Job 12:7

This is also in answer to Zophar's argument. Zophar had spoken of the greatness of God. The wisdom which Zophar had tried to impress upon him is so elementary that the beasts themselves know something about it.

"But ask now the beasts" — there is something triumphant here. "Why," he says, "the very beasts know more than you, and prove more than all your speeches!"… That is, the whole creation — God's lower creation on the earth — is a proof that things are not yet according to God. Do they not prey on one another? Do not the great swallow up the small? And is not man the one who deals death to beasts and birds and fish, and everything else, for his own pleasure? I do not mean only for food, but to please himself at all costs.

He proceeds then, in verse 7, to show far more than Zophar did, the greatness and wisdom of God. He appeals to creation, the beasts, the birds, the earth, the fish as witnesses of the great variety of actions of power and greatness on the part of the Creator. "The hand of the Lord has done this" (v.9).

In that hand of power, Job says, is the life of every living thing and the breath of all mankind — not only his own breath, but his three friends' breath too. He would not let them think of themselves as detached onlookers, free to judge others while no one judged them.

Nature itself, even more fully than the Old Testament, is an object lesson, a divine picture-writing, a teaching by type. It surely is. We may not yet hold the full key to it, but in every age its lessons have been taught and learnt — most simply, perhaps, in the earliest ages. As we grow older we lose the unsuspecting faith of childhood, which in many respects is the truest wisdom.

The unbeliever may tell us that God is to be known in creation. Did anyone ever find Him out there? No doubt creation does prove the existence of a Creator. The first chapter of the letter to the Romans says: "For his invisible attributes, namely, his eternal power and divine nature, have been clearly perceived, ever since the creation of the world, in the things that have been made. So they are without excuse." Creation gives a testimony the nations were bound to receive. Had they received it, a higher light would certainly have shone on them. But they did not receive it. Instead they worshipped the things that were made, rather than the One who made them. Philosophers talk of rising from nature up to nature's God. But nature is a ruin, and man himself is a ruin inside that ruin. Instead of rising to nature's God, he makes a god of nature, and sinks below the level of a beast.