Day 324: Job 38-39 | Read The Bible In A Year | Bible Study with Commentary by Dr. Manny Arango

Welcome to the Bible Department podcast, powered by Arma. We are walking through the entire Bible in a year. You can go to the description or thebibledepartment.com to download a reading plan and join the journey. (upbeat music) - Family, welcome to day 324. I'm super, super excited. I've been waiting for this day for a long time. Yahweh is finally responding to Job, okay? Like, I know that in an Eastern worldview, the chiasm is the center most point, which in the book of Job is chapter 28. And I know that that's like the key, right? Like the climax. But I don't care what nobody say. When God starts talking and he sets the record straight, these are some of my favorite chapters in the entire Bible. Hey, God is just gangster in how he responds to Job. But moreover, like what Yahweh has to say is just way more important than anything that Job has to say, definitely what his foolish friends have to say, definitely what Elohu has to say, and definitely what the Satan character, the accuser, the opposing has to say, Yahweh is going to, I mean, like, set the record straight. And I just think these couple of chapters of Job are epic. So Yahweh's response is gonna get split into two speeches, all right? We're gonna look at one of those speeches today,

and we're gonna look at the second speech tomorrow. So I just want you to get pumped up, okay? Today and tomorrow, we are looking at Yahweh's response to Job. Obviously the friends are in earshot and the friends are gonna be a part of just what God has to say in response to all of these dialogues that we have been reading throughout the book of Job. So chapters 38 and 39 would be considered God's first speech. And at the end of God's first speech, Job is like, I'm sorry, bro, my bad, let me stop talking. Clearly, I don't know nothing, okay? Clearly, I'm ignorant. But for God, ignorance and humility is not enough. Remember, that's just the beginning of wisdom. Now, it's time we get to the end of chapter 39. Job is at the fear of the Lord. But that's just the beginning of wisdom. Then chapters 40, this would be Job's second speech that Job hears from Yahweh. Yahweh is gonna start talking again, speech number two in chapter 40. And we're gonna get that second speech all through chapter 40 of 41. And the conclusion of the second speech is not ignorance. It's not the fear of the Lord, the awe of Yahweh, the acknowledgement that, hey man, you're big, I'm small, my bad. It's actually, Job is going to learn something powerful about God.

He's gonna actually get some information. So if there was a kind of trajectory here, all right? I want you to think about the trajectory from innocence to ignorance to information, okay? Innocence, ignorance, information, okay? From most of the book of Job, Job has been arguing his innocence. I'm innocent, I'm innocent, I'm innocent. And then God is gonna speak, chapters 38 and 39. And Job's finally gonna get to a place of, I'm ignorant. I should not have challenged you. Like, I mean, I am humbled, okay? Which the fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom. And it's gonna take Yahweh two chapters to get Job to a place of, instead of fighting for my innocence, I really should just be claiming, I'm ignorant, man. I don't know enough, I don't know anything. And then in chapters 40 and 41, Yahweh's actually gonna reveal some information to Job so that he won't just be at the beginning of wisdom, but that he can actually be on the path of wisdom beginning to know the Lord, okay? So I just wanna give that to you as a mind map. All right, I simply say this way sooner in the episode, but I'm pumped today. And if you didn't read chapters 38 and 39, I mean, you are literally missing out. This is like some of the best content, like some of the best stuff God says in the entire Bible. Pretty baller, all right?

