Day 77 — Wonder and Wordlessness
God's Questions Continue—and Job Puts His Hand Over His Mouth
However you can engage today, we’re here. Read, listen or both.
The written portion gives an overview, with verses broken down into smaller bites, and journaling/prayer prompts for reflection. In the podcast, Steve Traylor reflects on today’s passage with Scripture reading, a deeper pastoral teaching, and prayer (about 15 minutes). Perfect for morning coffee, commutes, or when your eyes need a rest.
📖 Resources: Printable Genesis Guide · Through the Wilderness: A Lenten Prayer Guide · Hard Questions, Honest Answers · Genesis-Job: Two Stories—One Foundation · What Job Teaches Us about How to Be a Good Friend
Job 39:1–40:5
Step into this day knowing you’re about to witness something remarkable.
God has been speaking from the whirlwind—not with answers, but with questions. Yesterday He asked Job about the cosmos: the foundations of the earth, the Pleiades and Orion, the gates of death, the dawn. Today He continues. But now He turns from the inanimate to the animate. From the architecture of the universe to the wild creatures who roam it.
Mountain goats birthing alone in rocky heights. Wild donkeys scorning the driver’s shout. War horses surging toward battle. Hawks riding thermals south with precision no human designed.
God made all of this. God sustains all of this. And God is asking Job: Did you?
Then comes the moment we’ve been waiting for through thirty-eight chapters of speeches and silence. Job lays his hand over his mouth. Not because he’s defeated. Not because God broke him. But because something larger than his suffering has finally entered his field of vision.
Today we see: the God who governs every wild creature—watching mountain goats labor, directing hawks’ migration, giving the war horse his fearlessness—this same God has never taken His eye off Job. Or you.
1. The Wild Ones God Watches Over
Job 39:1–18
“Do you know the time when the mountain goats give birth?
Do you watch when the doe bears fawns?
2 Can you count the months that they fulfill?
Or do you know the time when they give birth?
3 They bow themselves. They bear their young.
They end their labor pains.
4 Their young ones become strong.
They grow up in the open field.
They go out, and don’t return again.5 “Who has set the wild donkey free?
Or who has loosened the bonds of the swift donkey,
6 whose home I have made the wilderness,
and the salt land his dwelling place?
7 He scorns the tumult of the city,
neither does he hear the shouting of the driver.
8 The range of the mountains is his pasture.
He searches after every green thing.9 “Will the wild ox be content to serve you?
Or will he stay by your feeding trough?
10 Can you hold the wild ox in the furrow with his harness?
Or will he till the valleys after you?
11 Will you trust him, because his strength is great?
Or will you leave to him your labor?
12 Will you confide in him, that he will bring home your seed,
and gather the grain of your threshing floor?13 “The wings of the ostrich wave proudly,
but are they the feathers and plumage of love?
14 For she leaves her eggs on the earth,
warms them in the dust,
15 and forgets that the foot may crush them,
or that the wild animal may trample them.
16 She deals harshly with her young ones, as if they were not hers.
Though her labor is in vain, she is without fear,
17 because God has deprived her of wisdom,
neither has he imparted to her understanding.
18 When she lifts up herself on high,
she scorns the horse and his rider.
Stop for a moment and let this land.
God is describing mountain goats giving birth alone in the rocky heights—watched by no shepherd, assisted by no hand—labor pains cresting and releasing in utter wilderness. He knows when. He watches when. No human eye sees it.
He is describing the wild donkey, built for freedom, contemptuous of the driver’s shout, living in the salt flats no one else wants. God made him that way—undomesticated, ungovernable, free. No person designed his wildness. No person sustains it.
He is describing the wild ox—enormous, fierce, impossible to harness—and asking Job: Did you put the power in those shoulders? Will he till your fields for you? Can you domesticate what I made wild?
This is a God who governs a vast world that has almost nothing to do with human preferences or plans.
And then comes the ostrich.
She lays her eggs in open dust. She forgets them. She walks away. By human standards—by the standards of a careful mother—this looks like failure, even cruelty. But God says: I made her that way. I gave her speed instead of wisdom. And when she lifts herself to run, she leaves the horse behind.
The point is not that the ostrich is broken. The point is that she was designed by Someone whose purposes transcend what we call sensible. She is fearless and fast and strange—and entirely God’s work.
What God is doing here is bigger than any single creature. He is showing Job—and us—that He governs an enormous, intricate, wildly diverse creation that operates on wisdom so far beyond human comprehension that we couldn’t even begin to catalog it, let alone manage it.
And we are part of this creation. Not observers of it from outside. Part of it.
Journaling/Prayer: Which of these creatures resonates most with you today? The mountain goat birthing in the heights, unseen and alone? The wild donkey who cannot be domesticated or controlled? The ostrich, strange and fearless, made for a purpose that doesn’t look sensible by human standards?
