Job 39:28

God speaks first about the inanimate things, the earth, sea, clouds, hail and rain. He shows three things about them. First, that He designed them; second, that He created them; and third, that He controls them. Consider the whole range of inanimate things that make up the world and the whole range of living creatures, and God commands them all. It says, "Is it at your command that the eagle mounts up and makes his nest on high?" All the eagles on the earth, all moving to execute the demands of God.

God exercises a watchful oversight over every creature — young or old, beast or bird, even the least familiar or the hardest to reach — with the goodness and wisdom that made them. If that is true, was it not for Job to listen and learn, instead of darkening counsel by words without knowledge? And His ways with His people are certainly far deeper than His dealings with the animal world. Yet even there we see His sovereign control everywhere. He, not man, has made them what they are, and ordered their habits and their habitations.

On the crag of rock, where no man can come, she builds her nest and rears her young. Then the time comes when she sets out to teach her young ones to gaze at the sun and to soar from the rock themselves. So she stirs up her nest and flutters over her young. The young ones must dare the open air below, and she flings them off the rock!

Job was to learn from this that the One who made the eagle and its penetrating eyes surely has keener eyes than the eagle. His judgments can be fully trusted.

What He dwells on are two things in particular — His supremacy, and His power joined with the most tender care. That care is not just for the gentle animals, such as sheep and lambs and the like, but for lions and lionesses, which are certainly very formidable. And the eagle — an object of interest to God particularly.

Job, though the most righteous man on earth at that time, was in danger of being puffed up as a result. He said himself, "I shall die in my nest" (Job 29:18), and it is also recorded that "he was righteous in his own eyes" (Job 32:1). In the first statement Job was in danger of putting his confidence in the wealth God had blessed him with. In the second he was sure he deserved it. But it was God and not the nest who was his safeguard, and his righteousness was according to divine estimation and not according to his own.

And yet Jehovah is not seeking to crush Job, but rather to bring him to a true knowledge of himself and of God. Let him get ready for action like a man. God will not ask questions which a man cannot understand. With the belt of truth fastened on, he can answer — as indeed he does — these questions. The very fact that Jehovah speaks to Job like this shows His purposes of mercy for him.