Were you there? An exploration of the immature pre-frontal lobe. Job 38:1-41

(sermon text following scripture)

The Lord Speaks

38 Then the Lord spoke to Job out of the storm. He said:

2 

“Who is this that obscures my plans

    with words without knowledge?

3 

Brace yourself like a man;

    I will question you,

    and you shall answer me.

4 

“Where were you when I laid the earth’s foundation?

    Tell me, if you understand.

5 

Who marked off its dimensions? Surely you know!

    Who stretched a measuring line across it?

6 

On what were its footings set,

    or who laid its cornerstone—

7 

while the morning stars sang together

    and all the angels[a] shouted for joy?

8 

“Who shut up the sea behind doors

    when it burst forth from the womb,

9 

when I made the clouds its garment

    and wrapped it in thick darkness,

10 

when I fixed limits for it

    and set its doors and bars in place,

11 

when I said, ‘This far you may come and no farther;

    here is where your proud waves halt’?

12 

“Have you ever given orders to the morning,

    or shown the dawn its place,

13 

that it might take the earth by the edges

    and shake the wicked out of it?

14 

The earth takes shape like clay under a seal;

    its features stand out like those of a garment.

15 

The wicked are denied their light,

    and their upraised arm is broken.

16 

“Have you journeyed to the springs of the sea

    or walked in the recesses of the deep?

17 

Have the gates of death been shown to you?

    Have you seen the gates of the deepest darkness?

18 

Have you comprehended the vast expanses of the earth?

    Tell me, if you know all this.

19 

“What is the way to the abode of light?

    And where does darkness reside?

20 

Can you take them to their places?

    Do you know the paths to their dwellings?

21 

Surely you know, for you were already born!

    You have lived so many years!

22 

“Have you entered the storehouses of the snow

    or seen the storehouses of the hail,

23 

which I reserve for times of trouble,

    for days of war and battle?

24 

What is the way to the place where the lightning is dispersed,

    or the place where the east winds are scattered over the earth?

25 

Who cuts a channel for the torrents of rain,

    and a path for the thunderstorm,

26 

to water a land where no one lives,

    an uninhabited desert,

27 

to satisfy a desolate wasteland

    and make it sprout with grass?

28 

Does the rain have a father?

    Who fathers the drops of dew?

29 

From whose womb comes the ice?

    Who gives birth to the frost from the heavens

30 

when the waters become hard as stone,

    when the surface of the deep is frozen?

31 

“Can you bind the chains[b] of the Pleiades?

    Can you loosen Orion’s belt?

32 

Can you bring forth the constellations in their seasons[c]

    or lead out the Bear[d] with its cubs?

33 

Do you know the laws of the heavens?

    Can you set up God’s[e] dominion over the earth?

34 

“Can you raise your voice to the clouds

    and cover yourself with a flood of water?

35 

Do you send the lightning bolts on their way?

    Do they report to you, ‘Here we are’?

36 

Who gives the ibis wisdom[f]

    or gives the rooster understanding?[g]

37 

Who has the wisdom to count the clouds?

    Who can tip over the water jars of the heavens

38 

when the dust becomes hard

    and the clods of earth stick together?

39 

“Do you hunt the prey for the lioness

    and satisfy the hunger of the lions

40 

when they crouch in their dens

    or lie in wait in a thicket?

41 

Who provides food for the raven

    when its young cry out to God

    and wander about for lack of food?

39 

I followed my mother around a Reading, Pennsylvania Kmart in 1987 clutching a cassette tape with the hit song “Faith” by George Michaels. It was wrapped in a hard plastic security device.  Do any of you remember cassette tapes?  And those awful long contraptions they came in? I was pleading with all of the whine that my 11 year old body could muster.  Please mom, I have my own money and I waved my wrinkled $11 in front of her while she was trying to buy towels for our family. She was uninterested in my pleas.   I’ll buy the tape myself.  She answered without a glance in my direction.  “No”.

