Now no one can look at the sun, bright as it is in the skies after the wind has swept them clean. – Job 37:21

Today’s Scripture Reading (April 16, 2012): Job 37

I have a bad habit of forgetting my sun glasses when I am in the car. Luckily, I also have a solution. I have started to keep my sun glasses in my Mustang. When the sun shines, my glasses aren’t far away. But there is a second problem. I only drive my Mustang in the summer. During the winter, the Mustang is benched. But the sun isn’t. And with a liberal covering of snow on the ground, the reflected power of the sun off the snow can be worse than the light coming from the sun itself.

Elihu matches the brightness of the sun with the glory of God. His argument is that we need to consider the sun. Even when the clouds cover the sun, we know it is there. We can search the skies and not even catch a glimpse of it, and yet the light that emanates from it is plainly visible. The sun can be hidden, but not the effects of the sun. We can even see the sun after it has set as we watch the moon. But when the wind clears the clouds away, the one thing we can’t do is look directly into the sun. And because of that, for a long period of our history the sun was a hard object to study.

Elihu questions how much we can really know of God. Like the sun, we can’t look straight into his presence – his glory shines too brightly. But that doesn’t mean that we can’t see what he does. And that we can’t infer what God is like through the effect that he has on the world around us, just like we know about the sun even when we can’t see it. But the difference is that we can see the sun sometimes, even if we can’t stare at it.

The reader of the story of Job needs to be continually reminded that they know more than the characters in the story. They know the conversation between God and Satan that starts the story off. But the Christian also has two revelations of God that the characters of the story just didn’t have; the Law of Moses and the Ministry and Presence of Jesus Christ. These two revelations are our glimpses of the sun. They tell us who God is and give us a starting point from which we can interpret his actions.

There is a danger in interpreting the character of God strictly by his actions just as there is a danger in interpreting our character by our actions. What is missing is the glimpse of who we are, we need the starting point. And for God, revelation tells us that the starting point is love.

  

Tomorrow’s Scripture Reading: Job 38