In this sermon, David shares the emotional journey that he and his fellow Christians have been through. He describes how people at work offered to help him, but he encouraged them to support the church community instead. David reflects on the lessons learned from their experiences and acknowledges his own feelings of unworthiness. The sermon then shifts to discussing the book of Job and how God challenges Job's confession. The speaker uses examples from nature, such as the marvels of the ocean and the strength of a war horse, to emphasize God's power and wisdom.

I'd like to think with you this morning about Job, and we'll turn, first of all, to Job 38, and just read a few verses there. Job 38. One of the things I want to emphasize this morning is that these last chapters deserve to be better known. Everybody knows the first two chapters of Job, and they've suffered with Job through all his losses, but not everybody is so familiar with these last chapters, and they present the glories of God in a way that few passages in the Bible do. Job chapter 38, verse 1, Then the Lord answered Job out of the whirlwinds, and said, Who is this who darkens counsel by words without knowledge? Now prepare yourself like a man. I will question you, and you shall answer me. Where were you when I made the foundations of the earth? Tell me, if you have understanding. Who determined its measurements? Surely you know. Or who stretched the line upon it? To what were its foundations fastened? Or who laid its cornerstone when the morning stars sang together, and all the sons of God shouted for joy? Job was a historical character. He lived in the time of Abraham's father, probably. This is deduced from the length of years that he lived, and from other considerations in the book. He certainly lived before the Law of Moses, didn't he? No reference here to the Law of Moses in this book. It really takes us back to the early days of human civilization, the book of Job. And this dear man suffered more loss than any other man in one day. He suffered more loss than any other man in the history of the world, except the Lord Jesus, of course. He was wiped out as far as his material possessions were concerned, and his sons and daughters. And, as if that wasn't enough, he was subjected to a terrible case of boils. I don't know if any of you have ever had boils. I had as a boy. I was recovering from dyspheria, and they fed me some fish. And up there in the north of Scotland, they have an expression, the fish jumped his skin. That's the way it's translated, anyway. And it sure jumped my skin. And I asked for a knight to really solve the problem. I'm just five years old. Terrible thing. I can really sympathize with Job. And his condition was so pitiable that when three friends came to console him, they were speechless for seven days. Well, that's pretty bad, isn't it? They sat with him, but they were absolutely speechless for seven days. It's too bad it hadn't been 70, but never mind. Then they started to speak, and they started to weave a lot of human philosophy. They appealed to history, they appealed to human experience, they appealed to the wisdom of the sages, of the ancients, and they just had one violin, and they just had one string on their violin, and they just played one note on that string. And that note was, look, when you sin, you suffer for it. And you're suffering greatly. Only one conclusion, you must have sinned greatly. Thanks a lot. Some comfort, huh? The imperfect bedside manner. Imagine going to a man suffering like that, and telling him that. And I don't blame you if, when you read the book of Job, you kind of get weary during those chapters. I do, I'll confess. But that's not surprising, because human philosophy rears me anyway, you know. Actually, there was a measure of truth to what they said. Sin does bring suffering. They were wrong in applying it to Job, because Job was the most righteous man in the face of the earth at that time. They were judgmental, and they were wrong, and God said that later on. You haven't spoken concerning my service, that which was right. And then, after they got through the young man named Elihu comes upon the scene. People are divided in their estimation of Elihu. Some think he was just a proud, young upstart, you know, who thought he had wisdom, and others think, no, he really advanced the discussion to a higher state. Actually, the Lord doesn't criticize Elihu later on as he criticized the three princes of Job. But, even after you get through with Elihu, you still feel unsatisfied. Here you have a man that suffered like that. You think, how could a God of love allow a righteous man like that to suffer the way Job did? And then, God appears upon the scene, and I think, beginning in chapter 38, he does not solve the problem of suffering. He does not tell Job how he suffered. What he does is, he gives Job a university course here. He gives him a course in cosmology, and oceanography, and biology, and botany, and you name it. They're all here in the closing chapters of Job. If you're familiar with them, you really should get familiar with them. They're wonderful, and the more you study it, the more you study these chapters, the more wonderful they appear to you. And yet, what was God saying to Job? Well, he