Just Hang Up

Then Job answered and said: “How you have helped him who has no power! How you have saved the arm that has no strength! How you have counseled him who has no wisdom, and plentifully declared sound knowledge! With whose help have you uttered words, and whose breath has come out from you?” (Job 26:1-4 ESV). Sometimes you just have to hang up the phone! In chapter 26 Job hangs up the phone, in a sense. He says there is no use talking to his friends anymore. His answer to Bildad is one of rather deep and rich irony in which he suggests that his friends have been of no help at all to him. I think, however, that Job needs to learn something from this, and we will see in the next chapters that he does. Oswald Chambers reminds us that God can never make us into wine if we object to the fingers that he uses to crush us with; or if we do, it will be at great pain to ourselves. Job does not see here that God also is using these friends in his life. Satan has sent them; God is using them; and we will soon see the result in Job's life. Once again he goes on to state the majesty of God in a brilliant and moving passage. He says that there is a mystery in God that no human can plumb. Even when we have understood something of the greatness of His wisdom and majesty in nature, when we have learned of His omnipresence, omnipotence, and omniscience, and we know that as part of our theology, it still does not explain all of His ways. I am reminded of a verse from Robert Browning's poem, "Bishop Blougram's Apology," where the poet describes an arrogant young man who has worked out all his theology so that God is carefully boxed in. He believes he knows the answers to all the theological riddles of life; there is no place for God in it. He can handle it all himself. He comes to an old bishop and tells him he does not need God any longer; he is committed to his unbelief. The old bishop warns him: Just when we are safest, there's a sunset-touch, A fancy from a flower-bell, some one's death, A chorus-ending from Euripides,— And that's enough for fifty hopes and fears... The Grand Perhaps. What he means is that just when you think you have God all worked out, something happens that you can't handle. It doesn't fit your box. You see a sunset that is so moving that it awakens depths in you that you can't explain. Someone dies, and you don't know how to handle it. You see a flower, and you are touched by it. You listen to a chorus, and it moves you in such a strange way, it doesn't fit the facts. And in all these ways God is breaking through into our lives. It is the great mystery of God.