If you have not done the reading for the day, stop the video, pause the audio, get out of here, go get the reading done, it's beautiful. Not only is it poetic, it is challenging, it's all kinds of stuff. I mean, golly, peak, like Bible, okay? All right, finally God is going to talk. And I mean, he's quite literally just gonna put Job in his place, okay? Starts out with this, who is this that obscures my plans with words without knowledge? Like, immediately, you got a lot of words, but you have no knowledge. Brace yourself like a man. Oh, when God starts saying brace yourself like a man, it's like, I'm scared, okay? I'm nervous. And then verse four, where were you and I laid the Earth's foundations? Tell me if you understand. Who marked off in the dimension? Surely you know you could hear the sarcasm, man. You know, since you know everything, since you're so innocent, since you are claiming that I'm not just. And since you and your friends have made claims about how the world works, since you know how the world works, let's talk about the world. Let's see how much you know about the cosmos,

about the universe. And I mean, we get a couple of questions in and you start to get what Yahweh is saying. I mean, these questions are not questions. They are statements. And Yahweh says, who marked off its dimensions? Surely you know who stretched a measuring line across it. On what were its footing set? Or who laid its cornerstone while the Morningstar is saying together in all the angels shot it for joy? Who shut up the sea behind doors? Then it burst forth from the womb when I made the clouds its garment and wrapped it in thick darkness when I fixed limits for it. It's that it's doors and bars in place. When I said this far, you may come in no further. Here's where your proud ways halt. Have you ever given orders to the morning? Have you ever given orders to the morning? What a baller question to ask somebody. Have you ever given orders to the morning or shown the dawn its place? Like, in verse 16, have you journeyed to the springs of the sea or walked in the recess of the deep? Have the gates of death been shown to you? Verse 18, have you comprehended the vast expanse of the earth? Tell me if you know all this. 19, what is the weight of the abode of light?

Yahweh knows what he's doing. He's essentially getting Job to realize, oh gosh, I just don't have enough information. I am ignorant. I am ignorant. Clearly God has informed, clearly I am not. And this is the beginning of wisdom. You know when you're talking to a wise person 'cause wise people are genuinely humble. They're genuinely like, yeah man, I don't know. There's a lot I don't know. And so, all right, let me kind of dive into context clues, nerdy nuggets, Thomas' truth. Okay, I'm super, super excited, but I don't want the format of the episode to get lost. All right, so here's just an introductory thought. Okay, Yahweh is not concerned with Job's innocence or his own sense of justice. That's the first thing I think we just gotta observe. At no point in chapters 38 to 39 does God actually respond to like what Job has asked. Like, so the things on the docket to respond to have been Job's innocence, to which Yahweh says nothing about that, not important to the Lord. Second is his own justice, also not important. But there's something that God wants to desperately communicate to Job and his friends. And I think I've got an interpretive key to help us understand what is that idea.

But in order to understand it, we need context. All right, so by the way, the cover of this book is literally based on these chapters that we're about to dive into. Specifically chapter 41, okay, where God begins to describe a creature named Leviathan, Leviathan pictured here on the cover of my latest book, "Kression Chaos." So the subset of this book is calm your storms, order your life, find your peace. Now, when I wrote this book, the dominant framework for this book is kind of this chaos and this order. And chaos and order are at odds with each other. Now, I didn't want this book to be too complex or too convoluted, it's already nerdy enough. If you haven't got a copy of this book, you should, okay? We'll make sure there's a link in the description of this, of today's episodes so that you can grab a copy of this book. It's an incredible book. I know it may seem like I'm biased, but I promise you objectively, solid book. All right, now, when I wrote this book, I knew that there are actually three categories and not just two, but I just didn't want the book to be too complex or too convoluted. So I stuck to a two-fold system, chaos and order. However, in the ancient world, there are actually three kinds of existence, okay?

There's order, there's a non-order and there's disorder. I want you to wrap your mind around that, okay? Order, non-order and disorder. So let's kind of map out. Order, we get order in, you know, Genesis chapter two, right? Like by the end of day seven, creation has been ordered. The Garden of Eden is ordered, okay? What is non-order? Non-order is a space that is ready to be ordered. So let's think about it this way. There have been multiple times in my life where I've moved, right, from one house to another house. And when you are packing things up to move to a different house and all of your things at your new house are in boxes, okay? That's not disorder, but that is non-order, okay? It's gonna require that you take the time to unpack everything and put it in its place. That's non-order, okay? So order and non-order. Then there's disorder, which is like the unevil force that has ill intent, that wants to drag order and non-order back into dysfunction, okay? This is really disorder. And what I did in the book is essentially what I did is instead of creating order, non-order and disorder as three separate categories, I just created order and chaos. And I essentially made non-order and disorder all fall under the umbrella of chaos.

