Job 40: The path to reconciliation

Are we right to find fault with God?

Crushed by a tempest of adversities (9:27), Job ended up accusing God of being unjust (Job 9-10). Elihu’s inspired counsel didn’t try to ‘fix’ this. Instead, he encouraged Job to switch from the Salvation By Works Broadcast to the wavelength, where God speaks (36:15-16). After Job finally heard God’s voice in the storm, the readers are invited to eavesdrop that they may hear too (38:1; 40:6): 

• 40:1-2 Is it right that we find fault with God? Is it right to suspect our Maker of wrong, when the problem is that we are too small to fathom His wisdom? Does our inability to comprehend God’s decrees justify our suspicions, or is it one more reason to trust Him, especially in fiery trials of adversity?
• Hearing God’s question, Job began to see how his lack of trust got him stuck: When life looks absurd due to sufferings, contending with the Almighty provides no solution! All it achieves is to rob us of hope, and of purpose (see comment on 39:5-8).
• 40:3-5 Unable to answer, Job withdrew his demand to argue his case. Reluctantly, for if he had been satisfied, the story could have ended there. But apparently we need more answers. Together with Job, we are thus asked to search our motive as to why we question God’s ways:
• 40:6-8 “Will you condemn me so that you may be in the right?” Why do we condemn God’s apparent lack of justice? Why are literature and art full of outcries against God that He does not meet our expectations? Is the root an attempt to justify ourselves?
• 40:9-14 Our urge for self-justification is depicted by how our first parents attempted to cover their nakedness with fig leaves, Gen 3:7. Try to “clothe yourself with glory” (40:10): The sarcasm here is intentional because from Genesis to the book of Revelation, the Bible teaches that we are meant to be clothed with no other than the righteousness of God himself (Gen 3:21; Rev 7:13-14). We are not God, and the illusion that we could be like Him by knowing good and evil is how we lost our innocence and the ‘tree of life’ in the first place. Claiming the moral highground only increases our pride: Despising God’s mercy as weak and worthless, and left with nothing else to worship,  pride is bound to instead make us think highly of ourselves, and of our ‘ministry’ and sacrifices (cf Lk 18:11, 21; Ro 7:11).

Clothed with the righteousness of Christ: The prophecy about Behemoth 

After 40:1-14 stated what it takes to be Savior and why we cannot save ourselves, is there an explanation of how God saves? What is the counsel of God that remained obscured by Job’s ignorance until now (38:2)?

• 40:15-16 “Behold…” (twice): The short answer is that we need to hear Christ and be united to Him by believing Him, as illustrated by the parable of Behemoth. However, this riddle is so obscure that the concealment must be intentional (cf Mt 11:25-27; Lk 8:10):*
  • Ancient commentators speculated that Behemoth refers to a hippopotamus (it eats >40kg grass daily, v15), or an elephant, whose tail seems equally unspectacular, though (v17).
    • Other literalists such as Young Earth Creationists choose to believe that Job described a sauropod species alive in his time. However, evidence that those herbivores ate grass rather than leaves is lacking. Even if they did, it wouldn’t prove that sauropods were alive: Also the ancients likely stumbled over fossil bones when digging in the ground.**

• Even if Behemoth could be assigned to a given animal species, how would that help anyone to have a clue what the parable means?

Relevant here is not the species, but that the non-belligerent nature of Behemoth as a grass eater is contrasted to the predatory sea monster Leviathan, who is called “king over all the sons of pride” (41:34). Accordingly, Behemoth is no less a metaphor, but in this case for the king of the sons of humility:

• 40:15 “…which I made as I made you”: Not ‘made’ in the sense that Christ was ever created, but in the sense that He too was to become lower than the angels (Ps 8:5), i.e. subject to sufferings, Heb 2:9. Could the hint be more explicit what the metaphor of Behemoth means? Gen 3:15, cf Gal 4:4. 
• And could there be a better way to describe to seekers the strength of Christ and his body in meekness, 2Cor 10:1; Col 3:12; Ja 3:13, and of the faithful worker (“ox”): Deut 25:4; 1Cor 9:9; 1Tim 5:18?
• 40:16 “…His strength is in his loins, …his power in his womb”: i.e. to beget and to nurture offspring (note the contrast to 41:34), cf Isa 46:3; 49:1, 5. 

40:17 “…he bends his tail like a cedar” (stiffen, set up, or extend; lit. incline to, desire) cf Ezk 17:23; Phil 2:13; 3:21; Col 1:11; i.e. God himself grows and invigorates his people; “…sinews knit together”, cf Col 2:2, 19; 3:14-15

40:18 His bones and limbs: cf 1Cor 12:20

40:19 Some translate that God equips Behemoth with a sword, others that He approaches him with one (ESV):

• If the latter, then only figuratively (e.g. Heb 4:12; 1Pet 4:12).
• If the former: Arguably the most impressive feature of sauropod fossils are their tails which they could swing like a sword – an apt metaphor for God’s word entrusted to the body of Christ as its only offensive piece of spiritual armor, Jn 17:14; 18:11; Eph 6:17. 

40:20-24 He is resting in God and thus cannot be overcome by adversity:

• Wild beasts on the mountains are frequent OT metaphors for nations and their kingdoms, Isa 2:2; 17:13.
• ‘Rushing waters of the Jordan river’ point to union with Christ in baptism (Jos 4:19-24), foreshadowed by a ‘baptism unto Moses’ in the Red Sea (1Cor 10:2; Ro 6:5). To be united to Christ by faith means to partake in His sufferings and rejection by those who reject Him (cf Mk 10:39; Mt 20:22; Ps 140:4-5; Jn 9:34).

Sharing in Christ’s sufferings to partake in his comfort  

If Behemoth were meant to be beheld as a literal beast, this would create serious problems of interpretation: 

• 40:19 “He is the first (lit. choicest or first fruits) of the works (lit. of the way) of God…”:
  • The first of God’s works that we are told about was no animal, and starting with a sauropod would be odd, to say the least.
  • If ‘first’ would mean ‘most eminent’, one wonders why any animal species should be regarded as more eminent than any other. By contrast, calling Behemoth God’s firstfruits makes sense instantly once we acknowledge that throughout the Bible, firstfruits are a metaphor for Christ and his body (Ro 11:16; 1Cor 15:20, 23; 2Thes 2:13; Ja 1:18).
  • No one who experiences what Job went through will ever be reconciled to just any god. The caricature of god that his adversaries preached is what disillusioned Job in the first place. Those who know of horrors like the holocaust can be reconciled by no other than by the One who promised to become man and to suffer our injustice. This is what the Bible and the book of Job are all about: To direct our faith to Christ who put our sufferings in an entirely different light (e.g. 2Cor 1:5; Col 1:24; 1Pet 4:13).

There are of course those who consider it impossible that anyone could have predicted Christ and his sufferings. And the book of Job has indeed not done so until here. However, if God exists and chose to make Himself known through the same gospel both in the Old and the New Testament, would it not be absurd to withhold that good news precisely from the one who needed it most? And what could be more absurd than to call some mysterious musings about a legendary beast an answer, and an answer from no less than God himself, if it had omitted the only remedy there is?

---

*  Even Bible-believing commentators debate the species rather than its meaning. Such bewilderment and even disbelief of the owners of the Behemoth parable go a long way to rule out that someone wrote this book merely as propaganda. For if they themselves cannot see Christ in this metaphor, the fact that He is there means that this cannot be their fabrication.

** This would explain why myths of dragons exist across the globe, see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adrienne_Mayor