If you can’t pray much today, just sit with one of these animals for a moment. You are held by the same God who holds them—with just as much care and just as much intention.
If you can pray, say this: “God, You made things I can’t understand and sustain things I never think about. Help me trust that I, too, am under that same sovereign care—even when it doesn’t look the way I expect.”
2. The War Horse and the Soaring Hawk
Job 39:19–30
19 “Have you given the horse might?
Have you clothed his neck with a quivering mane?
20 Have you made him to leap as a locust?
The glory of his snorting is awesome.
21 He paws in the valley, and rejoices in his strength.
He goes out to meet the armed men.
22 He mocks at fear, and is not dismayed,
neither does he turn back from the sword.
23 The quiver rattles against him,
the flashing spear and the javelin.
24 He eats up the ground with fierceness and rage,
neither does he stand still at the sound of the trumpet.
25 As often as the trumpet sounds he snorts, ‘Aha!’
He smells the battle afar off,
the thunder of the captains, and the shouting.26 “Is it by your wisdom that the hawk soars,
and stretches her wings toward the south?
27 Is it at your command that the eagle mounts up,
and makes his nest on high?
28 On the cliff he dwells and makes his home,
on the point of the cliff and the stronghold.
29 From there he spies out the prey.
His eyes see it afar off.
30 His young ones also suck up blood.
Where the slain are, there he is.”
Now the register shifts—from wild and strange to fierce and magnificent.
The war horse. God is describing a creature that does not fear weapons. That mocks the sword. That hears the trumpet and surges forward. And Scripture records his response with a single, untranslatable snort of eagerness: “Aha!”
No human manufactured this. The terror and the courage and the surging delight of the war horse—God put that there. Who gave the horse his fearlessness? Who made him love the sound of battle?
No one. God did.
And the hawk: Is it by your wisdom that the hawk soars? When the hawk spreads its wings and rides the thermal south for thousands of miles—is that your engineering? Did you design the instinct for migration, the aerodynamics of those wings, the eye that sees prey from heights no human can reach?
Is it at your command that the eagle makes its nest in the highest cliff, and from that height perceives prey invisible to human eyes?
The answer to every question is the same: No. This was Me.
Here is the pastoral weight of this passage: God is not listing these creatures to make Job feel small. He is saying something far more important—Look at what I sustain without your help. Look at the vastness of what I care for. Look at how fully I am involved in this world—in the fearlessness of the war horse, in the migration of every hawk, in the nesting of every eagle.
If God is this engaged with wild animals, how much more is He engaged with you?
Jesus would one day stand in the same tradition: “Are not two sparrows sold for a penny? And not one of them falls to the ground without your Father’s knowledge... You are of more value than many sparrows” (Matthew 10:29, 31).
Job does not yet know Jesus. But he is standing in the classroom that prepared the world for Him.
The God who watches the mountain goat labor alone in the wilderness, who made the war horse surge toward the trumpet, who directs the hawk’s migration without being asked—this God knows your name. He watches your nights. He is not absent from your wilderness.
Journaling/Prayer: When has something in the natural world—a bird in flight, an animal’s wildness, a storm, a night sky—briefly interrupted your pain and reminded you of something larger? What was that like?
Even if your suffering feels all-consuming right now, take sixty seconds to look at something alive outside your window, or recall something wild you’ve seen. Let it ask you: “Who made this?” And let the answer settle somewhere in your chest.
3. The Challenge—and the Silence
Job 40:1–5
40 Moreover Yahweh answered Job,
2 “Shall he who argues contend with the Almighty?
He who argues with God, let him answer it.”3 Then Job answered Yahweh,
4 “Behold, I am of small account. What will I answer you?
I lay my hand on my mouth.
5 I have spoken once, and I will not answer;
Yes, twice, but I will proceed no further.”
The great examination pauses.
God has walked Job through the architecture of creation. The cosmos. The ocean. The dawn. The weather. The Pleiades and Orion. The storehouses of snow. The mountain goat and the wild donkey and the war horse and the hawk.
And now He asks: “Shall he who contends with the Almighty instruct him? He who argues with God—let him answer.”
And Job—who has been so eloquent, so fierce, so relentless in his defense, who demanded an audience with God for chapter after chapter—
Job covers his mouth with his hand.
“I am of small account. What shall I answer you?”
Not a word more.
This is not defeat. Read it again carefully, because this matters for every broken person who has ever been honest with God about their suffering.
Job is not recanting his innocence. He never says: I was wrong to be honest. I should not have spoken. My suffering was my fault after all. None of that.
Job is not renouncing his lament. He’s not repenting of asking hard questions. He never apologizes for the raw cries that filled chapters 3 through 31.