I was completely unaccustomed to my parents saying no to me.  I believed I was a pollyanna of a child.  I would clean the bathroom without being asked. My parents never checked my homework because it was always finished.  My parents even stopped going to parent teacher conferences because they would have to take off of work to hear the teacher say I was a great student, but I talked too much.  I used to turn the pot handles in on the stove for my mother when she forgot so we wouldn’t get burned and I pretty much recited the buckle up for safety seat belt pamphlets over and over again to my parents in the car. As a child I thought I was as close to perfect as I could be.  I feared discipline and punishment so much that I wouldn’t dare to make a misstep.  

And so that day as I clutched my desired cassette tape in my hands, having carefully saved up my own money waiting for this moment,  I simply couldn’t understand how she could possibly say no.  

I stayed closely next to her, standing between her and her shopping, explaining the million reasons why I deserved this tape.  My cousin Kris had it.  Yes, she was 5 years older, but still.  I had heard most of the songs on the radio already,  so the only difference was that now I would own them.  For the most part, my mother ignored me and kept going about her business.  I think she was hoping I would let it go and move on to some other request, like Rainbow Brite or Jem and the Holograms.  But as I cut her off at every turn, pleading with determination, her stance stayed firm.  Until finally in my preadolescent state of mind I escalated the situation and began to cry and yell across Kmart how she didn’t understand me.  How she didn’t realize that I was so much more mature than all of my friends and even more mature than most people older than me.  I had perfect grades, I was a good child and I deserved to use my money the way that I wanted to.  

What I didn’t know was that at age 11, my brain wasn’t capable of making decisions about what was best for me.  

Scientific research has come so far in recent years and though adults commonly assume that children and adolescents are really just little adults who haven’t figured out good decision making or rational behavior, all research and evidence shows that the part of the brain which is responsible for good decision making is not yet developed in the teen years.  The frontal lobe is not fully connected and the “wiring” that connects the frontal lobe is sluggish because it doesn’t have enough fatty tissue yet surrounding the nerves to pass information quickly from one section of the brain to the other.  

So in reality, what I am communicating to you today is that you can say that all of the things you did in your teenage years were completely and totally  not your fault.  And, if you are a teen, you can tuck away the mantra “hey mom, my frontal lobe isn’t working right yet, give me a break!” And that will be totally and completely true.  

These years are such a tricky and even awkward time for everyone and I can say for sure that I danced between my great desire to be blameless and sinless and with my natural and insatiable curiosity about the world around me.  My desire to do good didn’t always win out over my curiosities.  

For me, this adolescent time was a time to really truly begin to ask questions.  Early on my questions looked like:

“Will I make friends, do they like me?  Will I get invited to the sleepover?”

They morphed into “Am I going to fail this test?”  “Will “When will I have my first kiss?” “Will I make the basketball team?” 

They continued morphing into “Will I get into a good college?”  “Will I find a good partner?”
“What will I do with my life?”

And as time went on, so my questions matured “Will I get a job? “Will I get married?”  “Can I afford my rent?”  “Will I ever be a mother?”

Now, at 37, life presents me with all new questions.  “Why do I have wrinkles forming already?”  Why do those college students look so young?”  and one of the scariest questions that makes you confront the reality of being a full fledged adult… “are we saving enough for retirement?”  

Goodness.

When we ask these sorts of questions, at any age in life, we focus in on our own concerns and more often, our own problems.  It’s as if we have a high powered 0-700mm zoom lens and we point it at one thing.  We take photo after photo of the same thing and critique it and hover around it and analyze it and we assume that if we just think about it enough or research it enough or worry enough then somehow we will be rewarded with the answer to our question; the solution to our circumstance.  

Imagine the kinds of questions God’s faithful servant Job might have been asking.

Job was a righteous,  prosperous man. He was a devout God follower, he was blessed with many sheep, many children, friends,  health and marriage. Job had it all.

He was a success.

