Creation Series: Sky

he book of Job tells the story of a man by the same name.And it's important to emphasize that this is a story.While some parts of the Bible are historical, the book of Job is not one of those parts.Set in the fictional land of Uz, the book of Job is a meditation on the problem of suffering.It wrestles with that age-old question: why do bad things happen to good people?And if there's one thing you need to know about Job, it's that Job is good people.In fact, Job is said to be the most righteous person who ever lived.And then the worst things imaginable happen to him: he loses his livelihood, his home, his health, and even his family.No one-neither he nor his friends-can make sense of how so much tragedy could befall one person, especially Job! Incredibly, through all his suffering, Job doesn't curse God.But neither does Job let God off the hook.Job demands an answer from God as to why God has allowed Job to suffer so greatly.So what does Job's story have to do with creation?Well, after 37 long chapters, God finally responds to Job's pleas with the passage we just read together.To Job's question of human suffering, God responds by telling a creation story.Makes total sense, right?Job demands God answer for what has befallen him, and God waxes poetic about the wildness and freedom and beauty of the created order.About the seasons, the elements, the creatures.And at no point do we hear God say anything about human suffering!Some might argue that God ignores Job's suffering altogether.But I wonder, might it be instead that God takes Job on this guided tour of the heavens to help Job understand that, while we might think the world revolves around humans, God does not?For example, we see that God will do something as foolish as bring rain to the desert, where there are no humans to benefit from its goodness.This is something that to ancient Israelites-whose lives depended on precarious, never-too-abundant rainfall-would have been seen as wasteful extravagance. 2 It's not that God doesn't care about human suffering.It's just that, from God's perspective, human suffering is part of a much, much bigger picture that matters too!(In other words, "it's not all about us!" even though we might be keen to argue otherwise.)I love the way Dr. Ellen Davis puts it.She tells us that the view of the world that God presents to Job-and to us-"plays havoc with our notion of the way things ought to be-which is to say, sensible, well-adapted to human purposes, and aove all, predictable." 3But oh how hard we have tried to make the world "sensible, well-adapted to human purposes, and predictable."The history of human "progress" has been all about controlling and manipulating the world around us:1 Laura Sauder is the pastor at St Peter's Evangelical Lutheran Church in Cambridge (Preston).This sermon was delivered on Sunday,