Recently I have been reading in Job, and had to pull over in Job 26 for a while. The chapter consists of one of the many responses Job gives to his friends who think they know why he is suffering.
Job speaks of God’s power in phrases like: “He stretches out the north over the void…hangs the earth on nothing…binds up the waters in his thick clouds, etc.”
Then in verse 14 he says: “Behold, these are but the outskirts of his ways, and how small a whisper do we hear of him! But the thunder of his power who can understand?” I loved thinking about the fact that what we hear and see in the created world and the sky show his power, but are only the “outskirts of his ways.” How can we expect to fully understand why things happen as they do?
But in Scripture we also see in passages like Amos 4:13 that “He who forms the mountains…reveals his thoughts to mankind.” So he tells us what we need to know and what we can handle knowing, but not everything we want to know. We don’t understand all of his thoughts or ways.
We hear the “thunder of his power.” I am not a meteorologist, but thunder is the sound that comes from powerful things happening in our atmosphere. When we hear it, we know that a storm is near, even if we don’t see it yet. As God came to Elijah in 1 Kings 19, he made the wind tear apart the mountain, caused an earthquake, and then a fire. After the fire there was a “still small voice.” In this passage in Job, it says: “how small a whisper do we hear of him.”
Take comfort today in these words from Job. We don’t have answers for all of our “whys,” but we can trust the power, wisdom, love, and goodness of the One who does.