But in no time, a house falls on his children’s heads. They die.  His flocks are driven away.  He is stricken with a terrible skin disease, his wife turns on him and his friends come to point out completely unhelpful reasons for his demise.  

After all of the destruction and despair, Job sits in an ash heap and laments.  

If we focused on  the circumstances of Job’s life, it would be pretty easy to make a list of questions he might be wrestling with.

What happened?

Why did this happen to me?

Didn’t I do all the right things.

How will I get out of this mess?

Perhaps you can understand this type of  defeat.  When it feels that the world is crumbling around you.  I know that I can.  

And then, the text tells us that from the calm, clear skies inside the eye of a violent and turbulent storm, God speaks.  

From the eye in the middle of Job’s  storm of loss—loss of life, loss of health, loss of children, loss of stability, loss of friendship, loss of marriage…

From the eye of that very violent storm, God does not swoop in and wrap his arms around Job, God does not cradle him.  God does not praise his faithfulness.  

Instead, to a man who is about as down and out as I can imagine, God probes:

“Gird up your loins Job.  I am going to question you.”  

And to the ever faithful Job who never turns his back on God, God probes:

“Where were you when I laid the foundations of the earth?”

When I read it, this question has so much inflection to me.  From a quick reading it sounds so “angry parent” doesn’t it?  

Akin to:

Don’t you realize I have been working so hard to provide for you?

Don’t you understand how hard it is to be a parent?

Am I the only one who sees these piles of laundry?

Do you think these toilets clean themselves?

Don’t you see that there are children all over the world starving while you have extra food on your plate?

When I read the text and I see a man who has followed God so faithfully and yet has everything taken away from him, it is tough for me to swallow and to understand.  

I want to reach into the text and beg God to take it easy on Job.  Please God, just cut him a break?

But as I keep reading on throughout Chapter 38 and 39 of Job, it appears as though God keeps hammering Job with unanswerable questions.  Can you make it rain?  Do you hold the lightning in your hand? Can you hold in the waters of the sea?

Can you cause the sun to rise? Can you see the deep caves in the oceans recesses?  

Do you think that you really understand death?

One question keeps coming right after the other as if in an interview with a list of questions he can’t possibly answer. 

Perhaps it’s my human transference or maybe a flashback to sometime I was in trouble… but I hear these probes as an interrogation, perhaps even an interrogation assuming guilt.  

…as if Job has just come home after curfew, stumbling a little and God wants to be sure that all of the rules are followed.  

But what if….

What if we stepped back and took a wider look at what God is saying.  What if we changed the tone we hear when God is speaking and replace angry, controlling God to all knowing, persistent God.  

What if we heard God like this?

“Were you there when I laid the foundations of the earth?”

Could the voice sound more like a compassionate caregiver than a domineering tyrant?

“Job, were you there when it all began?”

You can’t possibly understand all the pieces that bring together the fullness of  life and the complexity of death.  

Just try to wrap your mind around it all…

The sun and the moon and the ocean and the light and the hail and the snow and the lighting and the canyons and the thunder and the desire and the wastelands and the wildflower and the grass and the rain and the frost ….

These things don’t just “happen.”

God tells Job that when the ocean was gushing forth, he made the gates for it, giving it limits and boundaries and definition so that all of creation doesn’t just wildly flail about in mayhem.  

After a long diatribe of God pointing out what Job cannot see and cannot know, God calls Job into account in Chapter 40, after God has laid out the vast tasks of caring for a universe and says “what do you have to say for yourself?”

To which Job says in a seeming defeat…  “I cannot reply to you and now I will  put my hands over my mouth.”

The Message paraphrase of the bible by Eugene Peterson gives chapter 40  the heading “I’m ready to shut up and listen.” 

And then, when Job acknowledges that none of his “doing the right thing” lifestyle has advanced his position in God’s sight, he admits that before,  he had only heard of God but now that he can see more than his own circumstances and take one small nod in the direction of God’s sovereignty.  He doesn’t get answers to why, but he can see himself as a piece of God’s great creation and know that he is a part of the masterpiece.  

