It’s Professor Henry Higgins in the film “My Fair Lady” who declares, while schooling Eliza Doolittle in the art of elocution, that “ln Hertford, Hereford and Hampshire, hurricanes hardly ever happen”.

Well, that may have helped Eliza pronounce her aitches properly; but from a meteorological perspective, the two key words in this little ditty must be “hardly ever”. For although we rarely get extreme weather such as the tornadoes which wreak havoc across America’s Midwest each year, or the hurricanes which cause death and destruction in the Caribbean, or the terrible cyclone which has brought devastation in south India just this last week, we aren’t totally immune from it. Here’s an extract from the “Illustrated London News” of October 5^th, 1876:

“A tornado of almost unexampled intensity and destructiveness passed over the Isle of Wight and Hampshire on the morning of Thursday September 28. The storm, which appears to have come from a southerly direction, struck West Cowes at about seven in the morning, thence crossed the Solent in a north-easterly direction, and, striking the opposite coast near the entrance. of Southampton Water, passed up Hampshire between Titchfield and Portsmouth at least as far as Meonstoke, which is about sixteen miles to the north-east of Cowes.

“Its appearance on is described as that of an immense black cloud sweeping along the ground and giving out a low moaning sound which it was awful to hear. A gentleman in a small yacht, which fortunately was out of the course of the tornado, suddenly heard sounds very much resembling the noise caused by the escape of steam when at its highest pressure, and at the same the whole sky became clouded with articles of all forms and sizes which were carried through the air to a height of about 300 feet. The hotel was blown down and several houses lost their roofs, a pier belonging to Dr. Kernock was wholly demolished, and many of the watermen’s boats were sunk, being filled with bricks which had been blown through the air. It is stated that some bricks fell on board Lord Wilton’s steam yacht, the Palatine, which was moored half a mile from the shore. At Cowes alone the damage done, the work of only one short minute or two is estimated at from £10,000 to £12,000.

“The destructive character of the tornado was maintained in its course through Hampshire, where turnips and other crops were literally dragged out of the ground, fine oak trees uprooted, farms and homesteads damaged, a barn lifted up and instantly converted into a heap of ruins, and life lost. It made a clean sweep through a thick copse, clearing a path for itself 100 feet in width, in which the trees and underwood were all uprooted as if men had grubbed up everything. In some cases it is said that the corners of hayricks and cottages were cut off as if with a knife, and that iron pig-troughs were carried a distance of 300 to 400 yards, and gates lifted from their hinges and thrown into the adjacent fields”. This was clearly a dramatic and frightening weather event.

In last week’s service we were thinking about poor Job and the many calamities that had befallen him – so many that he wished he’d never been born. In particular we heard him crying out to God for help, only to discover that God seemed to have vanished. We recognised that this is quite a common experience; however I hope we were able to find some comfort in knowing that Jesus himself, when hanging in agony on the Cross, also felt completely abandoned by God. This suggests that he is able to identify with us and understand our pain and despair.

Well, that was Job 23. This week we’re in Job 38, and the scenario is totally different. For, after pages and pages of silence, God speaks. But he doesn’t speak, as we might have reasonably expected. in gentle words of compassion and love. No: he comes thundering in on a storm or, as the old King James Bible puts it, in a whirlwind. How God speaks and how Job hears, we aren’t told – although the authors of this book clearly don’t have a problem believing that this kind of communication can take place. But God does speak, in a way which is terrifying, puzzling, inconclusive and magnificent. And he keeps on speaking, with just one brief pause, for four whole chapters: God’s silence has become a flood.

For what takes place isn’t a conversation: Job hardly gets a word in edgeways. Nor does God even attempt to answer the questions that Job has been so desperately asking. What we actually have here is a long series of rhetorical questions in which God asks – in fact demands – Job to think about his almighty creative power which is so utterly beyond human comprehension. They are somewhat like the questions in that passage by Isaiah where God asks the people of Israel to contrast him with the puny little idols that they have made for themselves and so recognise his true greatness: “Have you not known? Have you not heard? The Lord is the everlasting God, the Creator of the ends of the earth. He does not faint or grow weary; his understanding is unsearchable”. The passage in Job is a glorious piece of poetry about God and the universe he created, almost unmatched in the Bible.

