God Outside the Boxಮಾದರಿ

When God Breaks Our Expectations

By the time Job’s friend Elihu speaks these words in today’s passage, Job has exhausted himself trying to reconcile who he knows God to be with what he is experiencing. His suffering doesn’t match the easy categories his friends offer, nor does it fit his own understanding of divine justice.

Into this tension comes a reminder: God is not chained by our expectations.

Elihu declares that the Almighty is beyond our reach—exalted, just, and righteous. In other words, God is not small enough to be boxed into human assumptions.

Job expected that righteousness would equal blessing, yet his life became marked by loss. His friends expected that suffering could only mean sin, but they, too, were wrong.

God, in His wisdom, operates outside the neat equations we try to write. The algebra of our theology does not solve for “x” in all our circumstances. We may fill our chalkboards with letters, symbols, and even chapter and verse numbers, but we still fall short.

This may be unsettling for us as men who value control and predictability. We want life to follow patterns we can master: work hard, reap success; live rightly, avoid hardship.

And when those patterns break down, it can shake our sense of self and potentially our faith in God. But Job’s story shows us that when God breaks our expectations, He is not being unjust. He is being God—greater, higher, and more mysterious than our formulas can capture.

The challenge is whether we will trust Him when He doesn’t act as we assumed He would. Will we still worship when our categories collapse? Will we acknowledge His righteousness when our circumstances seem unfair? True faith does not rest on God behaving according to our rules, but on His unchanging character—perfect justice, unwavering righteousness, unstoppable and uncontainable power.

This admission forces us to accept that God is both knowable and beyond reach. We know enough of His justice to trust Him, but never enough to control Him.

For men, that means surrendering the illusion of mastery—not just over our lives, but over God Himself. It is humbling, but it is also freeing.

We don’t have to make God fit our expectations. We only have to learn to trust Him when He breaks them.

Prayer: God who cannot be chained, forgive me for the boxes I have built for You, even those that I think are large enough. Help me not to live in resignation of Your immensity, but in faithful service and trust in You. Amen.

Reflection: How might you have chained God in your own theology? Where do you need to admit that you have questioned God’s rightness?