Sound is muffled and the pressure pushes from all sides. You feel a calm, but urgent longing to break the surface of the water. You swim up, not knowing how deep you went. Your breath that lingers in your lungs is stagnant. Every bit of oxygen is being pulled from it, slower and slower as the balance shifts from oxygen to carbon dioxide. You remember the clear sounds and the plunge mere moments ago, as the last of the bubbles surrounding you roll off. You kick and kick, pulling yourself upward with your arms. The weight of waiting presses on you as you resist a panic.
Just as suddenly, you break the surface. A deep breath fills your lungs. Relief floods through you—the pressure gone, the suffocation ended. You can breathe. But as you gasp and recover, you notice: the sky has darkened. Waves are rising. A storm approaches—far more powerful and terrifying than the drowning you just escaped.
Job felt the words of Elihu enter his ears and then, what he asked for came. The moment that God starts to speak. In Job 38:1-2 we see that God arrives and speaks from a whirlwind, asking, “Who darkens counsel with words without knowledge?” If we were there it might be like the moment after we broke the water surface and entered into a rough and stormy ocean. With a massive wave imminently close and about to hit you, with no escape. The silence almost feels safer. Job wanted to know where justice was—well, brace yourself, for the response is incoming.
God overwhelms Job with examples of things he did not observe and cannot know. For two chapters, Job has to endure his inadequacy. Like continuous punches from a violent ocean, Job is reduced almost to fatigue, to the point where he replies that he is small and will stop talking. God showed up and Job was overwhelmed by his inadequate knowledge. Job had to admit: he did not know enough to make a judgment.
God confronted Job with the complexity of reality. The origin of everything, how things work and how they work together. God presented to Job that he had limited perspective in comparison to God that was, is, and will be (Revelation 1:18). God is far beyond him. Consider the complexity of a single computer’s processing unit and the electrical currents that power it. Now consider the networks that stretch across the whole earth. Do we know the positions of electrons and the movement of atoms within these structures and what affects them? That is basically what God presents to Job—both his lack in the fine details and the holistic picture. We can ask ourselves the same questions that were placed before Job. Do we know the history of everything that led up to this point? Do we really know everything in detail—the thoughts of every person, their motives, their hidden struggles? Do we really know how everything interacts with each other? This is an overwhelmingly complex situation that God is presenting to Job. How else can we respond but by realising that we simply do not know?
How frequently do we want to fight the Lord with a better option than current events? Where are we asking Him now why He is not intervening? Does He not know what is going on? For if He did—what more could we possibly say?
Job finally had to cling to God, like a man clinging to a lifeline in a volatile sea. He was fatigued and could not handle his lack of knowledge. He admitted he did not know enough and God knew. When God told Moses to make a bronze snake, could Moses have known that one day, Jesus Christ would be made sin for us so that those who look at Him will be healed from sin? Christ became sin—we were healed by him becoming what plagued us. Job couldn’t see the purpose of his suffering in the moment. But God’s purposes extend far beyond what we can perceive.
So let us rest in this idea: even if we know too little, God knows everything. He knows how things interact. He knows from where things came and towards what it is going. God is all-knowing.
“I am unworthy,” Job finally says. “I will put my hand over my mouth” (Job 40:4).