The Terrible Voice of God Text: Job 37:1-5
Introduction: The Audacity of the Creature
We come now to the final words of Elihu, the young man who appears on the scene after Job’s three friends have exhausted their tidy, inadequate syllogisms. For many chapters, we have been listening to a debate conducted on the floor of a cosmic courtroom, but with the wrong man in the dock. Job has been defending himself, and his friends have been prosecuting him, all while assuming they understand the rules of the court. They have been trying to fit God into their theological boxes, to make His providence behave according to their neat and tidy ledgers of sin and consequence. Job, in his agony, has demanded that God Himself appear and give an account. The friends, in their piety, have insisted that the account is already settled: Job must have sinned.
Into this stalemate, Elihu speaks. And his purpose is not to offer a fourth variation of the same tired prosperity gospel logic. His purpose is to change the venue. The debate is not about Job’s righteousness or his hidden sin. The debate is about God’s majesty. Elihu’s task is to prepare the court for the arrival of the Judge. He does this by directing everyone’s attention away from the ash heap and up to the storm clouds. He is, in effect, the bailiff who cries, "All rise."
Our modern sensibilities are profoundly uncomfortable with this. We want a God who comes to us with therapeutic whispers, who validates our feelings, who submits His resume for our approval. We want a manageable God, a God who can be summoned to our therapy session to help us process our trauma. But the God of the Bible is not manageable. He is not safe. He is terrible in His majesty, and He speaks in the thunder. Elihu’s speech is a frontal assault on the central idol of our age, which is the autonomous self. It is a reminder that we are creatures, and the Creator is about to speak. And when He speaks, the proper response is not to cross-examine Him, but to tremble.
Elihu is not just talking about meteorology. He is doing theology. He is telling Job, and us, that the storm is not just a weather pattern; it is a sermon. The thunder is not random atmospheric noise; it is the very voice of God. And if we had ears to hear, we would understand that this voice is not an invitation to a dialogue between equals. It is the royal summons of the absolute Sovereign of the universe, and it is a summons that ought to make our hearts leap from their place.
The Text
"At this also my heart trembles, And leaps from its place. Listen closely to the thunder of His voice, And the rumbling that goes out from His mouth. Under the whole heaven He lets it loose, And His lightning to the ends of the earth. After it, a voice roars; He thunders with His majestic voice, And He does not restrain the lightnings when His voice is heard. God thunders with His voice marvelously, Doing great things which we do not know."
(Job 37:1-5 LSB)
The Fear of the Creature (v. 1)
Elihu begins with the only appropriate, sane response to the presence of the uncreated God.
"At this also my heart trembles, And leaps from its place." (Job 37:1)
The "this" he refers to is the gathering storm, the physical manifestation of the divine glory he has been describing. Elihu is not a detached, academic theologian. He is experiencing what he is describing. The majesty of God is not an abstract concept for him; it is a visceral, physical reality. His heart pounds in his chest, not with a medical condition, but with a theological one. This is the fear of the Lord.
This is the response that our generation has utterly lost. We have domesticated God. We have turned the consuming fire into a pilot light. We approach Him with a swagger and a list of demands, as though we are the ones who are to be impressed. But the uniform testimony of Scripture is that when a sinful man comes into the unfiltered presence of the holy God, he does not feel affirmed; he feels undone. Isaiah saw the Lord high and lifted up and cried, "Woe is me! For I am lost" (Isaiah 6:5). The disciples saw Jesus calm the storm and were "filled with great fear" (Mark 4:41). John saw the risen Christ and "fell at his feet as though dead" (Revelation 1:17).
Elihu’s trembling heart is the sign of a man who still understands the Creator/creature distinction. There is God, and there is everything else. And the distance between the two is infinite. When God draws near, the creature trembles. This is not the cowering of a slave before a tyrant; it is the awe-struck reverence of a finite being before an infinite one. It is the beginning of wisdom. If your theology does not make your heart tremble, you have a theology of a god you made in your own image.
The Voice in the Storm (v. 2-3)
Next, Elihu commands Job and his friends to stop talking and start listening. The sermon is about to begin.
"Listen closely to the thunder of His voice, And the rumbling that goes out from His mouth. Under the whole heaven He lets it loose, And His lightning to the ends of the earth." (Job 37:2-3 LSB)
Notice the direct equation: the thunder is His voice. The rumbling is what comes from His mouth. This is not poetry in the sentimental sense. This is natural revelation at its most raw and potent. God is not silent. The heavens declare His glory, and they do so with articulate power. The whole creation is a theater of God's glory, and a thunderstorm is a command performance.
The modern secularist hears thunder and thinks only of atmospheric pressure and electrical discharge. He has a purely mechanistic explanation. But this is the height of foolishness. It is like looking at a Rembrandt and speaking only of canvas and hydrocarbon chains. The scientific explanation tells you the "how" of the medium, but it cannot tell you the "what" or the "who" of the message. Elihu hears the thunder and knows he is being addressed. He knows that this is personal. This is the voice of a Person.
