Job 26

In 1988, when I was 11 years old, my parents bought us an Apple IIGS computer for Christmas. My brother—who was then, and has always been, more technologically savvy than I—was especially excited. For months, he had been reading about the Apple IIGS, and he wanted one in the worst way. Let’s face it, in 1988, just the idea of having a personal computer in your home was rare, let alone one that had a state-of-the-art sound system and a color graphical user interface. Oooooh, aaaaaah.

The Apple brand has dominated the world of technology ever since. Steve Jobs, the co-founder of Apple, was a legend in the computer world, even since his death more than eight years ago now. After the Apple IIGS, he went on to design a whole line of Macintosh computers, the iPod, the iPhone, and the iPad. It would take an entire book to detail all the technological accomplishments he oversaw in his short lifetime. Simply put, Steve Jobs was a genius, and though the Apple company survives him, many would say the world of technology will never be the same without him.

Nobody would look at an iPod or an iPhone—with its intricately-designed functionality—and think that it appeared on the planet by chance, that it slowly pieced itself together over hundreds or thousands or millions of years. Yet many people think this very thought about things God has made—things that are so intricately-designed that we (in all our intelligence) can’t even come close to replicating them.

Job pointed out a number of these things in this chapter, and they struck me all over again in a new way. These days, Science would have us believe that none of what we observe in the universe is designed, yet the geniuses among us not only fail at replicating these things, sometimes they can’t even describe how or why they work as they do:

[God] spreads out the northern skies over empty space; he suspends the earth over nothing. (vs 7)

God stores water in clouds, but they don’t burst. (vs 8)

[God] makes the moon wax and wane, putting it through its phases. (vs 9)

[God] marks out the horizon on the face of the waters for a boundary between light and darkness. (vs 10)

And this only scratches the surface. Job says as much in verse 14: "These things are merely a whisper of God’s power at work. How little we would understand if this whisper ever turned into thunder!"

So, while we stand back and marvel at the technological geniuses like Steve Jobs, let's remember that all of his genius is but a drop in the ocean of God’s genius. When we design, when we imagine, when we create, we are utilizing the ingenuity of the One in whose image we were made. He is the true genius!