Tag: The Ostrich

Scripture: Job 39:13-18

Video Link: https://youtu.be/HXhf3YyM0-o

Structure:

• Introduction
• Job
• Yahweh
• The ostrich
• Conclusion

Introduction:

Good morning everyone.

When we hear the proverbial saying, “Don’t bury your head in the sand”, most of us probably think of what? [Wait] That’s right, we think of the ostrich.

While ostriches are a bit comical to look at, they don’t bury their head in the sand, in order to avoid their problems, as is commonly thought. That is a myth.

It would be more accurate to say ostriches bury their eggs in the sand because it is warm there. They then poke their head into the sand occasionally to rotate the eggs.

Last week we began a new sermon series on Birds of the Bible by looking at the dove. Today we consider the ostrich. The ostrich is the largest living bird. An adult male may stand eight feet tall and weigh 300 pounds. Male ostriches typically have black feathers with a white trim, while the females have brown feathers.

The main Biblical passage in which the ostrich features is Job 39. From Job chapter 39, verse 13 we read…

¹³ “The wings of the ostrich flap joyfully, though they cannot compare with the wings and feathers of the stork. ¹⁴ She lays her eggs on the ground and lets them warm in the sand, ¹⁵ unmindful that a foot may crush them, that some wild animal may trample them. ¹⁶ She treats her young harshly, as if they were not hers; she cares not that her labour was in vain. ¹⁷ It was I who made her foolish and did not give her wisdom. ¹⁸ Yet when she spreads her feathers to run, she laughs at horse and rider.

May the Spirit of Jesus illuminate God’s word for us.

Job:

To be able to understand these verses, we need to know the context. The book of Job deals with the problem of suffering and the verses we just read are part of Yahweh’s first speech to Job, found near the end of the story.

But let us start at the beginning. Job was a blameless and upright man who feared God and shunned evil. Job was also very wealthy. God allowed Satan to test Job. Satan began by destroying Job’s business and robbing him of his great wealth. Then Satan arranged for all of Job’s children to be killed in a storm, before afflicting Job himself with sores all over his body. 

Despite losing his farm, his family and his health, Job refused to charge God with wrong doing. He continued to worship God saying: Naked I came from my mother’s womb and naked I will depart. The Lord gave and the Lord has taken away; blessed be the name of the Lord.

To add to Job’s woes, the very people one would expect to provide some comfort and support (his wife and best friends) only made matters worse. Not only did they show a lack of understanding and empathy, they actually blamed Job for his misfortune. Job was alone in his marriage and alone in his community. Job, the righteous & lonely sufferer, reminds us of Jesus.

Despite all of this though, Job did not sin in what he said. Job held onto his integrity. And it was integrity that required Job to ask God for a fair hearing. Eventually, Yahweh spoke to Job out of the storm.

Yahweh:

We might have expected God to comfort Job with a few gentle words of explanation but God does not do this. God offers Job no answers and instead responds forcefully with an avalanche of his own questions for Job.  

The strength of Yahweh’s approach shows Job that God is robust enough to handle his pain and his rage.  

At first glance God’s questions might seem unfair. They were hardly the sort of questions that Job could give a sensible answer to. But really Yahweh is doing Job a kindness. God has listened patiently to Job (at length). Now it is time for some medicine.

When you are in as much pain as Job was in, it distorts your perspective. Your world becomes quite small and you can feel trapped or cornered, like you have no options. In that frame of mind, you become defensive and entrenched in your own narrow point of view. What Job needs is a change of perspective.

One recommendation for promoting good mental health, is spending time in nature. Taking a walk in the bush or the mountains or by the sea, opens your mind to a new perspective, helping you to see your options more clearly.

By asking Job a series of questions about creation and the natural world, God is giving Job a new perspective. The Lord is helping Job to shift the focus off himself and he is dismantling Job’s defences.

God’s questions are a strategy for pulling down the wall that Job has built around himself, a wall that Job felt he had to build because his wife and his friends were so hostile to him. But also a wall that isolates Job and prevents him from experiencing the kind of closeness and understanding that could heal him.

