"Thus, what God is saying to you in 38:2, Job, is 'who is this guy who has brought darkness to the situation?' That will be God's "thesis statement," so to speak, God's general approach to you in the next four chapters. You have obscured things, Job. You have not brought light. I just have to pause for one more second on that one, Job. How can God characterize all your beautiful words as bringing darkness? As obscuring matters?
Ah, I think I have an answer to that one, actually. If you know law, you know also that litigation is the process of advocacy, even zealous advocacy of your "side" of the case. We make a mistake if we think that litigation is an impartial search for the truth. It is no Socratic dialogue (and it is questionable, really, whether Plato's description of a Socratic dialogue really is after that, anyway). You ignore, or play down, or even twist facts (by "recharacterizing" them) so that your side sounds real good. That is what God is doing, isn't he? He is just being a vigorous advocate here for the point he is about to make. He characterizes your words, Job, as "darkening" counsel, not because they objectively confuse things but because that is the way God wants to characterize them to further his own case. I say this because always looming in my mind when I think about God's words in your book, Job, is 42:7, where God says that you, Job, are right. That means, ultimately, that your words were not "darkening counsel." They were as full of light as a meteor shower. But God has to say this here in order to try to wear you down, to try to get you to abandon your own case.
Ok, dealt with that one. But then I begin to listen to God speak in 38:4 and my breath is taken away, Job. I wonder if yours was, likewise. God speaks so differently from any other character in the rest of the book. His words have a sweeping and expansive character to them, his images are not as precise as yours but they are imaginative, as if they invite consideration and flights of fancy. What I mean, Job, is that your pictures and images in ch.16 or ch.19, for example, were utterly brilliant and hopeless, were characterized by vividness and devastating power. When you described God's slash attack on you, for example (16:12-13), I recalled intensely an experience in my past where I had cut myself badly with a kitchen knife. I remember the moment of utter terror I felt, the way the skin separated, the instant in which there was no reaction from my body at all, and then the blood that came streaming forth from the incision. Job, your words made me think of experiences in life where what you described had happened. Your images exhaust me and make me see your anguish in mind.
But God's words do something else to me, Job. They make my facial muscles relax. They make me turn away from the page after I had read 38:4-7 and wonder what indeed were the "foundations of the earth." How could someone measure something like that? Are we imagining a huge construction project, like sinking the pilings deep into the earth to anchor the building? Is the earth God's "Big Dig?" So, I thought about images of stability, of founding, of making secure the world. I was taken out of myself to let my heart fly to ways that I understand how this earth "lives." Are we "suspended" in space? Do we "hurtle" along in space? Or, are we "founded" on something? I simply don't know, but I know that God's asking those question in 4-6 made me expand my vision rather than constrict it.
And, Job, I really think that this is the point. As I began to read 38 again, I saw it as wanting to wean me away from my narrowness, my own explanations of things, and bring me into another type of laboratory with which I was not familiar. But it not only did that. It wanted to stimulate my imagination further. Not only was the earth founded on cornerstones and bases that I could scarcely imagine, but there was a heavenly chorus that sung it into existence--"when the morning stars sang together and all the heavenly beings (or "sons of God") shouted for joy" (v.7). Not only was my heart encouraged to take an imaginative leap into the wide spaces of the earth and heaven, but I was to imagine some kind of symphonic choir singing the beauty of this world. And, then, Job, you know what happened? William Blake entered my mind. I will have to tell you about that in our next talk.