So often, when we don’t receive an answer from God, it’s because we are asking the wrong question. Job wanted to know why he had lost his family, his wealth and his health. He knew his friends were wrong when they said he had committed some sin, bringing all his suffering on himself. But Job still assumed that he could somehow understand how all the circumstances of his life fit together, if God would just explain everything to him.

But when God showed up, when God finally did talk to Job, God did not in fact provide such an explanation. In the same way, it is rare that any of us understand why grief and sorrow, sickness and sadness come our way.

So, why doesn’t God clue us in? Because, as God says in chapters 38 and 39, we simply aren’t able to understand the complexity of our circumstances. We just don’t have the capacity to see how all the pieces of our lives and the lives of our loved ones fit together. We plead with God to give us health or wealth or happiness, but we can’t see how such gifts would alter our future course, or how they would affect other people all around us.

In short, we have to fall back on faith, trusting God to know what is best for everyone. After all, He is the One Who created the whole world (38:4-7). He’s the one who decided where the seas would fit on the globe (38:8-11). And so, only the One Who created light can decide the appropriate time to punish the wicked by withholding it from them (38:15). Only the One Who created the complex weather patterns that produce hail can decide when to cast it down on His enemies (38:23). We simply have to leave matters of justice in God’s hands.

And the same thing is true where it comes to material blessings. In Job’s time, the right amount of rain meant the difference between starvation and prosperity. Pagan people thus prayed to their false gods for rain, and performed complex and often perverted rituals in an attempt to insure that the right amount of rain would fall at the right time. But only the One True God can transform a desert into a garden (38:25-27). He alone decides the distribution of all natural resources, and thus of all our material wealth.

All this is not to say that we shouldn’t pray for ourselves and our loved ones. But it is to say that we must trust God to answer us in His way and in His time. For to insist that we know better than God is to “darken counsel by words without knowledge.”

Job 38:1-15 (NASB)

Then the LORD answered Job out of the whirlwind and said,
2 “Who is this that darkens counsel By words without knowledge?
3 “Now gird up your loins like a man, And I will ask you, and you instruct Me!
4 “Where were you when I laid the foundation of the earth? Tell Me, if you have understanding,
5 Who set its measurements, since you know? Or who stretched the line on it?
6 “On what were its bases sunk? Or who laid its cornerstone,
7 When the morning stars sang together, And all the sons of God shouted for joy?
8 “Or who enclosed the sea with doors, When, bursting forth, it went out from the womb;
9 When I made a cloud its garment, And thick darkness its swaddling band,
10 And I placed boundaries on it, And I set a bolt and doors,
11 And I said, ‘Thus far you shall come, but no farther; And here shall your proud waves stop ‘?
12 “Have you ever in your life commanded the morning, And caused the dawn to know its place;
13 That it might take hold of the ends of the earth, And the wicked be shaken out of it?
14 “It is changed like clay under the seal; And they stand forth like a garment.
15 “And from the wicked their light is withheld, And the uplifted arm is broken.