Now, here's what's just not fair, is that in the ancient world, order, non-order and disorder are three distinct things. And here's the assumption that Job and his friends are living from. They believe that when there is non-order, okay? Non-order, that non-order like suffering or non-order, like what Job has experienced, that that stuff is the result of disorder. Meaning, I sinned, I did something sinful and therefore because of disorder, now non-order is present, okay? That is the assumption that Job and his friends have been operating with. And what Yahweh is saying is that no, no, no, no, no, no. Even in the realms of non-order, there's order. Which means when we go back to the triangle and we look at God's justice, Job's innocence and the policies and procedures whereby God rules the planet. And does he rule the earth with strict justice, retribution and reward policy? God is actually going, no. The non-order that you are experiencing is not the result of disorder. Life is not that simple. So what God is actually doing in these speeches is giving Job a tour of the universe and essentially showing him that there are realms that him and his friends would describe as non-ordered realms.

As the kind of places that kind of feel like the beginning of Genesis chapter one verse one, the earth is formless and void. It's the tohu vavohu, it's the deep. And what does God do to that non-order? That's not disorder, that's non-order in Genesis one. But God then brings order, okay? And for a lot of us, me creating three categories instead of two is gonna bring confusion. But honestly, it should bring clarity because if we're honest about our own life, there are non-threatening forms of chaos and then there are threatening forms of chaos. All chaos isn't the same, right? And so I wanna create a space where we A, enter into the ancient worldview of order, non-order disorder and kind of help us to see that these friends think that all non-order is a result of disorder. But God, through showing what happens in nature, is actually gonna reveal to Job and his friends that nope, my order can actually be found in the realms of non-order. And that would have been the curveball for Job and all of his friends. Let's actually look at one of the verses that is literally doing this, okay? Now we're gonna, that's our context. That's a theological context that we need in order to understand what's happening

in Job Chapter 38 and 39. Now, now that we have that context, we can then come to the conclusion that what Yahweh is gonna reveal in Job Chapter 38 and 39 is that it is not a retribution reward policy that is the third leg of this triangle. What's actually here is that the earth is not founded on justice, but on wisdom, hokma, wisdom, that in order to govern the universe, it is not just a, hey, all non-order, But there's a complex relationship between order, not order, and disorder. And because of that complex relationship, the thing that fuels the relationship between not order, disorder, and order is not justice or retribution or reward, but rather wisdom. That this system is fueled by wisdom, not justice. Therefore, the triangle that the friends have been trying to figure out is inherently flawed. Now, let's move into our nerdy nuggets. All right, family, the weight is over. My brand new book, "Crushing Chaos," is out now. And available everywhere books are sold. Literally, today, I walked into a Barnes & Noble and I signed a bunch of copies at a physical location. So you can grab this book at a physical Barnes & Noble, or you can go to a book's a million, or Amazon, or anywhere books are sold in Grab a Copy. If you enjoy reading the Bible from an ancient perspective,

if you understand that the beauty of scripture is actually knowing it in context, then you'll love this book. And if there's any chaos in your personal life, I think that reading the Bible from an ancient perspective can actually help to crush the chaos in your life. I think this book is gonna be a New York Times bestseller. I really do. I think we wrote a good one. I think you should get a copy today. All right, back to the episode. God is gonna reveal that his order can be found in non-ordered space. And he's actually gonna do it in a quite fascinating way. Let's look at the relationship between God's order, non-order, and disorder. The interpretive key here is found in Job chapter 38 verse 25 to 26, okay? Here we go. That's what Yahweh says. He's saying, if you think that things just operate in the universe based on justice, riddle me this Job, okay? Who cuts a channel for the torrents of rain? Now rain is gonna be seen in the ancient world as a part of God's retribution or reward, okay? Retribution, if people are evil and wicked, they get a flood, right? If people are blessed or if people are wise and they follow Torah, what happens? God sends rain so they can have crops