So how did Job feel during this verbal torrent? Was he wondering why God was speaking now after apparently ignoring him for so long? Was he angry and disappointed by God’s continued reluctance to answer his questions? Was he puzzled as to why God had launched into this lengthy diatribe in which he seemed to be saying, “How dare you, a snivelling little man, even think of questioning the way I, the almighty God, act? Do you have the faintest idea of who I am and what I can do?” Did Job end up feeling completely insignificant and battered into submission?

Perhaps he did. But I don’t think that God intended to crush Job. Perhaps what was happening was the inevitable outcome of a no-holds-barred meeting between a finite man and the infinite God: there can never be equality in such an encounter, and God had now unveiled and revealed his true nature. That doesn’t mean that he was uncaring or brutal, simply that he was functioning in a completely different realm to us humans. Job had to recognise the divine way of looking at all that happens and realise that God does not work to our agenda. He is far more than a genie who will come rushing to our aid whenever we rub his bottle – although that, I think, is how many Christians regard him.

For these final chapters of Job tell us that we so often misunderstand God. He is basically saying, “You think you know it all, but in fact you know nothing. You think you’ve worked out who I am, but in fact your minds can’t even begin to do that. For I am the Creator of the universe. The way I act is entirely up to me. I can make whatever decisions I want, without reference to anyone else”. And, speaking both to Job’s friends and to readers of the book, God says, “You can’t have the faintest idea of what’s happening to my servant Job”. It’s scathing, timely and majestic; a rebuff to anyone who dares to think that they’ve got God worked out or under control. For, although we can study the Bible and do theology until the cows come home, there is no way we can fully understand God. We must remember that, although he may often work in predictable ways and always in accord with his past promises, God is his own boss who doesn’t need to give account to anyone. He is inscrutable.

But this picture of God leaves us with a problem: it makes him out to be either an ineffable mystery or an abhorrent bully – and we don’t want either! One person has made an interesting comment on one word that comes in the very first sentence: “Then the Lord answered Job”.  No, it’s not the word “answered” that he’s thinking about, but the word “Lord”. For this is the ancient and classic name of God, “Yahweh” (or “Jehovah”), the name that God uses when he enters into covenants with people, the name that identifies him as the God who takes them by the hand in order to lead them to blessing beyond imagination. And it’s a name that has hardly been heard since chapters 1 and 2 as, during his prolonged suffering and his exhausting debates, Job has simply called God “he” or “the Almighty” or “my judge” or “God” – which isn’t surprising because, when we suffer, God does feel more distant and our relationship with him becomes blurred. But now God has reappeared at this personal level: he speaks to Job as Yahweh, the God whose love will never let him go.

Well, that’s a comfort. But we are only slightly nearer to finding a full answer to the mystery of human suffering; and Job still hasn’t found a way out of his troubles, although he has definitely made a start. But we, with the benefit of hindsight, are possibly closer to getting some answers because we know – as the Old Testament writers did not – about Jesus, who shows us both God’s glory and his care for humanity. John, in a well-known verse we often hear at Christmas, tells us that “No-one has ever seen God”. But he doesn’t stop there; he goes on: “But the only Son, he has made him known”. In Jesus we see God sharing and suffering with the human race, both in his ministry and, supremely, on the Cross. And in him we can see both God’s love and his power, revealed not just in miracles but also in the Resurrection, the ultimate victory over death and despair.

These are aspects of God that Job could never know: to him, God was almighty and remote, and little more. But we have a fuller and richer picture of him which may help us in our times of trial. Yes, we may feel forgotten; yes, we may question God’s motives; yes, our knowledge of him will be inadequate. But we shouldn’t doubt that he can answer us out of the whirlwind, that he really does know and understand.