When God Speaks
Listen!
Job 38 -- 42
After everyone has had their say, a great wind whips up. As if to reinforce young Elihu's argument, God speaks out of a whirlwind: "Who is this ... [with] ... words without knowledge?"[1]
It was not going to be an easy conversation, so God advises Job to get ready to ponder what it means to be God! Fifty nine questions later, Job admits that he has nothing to say[2]. Then, God asks 24 more questions. All were questions pointing to things outside of Job's body of knowledge. Only a few of the questions can be answered today, some four thousand years later.
All we have to offer is "educated guesses" based on reasonable assumptions in how things seem to work. However, mankind still stands boldly against the Creator of the universe, challenging Him on how to be God. If it weren't so sad, I couldn't stop laughing.
God uses two ancient creatures -- creatures so strange that until recently they were considered metaphors by some very conservative expositors -- to bring home true wonder of His creation. There is one land animal and one sea creature. These monsters have stymied translators since the early days. Today, we recognize the "Behemoth" (a plural form for the word meaning "beast") today as a large theropod similar to the apatosaurus, an unimaginably large extinct reptile (that is, a "dinosaur."). Nothing known today comes close to the herbivorous giant with a tail like a cedar and legs as strong as pylons![3] Its distant cousin, the sea creature called Leviathan (assuming it was a "water snake" of incredible proportions) most resembles a fire-breathing plesiosaurus![4] Since there are biological mechanisms that can create "fire" (bombardier beetle, for instance), it is reasonable to believe something like this could have existed.
Mankind today, in all its supposed wisdom, calls these animals elephants or hippopotami. Or crocodiles. And why? Because they don't listen to God -- or look at the evidence He has left behind. The educated scientists insist that these dinosaurs lived up to hundreds of millions of years before recorded history. I am not one of these scientists, but I do recognize conjecture and misdirection when I see such distractions. As long as they say, we "assume" or, "suppose" things -- which is about all the can do -- I choose to take the plain sense of the words passed down from God and his spokesmen.