presented such a marvel of exhibition of his greatness, and his power, and his glory, that, you know, Job would start feeling less and less. It was designed to show Job his insignificance, and his ignorance. And, I think that's a great lesson in the book. There's nothing random or chance. Out near us, there's an assembly hill view down in San Jose. It's your brother Gordon Westwood has a son named David. They had a little girl, and she developed leukemia, and she had that bone marrow transplant. I think she came down to Texas, or was it Houston, maybe, to get the bone marrow transplant. And, she was very, very sick, this little girl, and you know what an emotional roller coaster it was for that family. You know, sometimes their hopes would be up, and then it would be dashed again. Well, when she seemed to have recovered reasonably well, David and his wife decided to invite all their friends, all that had shown an interest in love, and it was great, and they gathered together up behind their house one Sunday afternoon just to express their thanks to them. They had a refreshment there, and all of that. And, dear Dave got up, and he gave a wonderful little talk on what they had been through. You know, he described all of the emotional zigzags that they had been through. He described the testimony that the Christians had been, and how the people would say, people at work would say to him, Dave, what can we do? Could we come over and mow your grass? And, he said, well, let's see the folks from the chapel mow the grass. And, well, could we bring some food? Let's see the folks from the chapel bring meals to us regularly. And, then he got all through, and he's holding the little girl in his arms, his dear little thing. He said, what's the lesson in all of this? And, he said, not to be troubled. And, he said, and I found my eyes bubbling at that point. What a glory to God to see a young man like that in the prime of life, and he's just gone through a tremendous suffering. Glorify God, and that's what God is teaching Job. And, he didn't tell Job why he went through that. We know today why Job went through that. Do you know why? He's in the action. God knew, of course, that he was going to present to the world his word, the word of God, Genesis through Revelation. And, he knew that we live in a world of suffering. We live in a world of suffering. There has to be a book on suffering from the very earliest days. And, so he picked up one of the prized students in his school as exhibit A, Job. What do you think, if you could talk to Job today, what do you think he'd say? Job, this was really quite a patch of trouble you went through, wasn't it? I think I know what he'd say. He'd say, I wouldn't want to go through it again, but I wouldn't give up the experience anyway. But, I realized how God worked that out and put a book in the sacred canon about this experience for the comfort and health of other people down through the years. Dear friends, we're all called to go through sufferings in life, aren't we? You don't get very far in this life without suffering. If you were a child of God, not one of those sufferings did you need. God is working out perfectly. Someday, you're going to see the other side of the weaving. Not till the loom is silent, and the shuttled feast to fly, will God unroll the canvas and explain the reason why the dark threads were as needful in the weaver's skillful hands as the threads of gold and silver in the pattern he had planned. And, Job today knows why all of this happened. He knows. He's quite satisfied. He's quite satisfied. I would be too little did he think the people in Garland in 1993 would be talking about Job. Made it all worthwhile. Made it all worthwhile. Well, let's look at how God deals with him. And, I just love it. The wonders of God in creation. First of all, God deals with his inanimate creation. And, first of all, a slight word of rebuke to Job. He said, who is this who darkens counsel by words without knowledge? What does that mean? Darkens counsel by words without knowledge? Well, it means Job did a lot of talking. He really did. He did a lot of sputtering. He wasn't patient, but he did endure. He did endure. And, the whole scene was just darkened by all of the words that were poured out. God said, now prepare yourself like a man, and I'll question you, Antony. Where were you when I made the foundations of the earth? Now, how much is included in just a simple statement like that? Job is in the hands of the one who made the foundations of the earth. He says to Job, who determined its measurement? And, that's wonderful in itself, you know. Did you know that planet earth is just the right size? Well, more or less, we wouldn't be here today. This is the right size, the measurement. And, the tilt of the earth, and a rotation of the heavenly body. This is exactly right. Conducive to human life. How would children ever know anything about that? To what were its foundations added? It's marvelous, isn't it? Earth suspended in nothing. And, here you find so many of these things in the book of Job. Things that science discovered many, many years later. Who laid its cornerstone, verse 6, when the morning stars sang together, and all the sons of God showed it to Job? You'd never known that except for this