Boundaries  - Job 38:1-11

 

 

            There’s a story my dad used to tell about a crowded train that was traveling in a mountain region. Standing in the middle aisle of the train were a sergeant, a private, and a beautiful young woman. The train went into a tunnel under the mountains and everything was pitched into darkness. Suddenly, there was the sound of a passionate kiss, followed by a resounding slap. Moments later, when the train emerged from the tunnel, everyone could see the sergeant had a bright red welt on his cheek.

            Everyone left the train that day believing they knew exactly what happened. The passengers all assumed the sergeant had taken advantage of the darkness to kiss the young woman and had gotten from her what he deserved. The sergeant assumed that the private had kissed the woman who had responded by swinging wildly, and had hit him by mistake. The woman assumed that the sergeant had kissed her and that the private had stepped forward to protect her honor. 

            They were all wrong. Only the private knew what really had happened. That he had kissed the woman and then slapped the sergeant.

 

            Truth isn’t always what we assume. What we know of the facts may be true and yet we find ourselves jumping to conclusions that turn out to be way off the mark. We think we have all the information we need, when we don’t.

 

            What do we really know about God and how do we know it? How can we be sure that what we believe about God is really true, and that there is not something that we are missing?

 

            That’s what the passage from Job is all about. We spent time on Job in our adult education class, so some of this will be review for those who were there. But then Job is such a profound book that it pays to keep revisiting it.

 

            Job is a folk tale at its finest. It tells the story of an impossibly rich and impossibly good man from long ago and far away who suffers impossibly bad fortune. It is a story designed to explore the age-old question, “Why do bad things happen to good people?”

 

            At first Job stoically accepts what happens to him. But as his misfortunes mount beyond the point that any human being could stand, he becomes absolutely convinced that justice is not being done. The story purposely sets up Job as an impossibly good man just to stop anyone who wants to take the easy way out and say, “Yes, he did deserve it.” There is no way that he deserves what happens to him.

 

 From this, Job makes what seems to him a logical conclusion:

             If God can let such terrible things happen to him, God must not be compassionate or just.

 

 

Job does not say that in anger. He is a good and obedient man. He does not deny that God has the right and the power to do whatever God wants. Job just wishes that God were not like that.

 

            For 37 chapters, God has not disputed the facts of the case.

 

            But when Job comes to his seemingly logical conclusion, God roars to life. A voice out of a whirlwind slams Job to the ground with a serious of pointed questions that seem to say, “Who do you think you are?”

 

            We discover as we listen to God’s speech that God has no quarrel with the facts as Job sees them. In fact, God says that Job was right: In no way does Job deserve what has happened to him. That’s right, bad things do happen to good people.

   

            What God will not stand for, though, is the conclusion Job draws from this fact. God is not compassionate or just? Don’t you know anything about God? Compassionate, just, and powerful pretty much define exactly what God is. If you take away two of those, you don’t have a clue who God is.

            Job, your conclusion is dead wrong.

 

            Which leaves Job with the question we started with: If God, who is powerful, is also compassionate and just, why does God allow good people to suffer for no reason?

 

            God’s speech addresses that. The answer, Job, is all around you. It is everywhere you look. The answer is tied up in boundaries.  

 

            Do you know who made the boundaries of the universe, Job? God asks. Yes, I did.

Do you know why I made boundaries? I set boundaries because nothing meaningful comes out of chaos, and I wanted something meaningful to come out of this world that I made. I had to create order, and order means setting boundaries. And so I made the bars and the doors for the sea, and said, “Thus far you shall come and no farther.”  I set boundaries for the stars and determined their measurements. I set boundaries for the universe.

 

Setting boundaries means there are things inside and outside the boundaries. Setting boundaries means are things you can and cannot do.

There are things, for example, that humans cannot do because of the boundary of gravity.

And yes, because God chose to set boundaries and make life meaningful, there are things God cannot do.

 

Do you believe that nothing is impossible for God? Really? Do you believe that it is possible for God to enjoy torturing little children? Do you believe that it is possible for God to lie and deceive? Do you believe it is possible for God to be so shallow that the only thing God really enjoys is a six-pack of beer?

