowledge about the storms of the earth and of the mind along with the power to repair both? That would be something! What would the necessary repair be for all our troubles? Would it follow upon the discovery of a technical flaw in the handiwork of God, some problem with His engineering specifications? Isn't it the case that any error would likely be in us and not in Him? If so, then the fix required would be the satisfaction of God's own holy demands.

God has come to us from on high in Jesus Christ. He knew that the problem in this world was in us, and so He became Man to save humanity. The solution was not a secret fix to some technical glitch. It came in the Lord's perfect provision of all the holy righteousness required by His Father. There was one other thing necessary for the full realization of the repair to heaven and earth: The perfect Son of God needed to die in our place. This was the only way to still the mighty thunder of God that was against us for our sin. This was the only solution that would allow us to find life beyond the folly that, since Adam, has been bound up within the troubled hearts of all of his descendants. God's answer for this troubled world is very different then the repairs that even the wisest and holiest people imagine in their own conceit. The resurrection of Jesus assures us that the solution of the cross of Christ truly worked. Let us gather together then with both trembling and joy, and let us worship God through Jesus Christ together with all of heaven's glorious host.