in the Bible, would you? When the creation took place, the whole choir started to sing. It was such a magnificent event in God's program. And, then he goes on to talk about the oceans and the seas of the world. Of course, the world was covered with water at one time, and then God divided the water from the land, and then he says to the wave, thus far shall your proud wave come no further. It's beautiful, isn't it? I love some of the language of the book of Job, and even his comforters. Some of the languages, if you are an appreciation for great literature, quite apart from the inspiration of the scriptures, it's all here. Who shut in the sea with doors? Beautiful. That is, who gave the sea its instructions as to how far it could come, and you mustn't come beyond that. And, then he says, when I made the clouds of garments and thick darkness, it swaddled me there. Once again, it's picturing the earth and the clouds over the earth like a dress or a suit, covering the earth, or like the swaddling band on a newborn baby, the thick darkness, the night. Who could have said it as beautifully as that? And, then he says, in verse 12, have you commanded the morning since your day began? Did you ever stand out there and say, okay, dawn, come now, time to come now? Man, it would make me feel awful small if God ever said that to me. Imagine the futility of a man standing out there and telling the dawn to appear, and the light to ablaze, and over the whole earth. It's really fantastic. He says that it might take hold of the ends of the earth, and the wicked be shaken out of it. Who's that mean? Well, the dawn arises, and then the light just spreads over all the landscape, and it says that the wicked might be shaken out. Well, it's taking out, as if a man had a cloth, and he shakes the cloth, you know. Men love to carry on their wicked schemes in the darkness of night, don't they? Men love darkness rather than light, because their deeds were evil, and more crimes are committed in the nighttime. And, then the dawn comes, and it's just like shaking the wicked out of that, out of a rag, and causing them to slow down. It takes on form like clay under a seal, and stands out like a garment. It's all poetic language. It's all figurative language. When it's dark, apart from light, you can't see the landscape, but the light comes, and you can see the topography of the land. You can see the valleys, you can see the mountains, you can see just the way the land, and that's like taking a seal and putting it in clay, and you can see the writing there. Some parts are lower than, and that's what happens when the dawn comes. You can see the earth, and then it stands out like a garment. I think that has the idea of the different coloring of a garment. When it's night, you don't see any color. You don't see the green of the trees, or the grass, or the blue, or anything else. You don't see the beautiful flowers, but when the dawn comes, all those colors just come from light. God arranged all of this. And, then he goes on to repeat that, from the wicked their light is withheld, and the upright arm is broken. In other words, the light has come, day has come over the earth, and the wicked scurry to their holes and wait for darkness to come. Again, their upright arm, their power is broken, is really what it means. Their power to carry on their crimes. And, then he goes on to oceanography. It's wonderful getting these condensed courses, isn't it? You don't have to spend four years. He says, have you entered into the springs of the sea, or walked in search of the depths? What did Job know about what it's like at the bottom of the ocean? The marvels of the ocean. First, we're off to the east coast, and you know, I'm always fascinated by the Gulf Stream. Here's a stream of warm water that starts off down there in the Caribbean, and it goes through the Atlantic Ocean. Still warm. The Atlantic isn't warm, I'm going to promise you. It goes up by Ireland, and the coast of Scotland, and up toward Norway. It's still warm. How can you do that? Don't try it in your box house. It won't work. The clock isn't working. And, he does the same with the Japanese Stream, out on the west coast, too. If it weren't for the Gulf Stream, I think that a lot of those countries would be ice capped today. But, they're not. God arranged all of that. It's marvelous, isn't it? Have you entered into the springs of the sea? Have the gates of death been revealed to you? You know, Old Testament saints knew very, very little about death and the afterlife. Did you know that Christ brought life and immortality to life by the Gospels? You don't find very many clear statements of Scripture in the Old Testament about what happened. If you ask a Jew in the Old Testament, what happens at the time of death, he'd probably shrug his shoulders and say, she-all. And, she-all express more of ignorance than it expresses of knowledge. I really think she-all just speaks of the disembodied condition, that's all. The spirit and the soul are separated from the body. And, we know that when the believer dies, his body goes to the grave, and his spirit and soul go to be with the Lord in heaven. Have you seen the doors of the shadow of death? Have you comprehended the breadth of the earth? Tell me if you know all of