or morning devotion I've been praying, "Lord, talk to me through these texts" (Job 38-42).

We know what precedes them: the calamities, the pleas, the pain, the four foils even. When the Lord finally appears to Job (chapter 38), He says nothing about Satan's taunt, "Does Job fear God for no reason?" (Job 1:9*) or about His own reply, "Behold, he is in your hand; only keep him alive" (Job 2:6). Instead, He unleashes a flow of rhetorical questions contrasting Him in His creative might and power to the transience and ignorance of poor Job.

"Where were you when I laid the foundations of the earth?" the Lord begins (Job 38:4). After echoing some of the earliest images in Genesis--i.e., the origins of the earth, the sea, light and darkness--He says to Job (basically), Of course you know all these things "because you were born then, and the number of your days is great" (verse 21).

The Lord then points to wonders and mysteries of creation, again with a series of rhetorical questions ("From whose womb comes forth ice?" "Who has put wisdom in the inner parts?" "Who has put understanding in the mind?" "Does the eagle fly high at your command?")--not to prove His existence but only to show the vast gap between Job and the Creator. Had the book been written today, the Lord might have asked, "Who binds the quarks in protons and neutrons?" "Where were you when I first measured out a Planck mass?" "Is it by your wisdom that gravity bends space and time?"

When the divine litany's done, Job replies: "I know that You can do everything, and that no purpose of Yours can be thwarted. . . . I have heard of You by the hearing of the ear, but now my eyes have seen You; therefore, I despise myself, and repent in dust and ashes."

Thus, for Job, this vision of God was enough to convince him that the bemoaning about his dead children, his ruined property, and his diseased flesh was simply him bellyaching about "that which I did not understand, things too amazing for me that I didn't know."

Yet couldn't the God who makes the eagle fly, or who binds the quarks, have spared Job such suffering? Even with the great controversy motif unfolded in the background, the ending of Job still seems so inadequate, so full of unanswered questions. OK, God is great and powerful; we all know that. But if anything, that greatness and power make it even harder to understand human suffering.

For me, the only answer is the cross. For here we have the same God who revealed Himself to Job--the God who teaches the eagle to fly, the God who binds the quarks--suffering worse than any human being, even Job, ever suffered or could suffer. God does answer Satan's charges, not through the faithfulness of Job, but through the faithfulness of Jesus on the cross, where He bore our "griefs, and carried our sorrows" (Isa. 53:4). The grief and sorrows that we know individually, He assumed corporately; thus, no one can lecture God on suffering, not when He in humanity bore in Himself the full brunt of all the suffering that sin has spread around the globe.

The God who asked Job, "Do you know the ordinances of heaven; can you establish their dominion on the earth?" becomes more incredible when we realize that through creating the "ordinances of heaven," He also took upon Himself earthly flesh and in that flesh died so that "he might destroy him who holds the power of death--that is, the devil" (Heb. 2:14, NIV).

Viewed through the cross, the book of Job makes more sense than without it, because the cross answers many questions that the book leaves unanswered. Job saw God as Creator; after the cross, we see Him as Creator and Redeemer, or particularly--the Creator who became our Redeemer (Phil. 2:6-8). Thus, like Job, only more so, what can we do before such a sight but exclaim: "I despise myself, and repent in dust and ashes"?

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*The Hebrew translations in this column are those of the author.

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Clifford Goldstein is editor of the Adult Sabbath School Bible Study Guide.