In Job, chapter thirty-nine, verse one, God continued to interrogate Job with questions he could not answer. By doing so, God showed that his desire to debate God was foolish. The servant of God was humbled and silenced yet reassured of the most important thing: God had not abandoned him. The Lord was there face to face.
God inquires of Job concerning several animals. The Lord continued to humble Job with several animals spoken of, whose nature or situation shows power, wisdom, and manifold works: The wild ass. It is better to labor and be good for something than to ramble and be good for nothing.
From the untameableness of this and other creatures, we may see how unfit we are to give law to Providence, who cannot give law even to a wild ass’s colt. The unicorn is a strong, stately, proud creature. He can serve but is unwilling, and God challenges Job to force him to do it. It is a great mercy if, where God gives strength for service, he pours a heart; it is what we should pray for and reason ourselves into, which the brutes cannot do. Those gifts are not always the most valuable that make the finest show. Who would not rather have the voice of the nightingale than the tail of the peacock? The eye of the eagle and her soaring wing, and the natural affection of the stork, than the beautiful feathers of the ostrich, which can never rise above the earth and is without natural affection?
The description of the war-horse helps to explain the character of presumptuous sinners. Every one turneth to his course as the horse rushes into the battle. When a man’s heart is fully set in him to do evil, and he is carried on in a wicked way by the violence of his appetites and passions, there is no making him fear the wrath of God and the fatal consequences of sin. Secure sinners think themselves as safe in their sins as the eagle in her nest on high, in the clefts of the rocks; but I will bring thee down from thence, saith the Lord, as in Jeremiah forty-ine, verse sixteen. All these beautiful references to the works of nature should teach us the view of the riches of the wisdom of Him who made and sustains all things. The want of proper views concerning the knowledge of God, which is ever present in all things, led Job to think and speak unworthily of Providence.