this, then for it shall be shrinking, shrinking, shrinking all the time. Where is the way to the dwelling of light? Light is kind of a mystery, isn't it? We don't think about that, but it is a mystery. I nearly flunked a course in physics, and I just couldn't understand the theories that they had, theory of light. And, it is marvelous. Somebody wrote me the other day, and he said, we know the, we know the speed of light. What's the speed of darkness? I wish he hadn't asked me. He said, and darkness, that you may take it to its territory, that you may know the path to its home. Do you know it, because you were born then, or because the number of your days is gracious? What a wonderful son. And, when I think that God, his son, not sparing sent him to die, I scarce can take it in. But, on the cross, my burden, glad he's buried, he's bled and died, take away my sin. Have you went to the treasury of snow? I think, in the King James, this is the treasures of the snow, and either one is very good. Think of a God that can, so infinite in design, that he can design all those snowflakes, and really they're very insignificant, and yet every one of them is different. And yet, every one of them is beautiful, too. The symmetry of the snowflake is absolutely beautiful. Well, that's a good exercise. When you go home from the conference, sit down with a pen and paper, and see how many different designs of snowflakes you can make. You'll run out of ideas, just as architects run out of ideas in making homes. Pretty soon they all look alike, don't they? Tracks, boats, the marvels of snow. A snowflake is so insignificant, and yet they start falling on Milwaukee, and pretty soon traffic grinds to a halt. I've seen it. I've seen snow falling. Forget it. He says, have you seen the treasury of hail which I have reserved for the time of trouble? The time of trouble here means war time. How do you know? Because it goes on to say that, for the day of battle and war, and it takes us back to Joshua 10, where more people were killed by the hail than were killed by the force of burn. By what way is light diffused? Interesting, isn't it? How does light get around the corner? Why doesn't it just go straight? But it doesn't. It can bend around the corner. Diffuse. Man never thought of that. Nobody thought about it long before he was born, and he designed all of these things into the universe in which we live. Who has divided a channel for the overflowing water? Verse 25. Or a path for the thunderbolt? The direction of the rivers. He said, well, it just happened. That's the way it went. Well, it didn't just happen. It was all planned by God, because he knew the needs of commerce in the coming day, and everything else. And then it goes on to describe how rain falls on a desert place, and all of a sudden it just springs to life. This is marvelous. It's marvelous that God let all over the world today, the ground all over the world is filled with seeds, filled with seeds. And all those seeds need is the right depth of earth, the right moisture, the right sunshine to spring up. If you plow your fields a certain depth this year, and go down deeper next year, things will come up that you never saw before. Why? Because the seeds are all there. They're all there in Israel. They're all there in the desert too. Because we were talking about this since I've been here in Israel for many, many years. Of course, the dear Arab people were there in Israel, and Palestine in those days. And then the Jews come in, and they start irrigating the land, and they invent this drip irrigation, and soon the land is filled. In fact, they think they've fulfilled the scripture, the desert shall blossom like a rose. They think they've fulfilled that. So, future. But all they needed was to irrigate it, and carry on farming in the proper way, and it all sprang forth. And that's what God is speaking about in these verses, to cause it to rain on a land where there is no one. This is the desert, a wilderness in which there is no man, to satisfy the desolate waste, cause to spring forth the growth of tender grass. Has the rain a father? Who has begotten the drops of dew? It's interesting, isn't it? You put your car out at night, and you go out in the morning, and there is covered with moisture. Covered with moisture. And it is called that moisture will freeze. How did that happen? By divine design. The water's hardened like stone, and the surface of the deep is frozen. It's incredible. I was up in Newfoundland not too long ago. Sorry, Prince Edward Island. And we're driving along, here's this big harbor, and they said, it all freezes over in the winter. You can drive out there in your car. The whole salt water freezes solid enough in the wintertime, so that you could go out there with a team of horses or an animal group. And then God says, let's talk about astronomy for a while. Astronomy. Can you bind the cluster of the Pleiades, or loose the belt of Orion? He talks about the influences of the heavenly bodies on the earth. People think these men in this time were stone age men. What nonsense. Pattern is nonsense. Think of the knowledge that's here in the book of Job. And as I said, Job lived before Abraham. Can you bind the sweet influences of the Pleiades, or loose the belt of Orion? Can