The Wonders of His Weather

I had a childhood friend who was fascinated with the weather forecast. While the rest of us watched sports and cartoons, he was flipping over to check the Weather Channel. Of course we ragged him about it. Now, thirty years later, I want to be more like him. I want to be freshly enchanted with the weather — especially severe storms.

In a sense, my friend’s interest was juvenile. He had a pool in his backyard and wanted to know when lightning would shut down swimming. But there was some profound health in giving more thought to the weather than most of us do today.

Our technologies afford us ways to navigate and minimize the weather. Storms are often just an inconvenience, not a threat. Rarely does weather lift our eyes from the plane of our schedules and pastimes. Many of us would do well to take a cue from that childhood friend and from the climax of Elihu’s speech in Job 36–37.

Insufficient Theology

Afflicted Job and his three mourners argue back and forth in chapters 3–31. His friends have a simplistic theology of moral cause-and-effect — or as the scholars say, “retributive justice.” The friends assume that Job’s remarkable sufferings must be owing to some evil Job has done. But from the get-go, the reader knows that Job is a righteous man (“blameless and upright,” Job 1:1), and Job rightly responds that his afflictions are not owing to a particular evil in him.

However, Job ends up sharing in his friends’ simple-minded theory of justice. Not only does he defend his own righteousness, but he comes to question God’s. While no particular sin brought about the avalanche of Job’s sufferings, he does err in his suffering by doubting the justice of God.

By the end of chapter 32, Job has sufficiently answered his friends. Their rebuttals become shorter and shorter. He maintains his innocence. Finally, the friends are silenced.

Doctrine of Elihu

Then, at this critical moment, a Hebrew youth named Elihu steps forward. He has been listening in. As a young man, he let his elders speak first. But once their words have been exhausted, he steps forward to deliver what amounts to four unanswered speeches that, in the end, prepare the way seamlessly for God himself to speak to Job from the very whirlwind introduced by Elihu.

Students of the book of Job have long debated whether the unanswered youth piles on more folly, or if he speaks with wisdom that smoothly bridges the gap into the words of God in chapters 38–41. I won’t lay out the case here but lean on the arguments of Christopher Ash and others (including John Calvin, Don Carson, and John Piper) who defend the Hebrew youth as a voice of wisdom worthy of ushering in the book’s definitive divine words. As Calvin in particular writes, “God has imprinted such a mark on the doctrine of Elihu and . . . the celestial spirit has appeared in his mouth so that we ought to be moved to receive that which he says” (Where Shall Wisdom Be Found? 131).

In Job 32–33, Elihu first rebukes Job’s friends, then Job himself. Job 33:12–13 sums up his chief burden: “God is greater than man.” Job, says Elihu, has treated God like a fellow human, without sufficiently accounting for God’s divine greatness. In chapters 34–35, Elihu champions God’s unimpeachable justice and condemns Job for casting doubt on it.

Finally, in chapters 36–37, in his fourth and climactic speech, Elihu extols the greatness of God and his acts. “God is great” is the understated summary (36:26), and “he does great things” (37:5). And what does Elihu celebrate at this pinnacle moment, while marveling at the greatness of God and his works? He meditates on the weather.

We too might find ourselves not only rebuked but instructed and better prepared for life’s sufferings if we slowed the rush of our modern lives more often to marvel at the majesty of God outside the doors of our tech-laden homes.

Written in Raindrops

The final section of Elihu’s speech begins in 36:26: “Behold, God is great, and we know him not.” That is, he is great in what we see and know, and great beyond our comprehension in what we do not. Verses 27–28 then look upward to ground this declaration:

For he draws up the drops of water;
     they distill his mist in rain,
which the skies pour down
     and drop on mankind abundantly.

As the storm rolls in, the initial drops of rain come — and Elihu gives us a glimpse of God’s greatness in the waters that fall from heaven. Rain is not just condensed water droplets tumbling from the sky; rain is commissioned by God. He commands all precipitation with his powerful word. Whether snow drifts gently to the ground or driving rains come as “his mighty downpour,” God gives the word, “Fall on the earth” (Job 37:6), and the rain and snow obey.

“When God thunders, do you hear him roaring against you, or against your enemies?”

Just this past weekend, unforeseen storms popped up on a beautiful sunny afternoon during my daughter’s softball game. Not a single weather guru in the Twin Cities saw it coming. For a while, the players and umpire tried their best to continue on and ignore the water falling from the sky. But soon it became a downpour, and all fled for cover. No human made the decisive call. God did. Elihu does not miss the point:

He seals up the hand [of work and play] of every man,
     that all men whom he made may know it.
Then the beasts go into their lairs,
     and remain in their dens. (37:7–8)

When God flips his switch on a great downpour, and you scamper for shelter, do you pause to ponder the greatness of God while you catch your breath? Do you ever stop and think, Water is falling from the sky at God’s command? Have modern assumptions about meteorology blinded us to the greatness of God as his rain falls to the earth and alters our plans in a moment?