 

The message of the Bible is that God cannot be that way. Those things are impossible for God because God chose to make them impossible, because God chose to establish boundaries of what is possible and what is not. God chose to limit God’s self, by making boundaries that even God cannot cross.

 

Like Job, all of us have a need to figure out who God is, and how God works. We need to understand what the boundaries are. God allows us to do that in two ways: from what God reveals to us in handiwork of God’s creation, and from what God reveals to us in the authority of the Word.

 

There is too much argument between the religious world and the scientific world about where the boundaries are and what they mean. It doesn’t have to be.

 

Here is what I have found to be a good rule of thumb: if you want to know what the boundaries are that God created for the universe, look to science. God made no secret of what those boundaries are, and gave us the tools to understand them. The fact is we understand those boundaries a great deal better than did the authors of the Bible, because we have better tools than they did.

Scientific tools show us that the boundaries that God created are far more wondrous and magnificent than anyone in Old Testament times could have imagined. They didn’t know that the universe is 15 billion years old. That it is so huge that as an example of scale, if I place a marble, representing the moon 1 foot away from a ball representing the earth, the nearest of the trillions of stars beyond our solar system would be in Australia.

They didn’t know there are such things as bacteria, and that there is a kind of bacteria that can live in boiling water. They didn’t know that God’s world includes a single mushroom plant that is more than 2,200 acres wide. They didn’t know there’s a desert in Chile that hasn’t seen a drop of rain in 400 years. They didn’t know there’s really no such thing as a food chain but that all living things form a web of relationship so complex that it is beyond our ability to understand them. They didn’t know that species are constantly evolving. They didn’t know that weather systems are so complex that a computer kicking out 2 billion calculations per second couldn’t make a dent in figuring out all the factors that influence them.

Those are the boundaries that God created for the world. Those boundaries are huge and make for a spectacular world, but they are there, and thanks to God’s gift of science, we can know them.

 

            Knowing the boundaries that God created for God is much more difficult. As God’s speech explains to Job, God is larger than the world, and if we think weather systems are difficult to understand, God is infinitely more complex.

 

            Yet God is not unknowable. God has made a point of letting us know the important boundaries that God has created for God, the boundaries that we need to know about. God reveals those boundaries in the Word.

 

            The Bible tells us that God is bound by promises. God has to keep them.

            The Bible tells us that God is bound by the principles of love and justice and truth. God cannot go against them.

 

That’s why God comes down so hard on Job. Job assumed that since God allowed bad things to happen, that God can stray beyond those boundaries. That God is so powerful that God does not have to obey the rules of compassion and justice.

 

And that, says God, is simply not true. Whatever else you know about me, never forget this. That you will never find me setting foot outside the boundaries of love and justice. Never.

 

So we’re still stuck with the paradox. Bad things happen to good people. How can God let these things happen if God is always compassionate and just?

 

Listen to God’s answer to Job. The answer has to do with boundaries. If God can be bound by love, then God can be bound by other things as well. There are boundaries that have to be created in order for relationship to take place, for life to take place. There can be no life without choice, without change, without possibilities, without unpredictability, without chance.

If God operates and controls everything, existence is meaningless. God’s relationship with us would be like trying to have a relationship with a computer program. God chose not to do that. God chose relationship. And so God set up boundaries that limited God’s power in order to make life and relationship possible.

 

Because God chose to set boundaries and make life meaningful, there are things God cannot do.

 

If you want to know why God set the boundaries where God did, good luck. God fires a series of questions at Job that all ask the same basic thing: Do you know why I set the boundaries where I did?

 

That’s not something Job can begin to understand. The ways we have of understanding God come from God’s handiwork in nature and from God’s revealed Word. As Job finds out, the answer to why God set the boundaries where he did cannot be found in either. We can never know why God set the boundaries where they are. So don’t go jumping to conclusions about what God is or isn’t doing, about what God should or shouldn’t be doing in our lives.

 

There comes a point where you need to trust. We know enough about God from God’s created order and from God’s revealed Word, to know that God cannot be anything other than good, fascinating, powerful, and just. Those are the boundaries we know and understand. We know that God will never cross them.

Whatever other boundaries to God’s power exist are there because a good, fascinating, powerful, and just God chose to put them there. And knowing that is enough to give us comfort and hope in even the worst of times.