you bring out Mazaroth in its season, or guide the bear with its cup? And yet, God has arranged all these things in the sky. Their orbits, their movements, and their influences here on the earth. He speaks about that in verse 33. Do you know the ordinances of the heavens? Can you set their dominion over the earth? The influence of the moon on the tide of the earth. Marvelous, isn't it? The regularity can all be calculated. The newspaper will tell you when it's going to be high tide today. And people watch that all the time. Can you lift up your voice to the clouds, and an abundance of water may cover you? Well, I wish we could have done that the last six years out in California. We had a drought for six years, but I couldn't go out and say, okay clouds, let it come down. And words would just come bouncing back to me. Utter folly to think of anything like that. Can you send out lightnings that they may go and save you? Here we are, all present and accounted for. The Lord shows having its effects, don't worry. I love this one. Who has put wisdom in the mind? A marvelous question, isn't it? Who has put wisdom? You're sitting there, and you're thinking it. How are you thinking? How does that happen? Say, come on, give me a little flack. We just do it. We don't think about it. You know, the human mind baffles the best of scientists. And even some secular scientists, they did it. Don't try to compare the human mind to a computer. No computer assembled over an eternity could ever duplicate the human mind. God says, Joe, who has put wisdom in the mind? That really thrills me when I think of that. It really thrills me when I think of the working of the human mind. I say, okay, now wiggle your little finger. And, the mind sends the signal down. My little finger wiggles. Don't think about it. You know it. That's why the last chapter of the book of Job we're spending more time on. Who can number the clouds by wisdom? Verse 37. Or, pour out the bottles of heaven when the dust hardens and clumps and the clods cling. This is what a course spiritual is getting. And then God turns to the animate creation. He's been talking about inanimate things up to this point. But, in verse 39, he turns to the animate creation. And, he's saying to Job, quite a job arranging the food chain in the universe. Making sure that all my creatures have something to eat. That is true. These verses kind of came alive to me during the days of Desert Storm. You know, when our troops went over to Kuwait. A lot of troops do. You can think of what a job it was to assemble food for all of those men. Three meals a day. And, unknown period of time they were going to be there. It's called logistics. Logistics. I said a big word for everything, well, that's nothing. When you think of God, God's logistics. Providing for all. He's opening his hands and providing the desire of every living thing. That's what he says here. Can you hunt the prey for the lion or satisfy the appetite of the young lions when they crouch in their dens or lurk in their lairs till the lion waits? Who provides food for the raven? I laughed. Really, there is humor in the Bible. First of all, he speaks about the majestic lion, you know, absolutely gorgeous there. Then he speaks about that awkward little raven strutting along. And, he's just as interested in the raven as he is in the lion. What a wonderful God. His eyes on the pharaoh, even. But, I know he cares for me. Who provides food for the raven when its young ones cry to God and wander around for lack of food? Marvelous. And, the instinct that God has given to that raven to go and get food for its young. And, the same with the lion. Then he talks about the wild mountain goat. Inaccessible, really, to Job. Job could know very little about their gestation period, about their habits. But, there they are up in the mountains. He says, can you, verse 2 of chapter 39, can you number the months that they fulfill? And, you know the time when they bear young. They bow down, they bring forth their young. Then he talks about the wild donkey, in verse 5. And, it's also called an onager there, which is just a another name for a wild donkey. That whose home I have made the wilderness and the barren land is, he's out there on the desert, the wild donkey. Don't try to bring him into Dallas. He would be absolutely, whole Dallas in contempt. He doesn't want to be in an urban setting at all. He wants to be out there on the desert. And, don't try to put a harness on him either, because he won't obey you. He does not heed the shouts of the driver. The range of the mountains is his pasture. He searches after every green place. And, the same with the ox. Don't try to bring the ox back into your barn, and get him into a stall in your barn, and expect him to stay there. Don't try to put a harness on him to pull your plow after him. Will the wild ox be willing to serve you? Will he bed by your manger? Can you bind the wild ox in the furrow with ropes? Or, will he plow the valleys behind you? Will you trust him because his strength is great? Or, will you leave your labor to him? No, better not. Will you trust him to bring home your grain? Can you use him in your harvesting operation? Gather it to your threshing floor in the end? No. And, then he talks about the wild