This is not yet Job’s repentance—that comes later—but it is the beginning of humility. Humility born of encounter, not condemnation.
What Job is doing is far more profound: he is standing in the presence of something so much larger than himself that he no longer has the same need to be heard. He sought an audience with God. God gave him that audience—not with answers, but with Himself.
And Job’s words simply stop.
There’s a kind of silence that comes from being crushed. And there’s a kind of silence that comes from being expanded—from encountering something so vast and so beautiful and so overwhelming that words feel inadequate. This is the second kind.
The Hebrew word for “I am of small account” carries the meaning of being light, of being brief—not worthless, but small in scale compared to what he’s encountered. Job is not saying I am nothing. He is saying I have just seen how large You are, and I realize I was arguing with Someone I didn’t fully understand.
This is what happens to honest faith when it finally encounters God: it doesn’t become less honest. It becomes more humble. It doesn’t retract its pain. It puts its hand over its mouth—not because silence is required, but because some things are too large for more words.
Journaling/Prayer: Have you ever reached a moment in prayer where you simply ran out of words—not because God silenced you, but because you encountered something so much larger than your questions that the questions temporarily stopped mattering? What was that like?
If you haven’t experienced that, it’s not a sign of weak faith. Job needed thirty-eight chapters to get there. Most of us need a long time in the wilderness before we’re ready for the whirlwind.
If you’re still in the “demanding answers” stage—that’s where you are, and that’s allowed. God did not rebuke Job for his honest wrestling. He answered it.
If you can’t even speak to God today, maybe all you can do is lay your hand over your mouth, like Job, and let silence be its own kind of prayer.
Summary
God’s questions about the animal kingdom do something Job’s friends never could: they shift Job’s gaze from his suffering to the sovereign, present, wildly involved Creator who governs everything.
Job’s friends tried to explain his suffering. They mapped it onto tidy formulas: sin causes suffering; suffering proves sin. Their words multiplied, but never helped.
God does something entirely different. He doesn’t explain the suffering. He expands the frame.
From Job’s narrow field of vision—his ash heap, his losses, his unanswered prayers—God opens a window onto the vast, intricately governed, astonishingly cared-for world He sustains. The mountain goat in labor, alone in the rocky heights. The wild donkey scorning the driver’s shout. The war horse surging toward the trumpet. The hawk riding its thermal south with precision no human designed. The eagle nesting in the unreachable cliff, its young keen-eyed and fierce.
Not one of them exists without God’s attention.
And then God turns and asks: “Will the faultfinder instruct the Almighty?”
And Job—in one of the most significant moments in the entire book—has nothing left to say.
He is not defeated. He is not ashamed of his honest cries. He is simply standing in a presence so much larger than his questions that he has temporarily run out of things to say.
This is what honest faith looks like when it finally encounters God—not the tidy explanations Job longed for, but God Himself. Not answers, but awe.
And here is what this points forward to: the God of the war horse and the migrating hawk is the same God who became flesh in Jesus Christ. The One whose wisdom governs every creature’s migration also walked into death for us—and walked out. He knows the way the mountain goat labors unseen because He made her. He knows your sleepless nights because He sees everything. He knows your suffering because He entered it.
You are not outside His attention. You are not beyond His governance. You are more valuable than many sparrows—and He never takes His eye off the sparrow.
Action / Attitude for Today
Walk through today holding this truth: the God who watches every mountain goat labor and directs every hawk’s migration has never taken His eye off you.
Job could only see his ash heap—until God showed him the mountain goat, the war horse, the hawk. The suffering didn’t disappear. But Job’s field of vision grew large enough to hold a God worth trusting.
If all you can do today: Go outside for five minutes—or open a window. Find something alive. A bird. A tree moving in wind. The sky itself. Sit with it for a moment and ask: Who made this? Let the answer be simple: God did. Let that be enough.
If you can do more: Choose to let creation expand your frame. Read verses 19-25 again—the war horse passage—slowly. Let the sheer power and fearlessness described there stir something in you. This is the God you’re in conversation with.
Say this simple prayer: “God, I don’t understand my suffering. But I see what You made. I see Your power in creation. I choose to believe You see me the way You see the hawk and the mountain goat—with care, with intention, with sovereign attention. Help me trust You even when I can’t understand You.”
That’s enough.
Because the God who gave the war horse his fearless heart and watches the eagle’s nest on the cliff—He is watching you, counting your days, and sustaining you in the wilderness you didn’t choose. In Jesus, you are more valuable than many sparrows—and not one sparrow falls without your Father knowing (Matthew 10:29-31). The God who entered Job’s whirlwind also entered our world in Christ, walked into death for you, and walked out. He has not looked away.
The Bible for the Broken is published by Aurion Press LLC. © Aurion Press LLC. All rights reserved.