Feeding Baby Ravens

Job has always been a difficult book for me (not that I’m unique in that). My biggest frustration is not Job’s suffering. I get that. It is God’s answer beginning in Job 38 which, as I’ve understood it in the past, is essentially: “I Am who I Am. My ways are not your ways. My designs are beyond your comprehension. So don’t question me” Amen. This is true.

But by this point in the book, I’ve longed for comfort and God’s answer never seemed to give any. Job getting all his stuff back doesn’t, to me, make everything better. Thanks for the new children. But I still miss the dead ones. Children aren’t like puppies. Getting new ones can’t take away the pain of losing the old ones. Of course God’s word is perfect and my feelings are not so when I start bumping up against God’s answers beginning in Job 38, I’ve always had to pray: Lord have mercy on me and make me love this because right now, as you know, my heart is full of backchat.

Well, this morning as I was reading through Job 38 I came, again, to this rhetorical question (v.41):

“Who provides for the raven its prey, when its young ones cry to God for help, and wander about for lack of food?

I’ve read that text many times before but it comes right after God asks Job who feeds the young lions and my mind at that point always spirals off into African savannas and poor zebras being fed to the lions. But this morning for the first time it struck me that Jesus is actually riffing on Job 38:41 in one of the most comforting texts in all of the New Testament: Luke 12:24:

“Consider the ravens: they neither sow nor reap, they have neither storehouse nor barn, and yet God feeds them. Of how much more value are you than the birds!”

This tells us much about the way Jesus interprets Job and, consequentially, what God is actually saying there. He’s not only saying: “My ways are beyond your ways.” But also: “My ways are Compassionate. I feed raven babies. I am God. I am not going to tell you why you have suffered in this way. I am going to tell you that I am good and I love you and what I have allowed you to endure is – in a way you will not understand in this present life – food for you. You are worth more than young lions and baby Ravens.”

That’s not a brilliant new insight into God’s purposes. There are many other places in scripture wherein God’s purpose in bringing suffering is shown to be our good (James 1, 2 Cor 1, Rom 8:28 etc). But in Luke 12:24 Jesus indicates that this purpose is revealed in Job and, even better, to Job. God did not come to answer Job’s despairing “why”. He did come, personally, to answer Job’s despair. Thanks be to the God of all comfort.