ostrich. And, what a gawky creature, you know. And, what a foolish creature, too. It lays its eggs in the sand, and is quite unmindful of the fact that people can come and walk on the eggs, and destroy them. It says, verse 14, she leaves her eggs on the ground, and warms them in the dust. She forgets that a foot may crush them, or that a wild beast may break them. She treats her young harshly, as though were not hers, or labors in vain without her. Because God deprived her of wisdom, did not endow her with understanding. But, then the catch verse. All of those verses are really saying, in effect, what a dumb animal the ostrich is. But, hold your breath, friend. Verse 18, when she lifts herself on high, she scorns the horse and the rider. She can move faster than any horse. She can do it 45 miles an hour. I think that's marvelous. God revealing himself, the God of creation, and the God of providence. Then, he goes on to describe the war horse. It's not just the horse, the war horse. And, the war horse is a different breed, isn't it? The war horse knows what it's made for. It knows its job, and it does it very, very well. Now, you couldn't apply these verses to a Tidesdale horse, or Arabian horse, or something like that. It has to be a war horse. Have you given the horse strength? Have you closed his neck with thunder, or, some versions say, with a mane? Can you frighten him like a locust? His majestic snorting strikes terror. He haws in the valley. That's a magnificent picture. He haws in the valley. What's he saying? Let's get going into the battle. The pawing speaks of his impatience. He doesn't want to stand there. He's raised. He wants to see things accomplished. He paws in the valley and rejoices in his strength. He gallops with a clash of arms. He mocks at fear, and is not frightened, or does he turn back from the sword? God made him this way. Isn't that marvelous? Marvelous how God has given certain creatures an instinctive knowledge of what they're there for. Certain dogs are retrievers, you know. So, something's going to bring it back to you. I don't think a collie would do that, do you? What are you made for? You have to be a retriever. I was in a home in Detroit once, and there was a shelkie. I love dogs. I think God put dogs down here to teach us how to worship, you know. And there's a shelkie, and I was admiring the shelkie, and the owner said, that shelkie should be a psychiatrist. I said, why? He said, all she knows to do is go around in circles. I said, doesn't need a psychiatrist. That's a sheepdog. That's what a sheepdog does. Sheepdog goes around in circles. Here's a poor dog in Detroit, never seen a sheepdog. Marvelous, isn't it? Marvelous when you stop to think of it. Look at it. It's all in tears, isn't it? All in tears. What a great God. This is exactly what God was trying to show. To show. Exactly what he was trying to show. Back to the war horse. He mocks at fear, verse 22, and is not frightened, nor does he turn back from the sword. The quiver rattles against him. The glittering fear. You can see just the tumult of the war, and the fears of the javelin. Is he afraid? Does he want to turn back? You can let him smell battle, and he wants to go right into the middle of it. He devours the distance with fierceness and rage. What beautiful lines. He devours the distance. We would say he eats up the miles, wouldn't we? He eats up the miles. I mean, he's in a hurry to get there and get the job done, nor does he stand firm because the trumpet has sounded. The blast of the trumpet. He says, Aha! He smells the battle from afar. The thunder of captains and shepherds. You know, I'm going awfully fast this morning, and I just want you to know that every verse that we've gone over, it's all the truths there were written out. We killed probably a library of a million volumes. Probably was. All the scientific knowledge connected with what we've gone over so far. Probably fill a library with a million volumes. Which is going over very courageously. Does the hawk fly by your wisdom and spread its wings towards itself? The migratory instinct of birds is wonderful. Spread its wings towards itself. In Germany, there's a bird called the lesser white-throat warbler, and it goes south for the winter, and then comes up north and lays its eggs and raises its young. And then, in a classic case of child neglect, the parents take off for the winter down south and leave the young. A couple of weeks later, the young take off and fly to a place they've never been before. And are reunited with their... There were birds up in Alaska, and they go south too. They're land birds, and they travel over thousands of miles of water. They can't stop. They can't stop. Can't land. There's nothing there. They have to know just the right amount of fat in their system before they take off. Their fuel, the fat in their system. They have to go at the right speed. If they go too slow, it'll use up too much fat. If they go too fast, it'll use up too much fat, too. They have to watch out for adverse winds, you know. Some of them fly in V formations for that reason. They know just how to do that, and they... Did you know a hummingbird can fly across the Gulf of Mexico? And if you take a hummingbird and take the feathers off of it, there's not much