Towards the end of chapter 38 and the beginning of chapter 39, Yahweh questions Job about a variety of animals. For example…

The lions and ravens which God feeds.

Mountain goats which breed and survive without the help of people.

Wild donkeys and wild oxen which roam free and do not need humankind.

As well as the hawk & eagle that make their home where no man can go. 

All of these animals are wild and independent of man. All of them are dangerous and all of them are free, especially free from fear. Is Yahweh trying to show Job that he does not need to be afraid?

Certainly Yahweh is sovereign. He is Lord and King over all things, including the animals, both domesticated and wild. This means, no part of the world lies outside God’s rule. No hostile, dangerous force exists beyond his authority.

Not that God micro-manages everything. Rather he allows and supports freedom within certain limits. All that happens, including Job’s suffering (and ours) takes place within God’s wise governance.

I don’t believe God goes out of his way to cause suffering. Rather he is in control of it. This means God allows suffering to happen but he keeps a leash on it. More than that, God uses suffering to serve his purpose. If God is the surgeon, then suffering is his scalpel. 

That is cold comfort when you are going through tough times. When we are in pain, we just want the pain to stop. And even after the pain has subsided, we may still wonder why we had to go through it in the first place.

Nowhere, in Scripture, does God promise to give us an explanation. We are not entitled. Like Job, we may never understand why in this life.

What God does promise is to never leave us or forsake us. Jesus chose the nails. Christ walks with us and tells us to pick up our cross and follow him. If we share in his suffering, we will share in his glory. That much is promised.       

The Ostrich:

Included in the list of wild animals, in Job 39, is the ostrich. The female ostrich gets six verses. That’s more than the lioness and the hawk. Verse 13 reads…

The wings of the ostrich flap joyfully, though they cannot compare with the wings and feathers of the stork. 

Perhaps we are meant to see some ironic humour in the ostrich here. The ostrich cannot fly, no matter how much it flaps its wings. Surely the irony is not lost on Job who has had his wings clipped. Job cannot understand his suffering (much less God’s ways) no matter how hard he tries.

Like the ostrich, we human beings need to keep our feet on the ground. We need to humbly accept our limits. The lesson of accepting our limits and embracing the way God has made us is a difficult one. But if we can’t accept ourselves as we are, then we set ourselves up for a great deal of anguish.

Notice that it says ‘the wings of the ostrich flap joyfully’. The ostrich is not frustrated that it cannot fly. The ostrich simply enjoys what she has been given. 

Let’s say you wanted to be a professional sports person but you were not born with the coordination or the genes to reach the heights you dreamed of. For years you train and practice and diet and strive but no matter how hard you flap your wings, you just can’t fly.

Eventually you realise, I can’t achieve what I want to achieve because I’m simply not made that way. And so you are faced with an existential crisis. Who am I? What is the point of my life? Why did I waste all that time?

Well, if you had fun and made friends it wasn’t a waste of time. Who cares if you don’t make it as a professional sports person. If you like sports, play at the level you enjoy. Play socially. Become a coach or a ref.

The ostrich does not try to be an eagle. The ostrich joyfully accepts that it is an ostrich. We save ourselves a lot of grief when are able to accept ourselves the way God made us.

From verse 14, we are given a description of how a female ostrich behaves with her young…

¹⁴ She lays her eggs on the ground and lets them warm in the sand, ¹⁵ unmindful that a foot may crush them, that some wild animal may trample them. ¹⁶ She treats her young harshly, as if they were not hers; she cares not that her labour was in vain. ¹⁷ It was I who made her foolish and did not give her wisdom.

These verses paint a rather unflattering portrait of the ostrich hen. They blend comedy with tragedy. Apparently, ostriches don’t make great mothers.

It’s interesting that God draws attention to the weakness or deficiency of the ostrich. More than that, God takes responsibility for it. Yahweh says, the ostrich is foolish because I made her that way.

