Job 38:36

He is not satisfied with showing man's smallness by what is vast. He also takes up what we might think of as small things. He has travelled through the immense heavens and the uncontrollable sea, then the treasures of the snow and the hail, of the lightning and the waters. He notices various heavenly bodies in detail. But towards the end of the chapter He comes down to the little things of nature, where man fails just as badly. So it matters little whether we gaze at the greatest of God's works or look into the least. Everywhere we meet what is completely beyond man's understanding.

Lightning may trigger a rainfall, but who can send the lightning? If man does have any wisdom at all, who has put it in his mind? Is he to have the credit for this? Or does he manufacture his own understanding?

And modern science should not claim it can answer what Job could not. Outward knowledge has advanced. Men have discovered great laws and principles of nature. But can the scientist of today give truer and more satisfying replies to these questions from God than Job could long ago? What after all is human knowledge but a knowledge, as Socrates said, of our ignorance? What is the key to all these questions? It is God, the true knowledge of Himself. Knowing Him, we know the Author and Source of all knowledge. Leave Him out, and the sum of all science is a blank wall, with the hidden truth still lying beyond it.

Can Job bring down rain, or speak to the lightning flash? Does he have the understanding heart that knows the reason for the clouds — whether clouds of rain or of grief — and that can bring the refreshing showers on the dusty earth?

And then the rain clouds, the lightnings and their control. What questions these are! They cover every department of what man calls "natural sciences" — geology, meteorology, geography, oceanography, astronomy. Job had not a single answer to these questions. If he had spoken, his words would have been folly… But what is the Lord's aim in asking them? To show that God is greater than man, and to humble him. To bring Job to the true knowledge of himself that he needed, and to free him from the pride of his heart.

After all, what was God speaking about? Earthly things. Every one of them belongs to the natural world, and has to do with what is visible, with what is seen and temporary. Job is completely unable to answer even one of these questions. In fact no one has answered them to this day, for all the boasting of science. If that is how it stands with earthly things, what about the heavenly? What about the eternal things? There we depend on God entirely and completely. We know nothing except what He tells us.