left. It can fly 500 miles across the Gulf of Mexico. Marvelous, isn't it? Listen, if your car had that fuel efficiency, it's like going into the dealer and buying that brand new car, and you pay him, and you're leaving, and he goes, just a minute, I forgot something. Here's a cup of unleaded gas. It'll do you for the life of the car. That's what God does with his people. Marvelous, really. I'm breathless when I think about it. Does the eagle mount up at your command and make its nest on high? It dwells on the rock and resides on the crag of the rock in the stronghold. From there, it spies out the threat. The eyesight of some of those birds is absolutely phenomenal, isn't it? It's way, way up there. You can see the prey down there, and they can time... When I was a boy, we used to go out to a beach in Brewster, Massachusetts, and the tide went out a mile, and we'd go out and dig sea clams. The sea clam was about that big. I exaggerate. The sea clam, of course, never comes out of the sand, but it does work a little geyser. Here are the seagulls. They're going overhead. They can tell when a clam is close to the surface. They just hold their wings, and they come down, and they put their bill in the sand, and they grab the sea clams. God has packaged that sea clam very well. With all the strength that any human being has, you could never break one of those open with your hands. This is a sea gull, too. It takes off. It's just the right height to go. It drops the clam, falls with the speed of gravity after it. The clam hits the sand, breaks apart, takes the meat, goes off, and makes a stern tug of it. Who caught this sea gull? All of this is digested by the things that we have here. Coming over, I was mentioning we saw some sea gulls there on an athletic field this morning. Wow, you go out in the middle of the Pacific, you'll see sea gulls. What do they drink? What do they drink? I wonder if it's salt water. If you know what happens if you drink salt water, don't you? You have a short life expectancy. Yes, that's all there is to the sea gull. Well, what does he do? He falls off. But he goes through a filtered membrane, and the salt comes out as a teardrop in the sea gull's eye, and the fresh water goes down into his skull. You should practice, shouldn't you? It didn't happen by evolution, I'll tell you that. This is what would have happened to the first sea gull. They'd have died of salt water in the meantime. Verse 29, speaking about the eagle, from there it spies out the prey, its eyes observe from afar. I should say so. What a wonderful eyesight. 20-20 vision, and then some. Its young suck up the blood, and where the slain are, there it is. Job makes a partial confession. He says, well, Lord, I'm feeling pretty bad right now. I'm vile. What shall I answer you? I lay my hand over my mouth. Once I have spoken, but I will not answer. Yes, twice, but I will proceed no further. The Lord answered Job out of the world, and I love this passage. He says, now prepare yourself like a man. And God wasn't exactly satisfied with that confession that Job made here. He still had some lessons for him, and we're not going to be able to go over them all. You want me to stop at 10 minutes, Bob? Is that right? Yeah, we'll do it. I just wanted to show you verses 8, 9, and 10. Would you indeed annul my judgment? Would you condemn me that you may be justified? Have you an arm like God, or can you thunder with a voice like his? Then he says, adorn yourself with majesty and splendor, and array yourself with glory and beauty. What does that mean? He's saying, so wear the robes of royalty. You ascend the throne. You run the universe. See what kind of a job you can do. You see, Job had been questioning God. He had been questioning the providence of God in his life, and God says, okay, now you take over. Marvelous, isn't it? That's what he means. You adorn yourself with majesty and splendor. That's the ruler, you know, the king, the punished throne. Array yourself with glory and beauty. And then you just run the universe, and wherever you find ungodly men, you punish them. And where you find righteous men, you reward them. I've put certain laws into existence in my universe. Now you see that those laws are carried out. Eventually, of course, you know what happens. I've heard of you by the hearing of my ears, but now my life is ruined. I hate myself, and retention's just an issue. But I'd just like to leave that closing thought. Why did it all happen? How could a God of love allow his servants to go through all that trouble? The answer, the book of Job. We have the book of Job today, and what a wonderful blessing it is. Shall we close in prayer? Father, we do thank you for your precious word. How full of meaning it is for us, and as we've been going over these verses, what a great God you are. Thank you for these revelations of yourself. But we don't know what lies ahead of us in life. We don't know what suffering lies ahead of us. We thank you, dear Father, that you are a God who can be comforted, that you are working out your purposes. You're a God of infinite love, and nothing can come into our lives apart from your permissive will. We give you thanks that we're involved in your ministry. In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit, amen.