THE FIRST GOSPEL

   “Ask the animals, and they will teach you,
or the birds of the air, and they will tell you;
or speak to the earth, and it will teach you,
or let the fish of the sea inform you.
Which of all these does not know
that the hand of the Lord has done this?” (12:7-9)

How refreshing it is to see Job turning the discussion away, however briefly, from the claustrophobic abstractions of the last ten chapters and pointing vividly to the animals, the birds, the fish, the very earth itself as conspicuous and trustworthy beacons of wisdom. In its focus upon nature this passage contains a hint of the Lord’s own answer to Job at the end of the book. Could this be the reason why verse 9 contains the only example in the entire dialogue of the use of the Hebrew name “Yahweh”? Some commentators like to point to this as evidence of the verse’s doubtful authenticity, but is it not more satisfying to see in it a poetic foreshadowing of the theophany? When God finally speaks in Chapters 38—41, He does not advance any abstract arguments, nor does He make a single reference to any of the events of Old Testament history (no doubt for the simple reason that most of those events had not yet occurred). Instead the Lord’s entire appeal is to the wonders of nature, and the effect of this is to move the whole stuffy convoluted debate between Job and his friends outside, out into the fresh air of the real world.

Job’s speech in Chapter 12 holds a foretaste of this. His primary argument for the soundness of his theology is that it corresponds to the real world. Job’s faith encompasses all the strangeness and wildness of reality itself, while the faith of his friends does not. If you want to know the ways of the Lord, says Job, just look around you. You can theologize all you want, but if your theories do not mesh with the nature of things as they are, then what good are such theories? Even a dog has more knowledge of God than you do!

Sadly, this comment is all too true of the great majority of thinking and theorizing that people do about God. Often it does not even square with natural law, with the observable created order of things, let alone pierce through to the supernatural reality of the transcendent Creator. Even at its best, theology is like a jigsaw puzzle of the sky, in which human beings take all the available bits of evidence about sky and carefully piece them together into a complete picture. Yet somehow the picture is not complete: everyone’s picture turns out to be different, and all the pictures have pieces missing, and there are always a few extra pieces lying around that seem to have been left over from some other puzzle. Even a finished puzzle-picture of the sky would still have all the lines and cracks showing, and would be a far cry from the living reality that anyone can see simply by looking out the window.

Hence Paul writes, “Since the creation of the world God’s invisible qualities—his eternal power and divine nature—have been clearly seen, being understood from what has been made, so that men are without excuse” (Rom. 1:20). Nature, Paul implies, was God’s original word to man, His original revelation. It was only when people rejected this perfectly obvious and adequate display of His glory that the Lord was obliged to change tactics, so to speak, and to deal with sin through the special revelations of Scripture, and ultimately through the message of the cross. Nevertheless, nature still stands as His first and sufficient revelation, His first gospel. Mother nature is theology’s subconscious. She is our Father’s mother tongue.

This can be a difficult concept for Christians, among whom the revelatory role of the creation tends to be greatly undervalued. But while it is important that the Christian faith be book-centered, it is just as important that it not be bookish. What Job does in this passage is to urge his friends to get their noses out of their books, out of their scholarly religious treatises (for they probably had no Scripture as such), and to take a good look around them at the real world. As David wrote in Psalm 19:1, “The heavens declare the glory of God; the skies proclaim the work of his hands.”


Mason, M. (2002). The Gospel According to Job: An Honest Look at Pain and Doubt from the Life of One Who Lost Everything. Crossway.