Hear His Thunder

With that initial mention of rain comes Elihu’s introduction of thunder:

Can anyone understand the spreading of the clouds,
     the thunderings of his pavilion? (Job 36:29)

Thunder, he says, is “the rumbling that comes from [God’s] mouth” (37:2). When the skies crack, “his voice roars; he thunders with his majestic voice” (37:4). This audible majesty — whether muted but foreboding in the distance, or dangerously near and ear-piercing — isn’t God’s only or main way of speaking, but we should hear in it nothing less than the voice of the one who made and upholds the world, and its storms, by his word (see also 2 Samuel 22:14; Psalm 18:13; 29:3).

If you know yourself to be at enmity with God, the roaring thunder of God Almighty can and should be terrible. It’s just a faint reminder of the omnipotence that is against you if you run from him. Thunder should terrify the enemies of God. But for his redeemed, utterly safe in his Son, the heart-leaping roar of thunder strikes a different key:

God thunders wondrously with his voice;
     he does great things that we cannot comprehend. (Job 37:5)

When God thunders, do you hear a sounding of the divine power that holds you eternally secure? Thunder comes to evoke admiring awe in the hearts of those who are in Christ. The great thunderstorm ballad of Psalm 29 ends with this wonder felt by his people:

May the Lord give strength to his people!
     May the Lord bless his people with peace! (Psalm 29:11)

When the skies explode with thunder, his enemies cry, “Horror!” His people cry, “Glory!”

See His Lightning

Thunder, of course, has its famous partner in evoking terror and wonder:

Behold, [God] scatters his lightning about him
     and covers the roots of the sea. . . .
He covers his hands with the lightning
     and commands it to strike the mark.
Its crashing declares his presence. (Job 36:30, 32–33)

Visible lightning and audible thunder belong together. Naturally, then, the celebration of lightning is followed by “the thunder of his voice” (37:2). And together lightning and thunder produce the trembling heart that leaps out of its place. Doesn’t your heart instinctively leap at the sudden flash of lightning or explosive roar of thunder? No matter how learned our modern explanations, our hearts know the right response.

Don’t miss that Elihu calls this “his lightning” (36:30), that is, God’s lightning. God is not only sovereign over thunder, lightning, rain, and wind; they are his. They belong to him, obey his command, and give us glimpses of his majesty and incomprehensibility. His lighting. His majestic voice in the thunder. His mighty downpour.

And as thunder pairs with his voice, so lightning pairs with his hands. The lightning of his fingers knows no bounds, illumining the depths of the sea (36:30) and lighting up the whole of the heavens and the ends of the earth (37:3). God commands (36:32; 37:15) and scatters it (36:30; 37:11), striking the mark of his choosing (36:32). He not only permits the storm but produces it and “causes the lightning of his cloud to shine” (37:15).

And Elihu’s musings on lightning, like thunder, will not be rebuked but echoed in the next chapter when God himself speaks from this whirlwind, as God (like Elihu) asks Job, “Can you send forth lightnings?” (Job 38:35).

Feel His Wind and Cold

Finally, we feel with Job the change in temperature as the storm rolls in. Not only do rain and lightning and thunder barrel down on Job, but cold and wind do as well.

The whirlwind approaches with “cold from the scattering winds” (37:9). And where do cold and wind come from? From the majestic and mysterious God. Ice is his, given by his breath (37:10). He is the sovereign of winds and clouds that “turn around and around by his guidance, to accomplish all that he commands them” (37:11–12). And mysterious as his full purposes are,

Whether for correction or for his land
     or for love, he causes it to happen. (37:13)

For Job, and for the friends of God, this is “wondrous.” Hear a summons in the storm to “stop and consider the wondrous works of God” (37:14).

Enjoy His Calm

Elihu ends with one final word for Job, and us, on the far side of the terrors and wonders of severe weather: “He is great in power” (37:23) in the blissful calm that follows the storm. Our God is majestic not only in the storm but also in the “golden splendor” that ensues (37:21–22). The majesty and mystery of God come in both the storm and its peaceful aftermath. Elihu ends with an implicit exhortation for all men — enemies and friends alike:

Therefore men fear him;
     he does not regard any who are wise in their own conceit. (37:24)

Then, immediately on the heels of Elihu’s words, God himself answers Job out of the whirlwind (38:1).

Elihu Still Speaks

When Elihu asks, “Can anyone understand the spreading of the clouds, the thunderings of his pavilion?” (Job 36:29), we might be prone to think, Yes, now we know! Our great modern learning has taught us what these poor ancients could not fathom. But do we know?

Job 36–37 is a wake-up call for modern people like us not to pretend to know more than we do. Doubtless, we have more detailed, scientific descriptions than they did in the ancient world, but as far as explanations go, we hit the wall of mystery just as they did. As much as we pretend to “know the forecast,” we don’t. Meteorologists work with several models to project a few hours or few days ahead of the present moment, often giving us a good sense of what seems likely to happen, but rarely, if ever, telling us exactly what the high and low temps will be and how much precipitation will come and at what time. Their probabilities can be close enough to be helpful, yet no one really knows the weather until it actually happens. Far more mystery remains in meteorology than most of us assume.

And so Elihu still speaks. He points to the skies and reminds us that our God is both knowable and incomprehensible and that whether our hearts are freshly warmed or warned, our souls will be healthier as we marvel at God’s majesty in the storm.