And this voice is universal. "Under the whole heaven He lets it loose." His lightning goes "to the ends of the earth." No one is outside the jurisdiction of this voice. No one can claim ignorance. Paul tells us in Romans that God's eternal power and divine nature are "clearly perceived" in the things that have been made, so that men are "without excuse" (Romans 1:20). The thunder of God’s voice is the universal summons to repentance and worship. It is the background music of all human history, reminding every man, everywhere, that he is a creature living in a world owned and operated by a majestic and powerful Creator.
Majesty and Power (v. 4)
The description continues, layering the auditory and the visual to convey the sheer force of this divine speech.
"After it, a voice roars; He thunders with His majestic voice, And He does not restrain the lightnings when His voice is heard." (Job 37:4 LSB)
The lightning flash is followed by the roar of thunder. The sequence is important. First the brilliant, silent flash of raw power, and then the audible report of majesty. God's actions and His words are seamlessly integrated. What He does (the lightning) is inseparable from what He says (the thunder). His power is an articulate power. His Word is a powerful Word.
He "thunders with His majestic voice." The Hebrew word for majestic is tied to the idea of loftiness, of exaltation. This is not the voice of a peer. This is the voice from on high, the voice of the King. When this voice is heard, He "does not restrain the lightnings." There is no holding back. God does not stutter. He does not moderate His power to make us more comfortable. He unleashes it. This is a picture of absolute sovereignty in action. He speaks, and unstoppable power is released. This is the same voice that said, "Let there be light," and there was light. It is the voice that upholds the universe by its very power (Hebrews 1:3).
This is what Job needed to hear. He had been so focused on his own case, his own suffering, his own integrity, that he had forgotten the sheer scale of the God with whom he was dealing. Elihu is recalibrating Job’s perspective. You have demanded an audience with God? Look up. He is granting your request. This is what His voice sounds like. Are you prepared to stand and make your case in the face of this?
Incomprehensible Greatness (v. 5)
Elihu concludes this section with a summary statement that drives home the central point: God is beyond our full comprehension.
"God thunders with His voice marvelously, Doing great things which we do not know." (Job 37:5 LSB)
The word "marvelously" points to that which is wonderful, distinct, and set apart. God's voice in the thunder is not just loud; it is miraculous. It is a wonder. It is a signpost pointing to His nature. And what does it tell us? That He is "doing great things which we do not know."
This is the final rebuke to the pretensions of both Job and his friends. The friends thought they knew exactly what God was doing. They had their tidy system, their cause-and-effect grid, and they tried to cram God into it. Job, in his pain, demanded to know what God was doing, assuming that if God would just explain it, it would make sense to him. Elihu says that both positions are arrogant. God is doing great things, magnificent things, far beyond the horizon of our understanding. His purposes are vaster than our ability to track them.
This is not a call to irrationalism. It is a call to humility. We can know true things about God because He has revealed them in His Word and in His world. But we cannot know exhaustive things about God. He is always greater. His wisdom is unsearchable, and His ways are past finding out (Romans 11:33). The attempt to subject God to the limits of our own reason is the original sin of the Garden. Elihu is calling Job back to the sanity of creaturely humility. The thunder does not provide Job with an explanation for his suffering. It provides him with a revelation of his God. And that is a far better thing.
Conclusion: Hearing the Thunder Today
We do not live in the land of Uz, and we are not huddled in a literal thunderstorm with Job and his friends. But the voice of God still thunders. It thunders in the irreducible glory of creation that surrounds us, a glory that testifies to His power every moment of every day. But more than that, the voice of God has thundered in a climactic and definitive way.
The writer to the Hebrews tells us that "in these last days [God] has spoken to us by His Son" (Hebrews 1:2). Jesus Christ is the ultimate thunder of God. He is the Logos, the divine Word made flesh. In Him, the lightning of God’s raw power and the thunder of His majestic voice are perfectly united. On the cross, the sky grew dark, the earth trembled, and the wrath of God against sin was unleashed with a terrifying roar. The lightning of His holiness struck the Son, and in that moment, the voice of His justice was heard throughout the cosmos.
And on the third day, that same voice spoke again, not in a roar of judgment, but in the quiet, world-altering power of resurrection. He spoke a word of new creation, and death itself was undone. The voice that thunders marvelously in the storm is the same voice that calls the dead from the grave.
Therefore, the question for us is the same one Elihu put to Job: Are you listening? When you are confronted with the great and terrible things of this life, things you do not know and cannot comprehend, do you demand that God explain Himself to your satisfaction? Or do you fall silent and listen for the thunder of His majestic voice? Do you tremble before His sovereignty? For it is only when we are humbled by the thunder of His law and His power that we can truly hear the marvelous whisper of His grace in the gospel. The God who does great things we cannot know has done the greatest thing we could never deserve. He has spoken to us through His Son. Listen to Him.