The Home Page Network

Few people on earth have ever suffered like Job. Within a short span of time, he lost almost everything, including wealth, family, and even his health. Job, like many people grieving, wanted answers. The bulk of the book reads like grief, with Job’s friends presenting many answers – most of them not very good answers.

Finally, Job gets peace of mind, not from getting the answers to his questions, but from knowing who God is. “Where were you when I laid the foundation of the earth?” God said. After many similar questions, Job replies, “I lay me hand on my mouth. […] I know that you can do all things, and that no purpose of yours can be thwarted.” (Job 40:4; 42:1)

Job went on to live a happy and prosperous life, despite all the loss. The certainty of knowing that God is all wise allowed him to entrust to God the answers he did not know.

Another assurance of God’s infinite wisdom comes from H.G. Wells classic novel The War of the Worlds. To make the story short: Martians have invaded earth. Despite humanity’s greatest devices and efforts, it seems the Martian will inevitably win and ravage the earth. Then something unexpected happens. The bacteria on earth that the Martians had been eating and drinking begins to wreak havoc on their bodies, causing them to die. The narrator, seeing what happened, says, “Martians – dead! – slain by the purification and disease bacteria against which their systems were unprepared; […]; slain, after all man’s devices had failed, by the humblest things that God, in his wisdom, has put upon this earth.” Then the narrator lifts his hands to heaven and thanks God for the most unexpected victory that came from something God wrote into nature itself.

This pandemic seems to be another example as well. All our human efforts – the mitigation measures, the vaccines, and advances in treatment – have their place and have helped. However, ultimately, what will lead to a greater sense of normalcy is not our efforts but what God has built into the fundamental nature of a virus: the ability to genetically mutate, to mutate from a very virulent virus to something less severe.

I could give some great theo-historical explanation for why this pandemic happened, but no answer would suffice as the knowledge of God being all-wise. That is the advantage of the knowledge of God’s infinite wisdom. We can entrust what we do not know and may never know to his infinitely wise purposes, which defy the limits of the human mind to understand.