so there's no famine or drought, okay? So rain literally is an example of retribution and reward and God is saying, if I only operated the rain according to retribution and reward, riddle me this, who cuts a channel for the torrents of rain? In a path for the thunderstorm, verse 26, to water a land where no one lives in inhabited desert. Hey, Job, in your friends who are in your shot, if I manage the universe based on reward and retribution, why do I send rain to the desert? Where it's not even useful? Why do I do that? I do that because the world that we live in is more complicated than you know. And the relationship between order, non-order and disorder is not as neat and tidy as you think. You think that all non-order is a result of disorder. And I'm here to tell you right now, there is an order even to the realms of non-order in the cosmos. So what we are gonna see in chapters 38 and 39 is that Yahweh is going to give Job seven realms of the geographical universe and then seven realms of the animal kingdom, okay? So we're gonna get two sets of seven. I'll give you the first set, okay? The first set of seven is chapter 38, verses two to seven is the foundation of the earth. Does Job know how God began creation? Then Job 38, verses eight through 11.

The sea, does God know how God contains the sea? Then 38, verse 12. Sheal, has Job ever seen or know the place of the dead? Then number fourth, Job 38, verses 22 to 24. Snow and hail, has Job seen where God stores the snow and the hail? And then Job 38, verse 25 to 30, rain. Does Job know how and why it rains? We just looked at that just now. And then number six, the heavens. Could Job plant the constellations in the sky or know their course? And then number seven, Job 38, verses 34 to 38. The storm, can Job control the storm and lightning? So seven realms of just the geographical universe that Job has no idea how it works. And the big thing that Yahweh is communicating is that these are realms. And Yahweh is trying to show that these realms of non-order are not fueled by disorder, but they're fueled by God's order. And that the relationship between order, non-order and disorder are actually something that Job does not comprehend. This is above Job's pay grade. Okay, second is there's seven aspects of Yahweh's policies, his purpose is planned in the animal world, okay? So Job tab with 38, verses 39 to 41, the lion can Job provide, pray for the lions.

And then Job 39 verses one through four, the mountain goat. Does Job know when the mountain goat gives birth? And then Job 39 verses five to eight, the wild donkey. Did Job let the donkey run wild? Then Job 39 verses nine through 12. The wild ox is the wild ox willing to serve Job. And then number five, Job 39 verses 13 to 18, the ostrich, okay? Could Job possibly understand why an ostrich is like it is? And then six, Job 39 verses 19 to 25, the war horse. Did Job make the war horse so mighty? And then lastly seven, okay? Birds of prey, Job 39 verses 26 to 30. Does Job understand, does Job's understanding make the hawk soar? So seven, two sets of seven, two sets of ordered lists that describe realms of non-order that are not being fueled by disorder. This would have broken Job in his friend's brains. But without context, you don't really understand what's happening. All many of us realize is, dang, Job got sunned. Like, Job got humbled. But there's so much more happening than just Job getting humbled. He's actually moving from a place of needing to defend his innocence to realizing maybe the suffering, aka the non-order that I've experienced, is not the result of disorder. Maybe there's something about the universe and how it runs that I have made assumptions about

and my assumptions are incorrect. Job is coming to the place of, man, not I shouldn't just be arguing for my innocence, but I should acknowledge my incorrectness. And I should really realize that I'm ignorant. Now, Job's response to all of this is, okay, let's flip to Job, the end of Job 39. Sorry, not Job 39, Job 40, it says this in verse three. "Then Job answered the Lord, I am unworthy. How can I reply to you? I put my hand over my mouth. I spoke once, but I have no answer. Twice, but I will say no more. Then the Lord spoke to Job out of the storm. Brace yourself like a man. I will question you and you will answer me. God's not done." And so God's purpose is not just to get you to the place of, I'll shut up. No, 'cause what good does it do God if you just shut up for the rest of your life? God's goal is not just to sun you and humble you. It's actually to inform you and to fill you with wisdom so that you can be his witness in all the earth. Like that's the goal. All right, so what's our Thomas truth for the day? Obviously tomorrow we are gonna get into what is Yahweh's next move? Because man, Yahweh wants to fill Job with the kind of wisdom that Job could actually be a billboard for God's wisdom,

