When God Refuses to Explain

The End of Arguments and the Beginning of Vision

“Where were you when I laid the earth’s foundations?”

— Job 38:4

There is something unsettling about this passage.

After thirty-seven chapters of suffering, questions, arguments, accusations, explanations, and demands, God finally speaks.

And He does not answer a single one of Job’s questions.

He does not explain the loss of the children.

He does not explain the collapse of Job’s life.

He does not explain Satan.

He does not explain suffering.

He does not explain justice.

He does not explain anything.

Instead, He asks questions.

This is deeply offensive to the religious mind.

We want answers.

We want explanations.

We want reasons.

We want God to justify Himself before the tribunal of our understanding.

But God refuses.

Not because He is cruel.

Not because Job’s questions are unimportant.

But because Job has reached the limits of what explanation can accomplish.

There comes a point in every spiritual life when the problem is no longer ignorance.

The problem is control.

We want to know because we want to master.

We want explanations because we believe that if we understood the mystery we would finally feel secure.

The Desert Fathers understood this.

A brother once asked an elder many questions concerning the spiritual life. The elder answered only one. The brother became frustrated. The elder finally replied, “You seek words because you do not yet seek God.”

That is the terrible and liberating truth hidden in Job.

At some point we must choose between possessing explanations and standing before God.

We rarely get both.

What strikes me most is that God does not point Job toward theology.

He points him toward creation.

The sea.

The dawn.

The stars.

The rain.

The snow.

The depths of the ocean.

The wilderness where no human being lives.

Again and again God asks:

Have you seen this?

Do you understand this?

Were you there?

Can you control it?

Can you sustain it?

Can you even comprehend it?

The answer is obvious.

No.

And that is precisely the point.

Modern man imagines that knowledge has made him humble. More often it has made him arrogant.

We have learned how to split atoms, map genomes, and place machines in orbit around distant planets. Yet we still imagine that our understanding of reality is greater than it actually is.

A single illness can dismantle our plans.

A single loss can shatter our confidence.

A single betrayal can expose how little mastery we possess over our own hearts.

The Fathers never confused information with wisdom.

Wisdom begins when a man discovers his actual size.

Not his imagined size.

His actual size.

Abba Poemen’s famous question, “Who am I?” is not self-hatred. It is reality.

Who am I before the One who calls forth galaxies?

Who am I before the One who tells the sea where it must stop?

Who am I before the One who causes rain to fall on deserts where no human eye will ever witness it?

The modern world constantly tells us that everything revolves around us.

God’s speech says otherwise.

One of the most beautiful lines in this entire passage is easily overlooked.

God speaks of rain falling upon lands where no one lives.

Grass springs up where no human being dwells.

Life flourishes where nobody is watching.

That single image dismantles an enormous illusion.

We imagine that everything exists for us.

God reveals that vast portions of creation flourish entirely apart from human observation.

The universe is not centered upon us.

God is.

This realization can wound our pride.

But it also heals us.

For if God lovingly sustains grass in an empty desert, perhaps He can also sustain us in seasons where our lives seem unnoticed, unproductive, and forgotten.

The ego wants to be the center.

The heart wants God to be the center.

These are not the same thing.

Many people read God’s speech as a rebuke.

The Fathers often saw something deeper.

It is an invitation.

God is not humiliating Job.

He is enlarging him.

Job’s suffering had become so overwhelming that his vision had narrowed to the size of his wound.

Now God gently, relentlessly, pulls his gaze outward.

Look at the stars.

Look at the sea.

Look at the dawn.

Look at the rain.

Look at the mystery that existed before your suffering and will remain after it.

This is not an answer.

It is something greater.

It is a vision.

The saints eventually discover that God rarely explains Himself.

Instead He reveals Himself.

And in that revelation something strange occurs.

The questions do not always disappear.

But they cease to be the center.

The heart finally encounters the One who stands beyond every answer.

And somehow that becomes enough.

Not because the pain has vanished.

Not because the mystery has been solved.

But because the soul has passed from demanding explanations to beholding God.

That is the turning point of Job.

And it is the turning point of every spiritual life.