Sermon 46, Job 12:7-16
The Bible often uses appeals to the natural world for various teaching reasons. Appeals to mountains and ocean depths to speak of God’s majesty, the weather to speak of God’s power, animals to speak of God’s wisdom, crops and plants to speak of God’s provision, disasters to speak of God’s justice and righteousness. The list goes on. The words are often very poetic or, sometimes, pithy. Today’s verses from Job contain an appeal to nature to say how obvious God’s providence is to us simply by observing the birds and fish.
I do love the natural world. I love going for walks. I love seeing animals, on the garden camera (see below) and at the zoo! I love monitoring the weather. All of these things bring my genuine joy.
A screen grab of an opossum in my backyard 1/13/2026, 7:13 pm.
I can’t always explain the joy. It is like a satisfaction which is independent of my doing. I’ve always been comforted in the knowledge that the world continues without my actions. I also don’t often know what it is that I learn from observing nature. But it does make me feel better.
Today, Calvin says “…the very animals show us what our responsibility is. They do what they are supposed to do better than we do what we are supposed to do, and as a consequence we are doubly condemned.” Calvin exhorts us to “learn to put greater effort into contemplating God’s works.”
And that’s probably enough for today’s sermon. I like that.
However, I’d be remiss if I didn’t record a couple more interesting things. One in particular actually that is to do with teaching and, especially, learning. Calvin (Job, actually) uses images of food to exhort us to be aural gourmets! I am watching my caloric intake right now and so I think about food more than I should. The point here is that I am very discerning with my tastes. I like this and I don’t like that, etc. My palate “makes judgements about foods, and I have no taste for God’s teaching.” Calvin’s point is that we should be as discerning with accepting teaching as we are with food choices. I like that he references our “hearing” here as a choice. We can choose what we listen to and don’t listen to.
Lastly, Calvin speaks on there being two wisdoms in God. There is that wisdom that is revealed to us, most obviously in scripture but also through the natural world. Then there is God’s secret wisdom “which surpasses all human understanding and which we cannot attain.” It is very interesting that this parallels Calvin’s earlier sermon on God’s two righteousnesses (not sure that’s a word). But there is the righteousness revealed in the law and then a higher righteousness which, even by fulfilling the law (which we can’t) we would still fall short of. Calvin seems two have two lists of God’s attributes, the knowable and the secret.