This past Wednesday was the most ordinary of days.  I honestly can’t tell you one remarkable thing about how the day played out.  But I remember clearly that at about 5:45 pm when no one wanted to do homework, no one liked their snack, someone forgot their book at school, I stepped on the cat, the trash needed to go out again, the steps were full of toys and socks and papers, I couldn’t see the dining room table to set it for dinner and then someone decided to have a tantrum, I snuck around the corner into the kitchen and just clutched the fridge doors with a silent cry of “God, please help me.”  I’m tired and I can’t do this right now.  I felt a gentle nudge in my heart reminding me that even when it’s all falling apart, God is holding it all together.  And that I am not the only person or even one of the people who keeps the world spinning in motion.  

Life is hard, friends.  Much harder than 5:45 pm chaos.  And even when we are certain that the ocean waters are rising above us, God promises in Job that he has given them boundaries and hemmed the rising waters in.  Eventually God restores Job’s life and Job begins again, rebuilding and looking at the world with this new understanding of his position and God’s ultimate power.  

I have to tell you, though, as an aside… that when I was pouring through the text of Job I first watched a video version on You Tube to get a visual image of all of these creation pieces.  In that oratory as I listened I heard the narrator say “Can you loose the cords of Orion?”  It was in chapter 38, verse 31.  I hit stop on my video and I grabbed my Bible to look it up. I couldn’t believe that Orion was mentioned in the book of Job. Orion to me is a contemporary concept.  It was my favorite constellation as a child and I love that it is so easy to pick out in the winter night sky.  Of course I know that Orion isn’t mine, but I did find that it is most visible in the November sky which is my birth month, so I thought maybe we had this little connection.  

But it put me in some sort of time warp.  I literally said to myself “wait, God, how do you know Orion’s name?  I grew up knowing this name and I assumed that back when the book of Job was penned that the constellations had not yet been named and the names we use now wouldn’t be the same.  For some strange reason I didn’t think that they would be named more than just calling them stars   …   I kept looking and looking and looking at when the constellations were named and who named them and I found that they were part of ancient Babylonian cultures (forgive me if there are any astronomy scholars here!) and that recently a cave was found in Germany that has a drawing in it of orion that is archeologically dated as 38,000 years old.   

So, perhaps in a parking lot conversation you will call me naive or scientifically illiterate or simple, but I took the posture of Job and put my hand on my mouth and said, “I’m going to shut up now….”  because I had limited God and God’s ability and God’s knowledge and God’s age and depth to my understanding.  I literally almost claimed Orion as my constellation.  I tried to trap the stars of the universe in my playpen. I selfishly ignored how big the world is and tried to limit the realm that God is in control of.  

No, I wasn’t there when you created the world, O God.  And I’m sorry if I’m presumptuous and arrogant.  I don’t understand what is going on when schools are bombed and babies are brain damaged from mosquitos and people in the U.S. and all over the world go without clean drinking water.  These things don’t make sense to me.  The space/time continuum is too big for me to comprehend and so when I get so focused on the “me world”  I forget, oh so easily, that this is your world and these are your ways, and that You, O Fod, are bigger and mightier than my plans, my failures, my illnesses, my disappointments.  

Perhaps our prefrontal lobes of spiritual understanding aren’t fully developed yet.  in fact, I would say they definitely aren’t fully developed yet. 

And so I won’t ever forget begging my mom for a George Michael’s tape and I won’t begrudge her saying no to me.  Because while I clutched on to the $11 in one hand and the plastic cassette tape in the other, my mother had looked at the track list and she saw songs that were about sex (in parts, 1, 2, and 3)  and she knew that her 11 year old daughter wasn’t ready yet to understand what that meant.  

It is a difficult and incredibly joyful lesson to learn that perhaps the desires of our hearts are not the paths we were meant to travel.  

Remember, friends, that God’s holding it all together even if, to us, it’s all falling apart.