Garment of the Earth

The earth takes shape like clay under a seal; its features stand out like those of a garment... Job 38:12

The only garment I expected to find in Job is sackcloth...for sadness and infection and all things awful. But in this chapter there are 2 references to garments, and they are quite different from one another.

Richly decorated clothing, pleated and folded, jeweled and woven with colors, that is what God says the earth is like. What we see is a beautiful green and watery covering over dirt and rock and ore and magnum. We see a garment over a rocky ball, decorated with colorful flowers, majestic mountains, ribbons of waterways and rivlets, and skies of blue, rainbows, and sunrises and sunsets. Just as the body is just skin stretched over bone and muscle, covered with beautiful garments of color and texture, so is the earth we live on.

God could have made it the primordial soup that the fool believes sprung forth life, but He chose to create land, vegetation, flora, and geography that can boggle the mind in places in this world. Pictures and descriptions of New Zealand, for example, show the creativity of God, from mountain formations and open beaches to deserts and lowlands of grazing sheep. The earth shows forth the weaving of God's hand across the planet we call home.

The clay under the seal of God's thumbprint leaves the mark of His touch. He is not flat and boring and easily understood...He is complex and awesome, unknowable in human terms, but beautiful and awesome to behold. The earth has no choice but to exhibit His glory, with every flash of lightening to the structure of a leaf. Like a garment, He chose the colors and fibers to create every garment covering the earth.

Whenever I consider the existence of God, when Satan tries to put the bug in my ear that God lied in scripture of how He created this world, I think of a leaf. The very thought that it would grow up in the air on a branch, hanging on by pectin and a slender stem. The veins taper out, providing nourishment and water to every cell in the thing. Chlorophyll making green food, and the leaves nourish the rest of the tree, and helping the whole system make fruit. These little factories multiplied by the thousands on just one tree, multiplied by the billions over the face of the planet boggle the mind. Think of every cell in every leaf functioning properly on its own...under the direction of God's plan for leaves. Cells die and reproduce, and man can alter, but not create that which God has designed. The awe of one piece of a tree's garment is enough to make my mind see, like Job, that God's power and might is beyond knowing.

The earth does not question God's ways, it just dresses itself with Him and is content just to be what He called it to be. Like Job, if we are wise, we stand in silent awe of the garment of the earth, ever changing with the seal of God's will pressing down on it, making His mark on it that no one else can make.

He is worth of our worship, trust and honor.