A Prayer and Fasting Devotional
“Where were you when I laid the foundation of the earth?
Tell me, if you have understanding.
Who determined its measurements—surely you know!
Tell me, if you have understanding.
Who determined its measurements—surely you know!
Or who stretched the line upon it?
On what were its bases sunk, or who laid its cornerstone,
when the morning stars sang together
and all the sons of God shouted for joy?”
-Job 38:4-7, ESV
Job will always be a personal favorite in the poetic and wisdom literature in the Scriptures. Not because it answers the questions I have regarding the problem of suffering (it does not), but because it has radically shaped my understanding of who God is, who I am, and the proper approach and response of the latter to the former.
Yahweh’s piercing “answers” to the mystery of Job’s misery provide no explanation and comfort, only correction. I wonder what sins I have been spared because of this gracious rectification, personally and particularly manifest in Jesus, “who, though he was in the form of God, did not count equality with God a thing to be grasped, but emptied himself, by taking the form of a servant, being born in the likeness of men” (Philippians 2:6, 7). My understanding of the rightness of these texts has come from the most unexpected of places…
Our first-born son (age 15) was born with a myriad of disabilities. His condition defies labeling, but the broad spectrum in which his maladies are found is cerebral palsy. That Luke is even alive or occasionally thriving is a testimony to the power of God’s nurture, love, and the marvels of modern medicine.
His day-to-day existence is, in some ways, profoundly diminished by his condition as compared with most human beings. He is conscious of his needs, and his world consists almost exclusively of his immediate surroundings and the people that inhabit that space. When I spend time with my son, I am keenly aware of his utter dependence on my wonderfully tenacious wife and me. No one loves him more and understands him better. Equally evident is the jarring disparity in our functional abilities and capacities. I am able to tune into the media streams emitting from the ends of the earth and have some power to process; Luke cannot begin to comprehend the basics of the infrastructure within his small school.
And so it has occurred to me that when God invites us to draw close and spend time with Him, my relationship with my son with all his limitations is not unlike God’s relationship with all of us, and with Job I say, “I am of small account and I have uttered what I did not understand, things too wonderful for me, which I did not know” (Job 40:4; 42:3). In our journey of faith, may we trust in God with child-like faith he prescribes – what other kind could there be – as we draw close to Him, the One who lowered Himself and makes it all possible.
Don Weiss