his hokma, the thing that actually runs the universe, not his justice. All right, let me leave you with the Thomas truth. There's this cool little verse, okay? Where God is being described as so transcendent, but then it's like he knows where the mountain goats give birth at. This is a profound question, okay? It says this, this is Job chapter 39, verse one. "Do you know when the mountain goat gives birth, "do you observe the calving of the dose?" Okay, this is a profound question because it is such a small thing. 'Cause it's our timeless truth, okay? This is not the creation of Orion, but the birth of a mountain goat. But where do mountain goats give birth? In the mountains, of course, I mean duh, okay? There are the, these are the goats that walk on the seemingly vertical cliffs. I don't know if you've ever seen these mountain goats. It's like how in the world can they even live up here? They walk easily in places that humans cannot go. Mountain goats give birth in places inaccessible to humans. So no human could ever know when it happened as they could not be there to witness it. And remember, the mountains are inhabitable for humans, which means it's not ordered space. Gardens are ordered space 'cause that's where humans can live. But the mountains would be non-order.

It's not disorder, but it's not order. They walk easily in places humans cannot go. Mountain goats give birth in places inaccessible to humans so no human could ever know when it happened as they could not be there to witness it. So Job could not know this information. Yet Yahweh does. He does know when mountain goats give birth. He does witness it. This is telling us something unbelievable about God, the same God who created the constellations in the sky. The same God who created things like Orion and the Pleiades and the sky is present to witness the birth of a mountain goat, the transcendent glorious Creator God who is far off, who is big, who is magnificent. To whom Job is nothing in comparison believes that the birth of a goat in the mountains is a significant event that he should be there for. He's not just transcendent, he's intimate and he's close. He flings stars in the space 'cause he's big, but he also watches over goats being born and learn how to walk. Why? 'Cause he's also intimately involved in the small details of life. He's glorious and transcendent. Job's friends were right about that, but they missed something that is just as vital in understanding God and his creation. He is also intimate. He's absent, but he is fully present. God cannot answer Job's complaints. Why? Because these complaints have nothing to do with God's great transcendence and his intimacy. God is essentially communicating to Job, "My justice is not the only thing that there is to know about me, and my justice is not really the thing that fuels the universe.

It's my wisdom, it's my hokama, and if you want to learn more about my wisdom, then keep listening to Job 'cause I have another speech for you." And that's not just true for Job, it's true for us. We have to be intimately aware of the transcendent God that would cause us to be in awe, that we would worship, that would get us to the point of, "I'm scared of that God, he's big, I'm small." But also, that's the beginning of wisdom, not the end. The end of wisdom is to actually know this God, not in a transcendent way, but in an intimate way. And that's true forever, universally and timelessly. And with that, a commission you need to live a blessed life today, but I'm also inviting you back. Part two of this episode, which we'll pick up on tomorrow. If you're on the street, I'm proud of you. If you're not, I love you. Tomorrow's our last day in the Book of Job, and I think it's going to be our best day in the Book of Job. We're actually going to talk about Leviathan tomorrow. Ooh! I can't wait. Tomorrow, Job chapter 40 to 42 for day 325 here at the Bible Department. I'll see you right here, same time, same place as we finished the Book of Job. Peace! Thanks so much for joining us on the Bible Department podcast. If this episode was helpful, how about you leave a comment, share with a friend, and subscribe so that you never miss an episode. To learn more about the show, head to thebobledepartment.com. We'll see you right back here tomorrow.