Excerpt from The Book of Job

an essay by G.K. Chesterton in A Motley Wisdom: the best of G.K. Chesterton. (Chosen and introduced by Nigel Forde; Hodder and Stougthton 1995 p181)

All the human beings through the story, and Job especially, have been asking questions of God. A more trivial poet would have made God enter in some sense or other in order to answer the questions. By a touch truly to be called inspired when God enters it is to ask a number more questions on his own account….

This is the first thing to notice about the speech of God, which is the culmination of the inquiry. It represents all human sceptics routed by a higher scepticism…It is the root and reason of the fact that people who have religious faith have also philosophic doubt… In dealing with the arrogant asserter of doubt it is not the right method to tell him to stop doubting. It is rather the right method to tell him to go on doubting, to doubt a little more, to doubt every day newer and wilder things in the universe, until, at last, by some strange enlightenment, he may begin to doubt him/herself.

…The other great fact…is that other great surprise which makes Job suddenly satisfied with the mere presentation of something impenetrable. Verbally speaking the enigmas of Jehovah seem darker and more desolate than the enigmas of Job; yet Job was comfortless before the speech of Jehovah and is comforted after it. He has been told nothing, yet he feels the terrible and tingling atmosphere of something which is too good to be told. The refusal of God to explain his design is itself a burning hint of His design. The riddles of God are more satisfying than the solutions of people.

Job puts forward a note of interrogation; God answers with a note of exclamation. Instead of proving to Job that it is an explicable world, He insists that it is a much stranger world than Job ever thought it was…The poet has….contrived to let fall here and there in metaphors , in the parenthetical imagery, sudden and splendid suggestions that the secret of God is a bright and not a sad one….