The point seems to be that God has made things good, but not perfect. Imperfection and weakness (foolishness even) is part of the plan; it is built into the very fabric of creation. 

This is important to understand. It means we cannot expect everything in this world to function perfectly all the time. Sometimes things will go wrong. Sometimes your body will turn on itself and create cancer cells or produce too much cholesterol or fail to produce enough insulin or something else. 

The verse about the ostrich leaving her eggs on the ground introduces the idea of chance and randomness. Sometimes the ostrich’s eggs will be trampled on, other times they will be okay.

Now obviously, if God had made the ostrich with the good sense and skill to build her nest in a tree, the chance of the eggs being crushed would be greatly reduced. But that is not how God made the ostrich.

The analogue to this is that sometimes suffering is the direct result of the choices we make and other times it is random, just bad luck. More often though it is a combination of choice and chance.

We can make wise choices that mitigate risk and reduce the likelihood of suffering. But we cannot eliminate the possibility of suffering altogether because we cannot control everything.

If you drink and drive, you greatly increase the chance of causing suffering. But drinking and driving does not guarantee suffering. Sometimes you will get lucky and make it home without incident. By the same token, even when you drive sober, there is always the possibility of someone else running a red light and smashing into you. 

I know that Christians (generally speaking) don’t like the idea of luck. Many believers prefer to think that God is controlling every little detail of their life. That sort of belief is fine so long as nothing bad happens. But the moment things go wrong, your faith is turned inside out. Why has God done this to me?

Well, just because something bad happens to you, it does not automatically follow that God wanted it to happen. Yes, God is in control of the outcome and yes he could (if he so desired) micro-manage everything, but most of the time he chooses not to.

God allows room for his creatures to make mistakes. Even though Satan was wrong, God still allowed Satan to mess with Job’s life. Even though Job’s friends were wrong, God still allowed them to falsely accuse Job. The Lord works with the choices his creatures make.

Did God want Job to suffer? No! Of course not. God is not cruel. But suffering is what you get when you allow mistakes. The Lord allows imperfection (within certain limits) and that’s where chance comes in.     

Job’s friends kept insisting that Job was suffering because of bad choices Job had made in the past. They would not entertain the possibility of chance. But God does not agree with Job’s friends. Nowhere in his speech does the Lord convict Job of wrong doing. Yahweh vindicates Job.

Suffering does not submit to man’s moral calculus. Correlation does not prove causation. Just because you are suffering it does not automatically follow that God is punishing you. There is a certain mystery surrounding suffering.

God’s portrait of the ostrich indicates that the world is not perfect, so there is an element of risk and misfortune for all God’s creatures in this world. 

In many ways, Job is very different from the ostrich. Job was wise and consistently made choices which reduced the risk of suffering. Job cared deeply for his children and did everything in his power to look after them. Nevertheless, despite his diligence and care, Job’s children were still killed in a storm.

The book of Job teaches us that it is foolish to rely on luck. At the same time, Job also teaches us that God allows a certain amount of randomness in the universe. Sometimes there is nothing we can do. But even if we do suffer bad luck in this world, God is still in control of the outcome. This world is not all there is. God makes things right in the end, for the Lord is just and merciful.

(As Lance Corporal Jones likes to say, “Don’t panic Mr Mannering”.)

We human beings cause ourselves quite a bit of unnecessary suffering through worry and anxiety about the future. The ostrich does not suffer from worry though. Verse 15 says the ostrich is unmindful that some wild animal might trample her eggs.

Being a parent is terrifying really and it only gets harder the older your children get. When they grow up and leave home, your kids make their own decisions and you can’t protect them in the same way you could when they were young. To be a parent is to be vulnerable.

The temptation, when you’ve been through a traumatic experience (or three) is to imagine the worse. What if someone knocks them off their bike? What if they don’t make any friends? What if they forget to take their inhaler? What if they meet the wrong guy or the wrong girl? What if someone slips a pill into their drink? What if? What if?

Parenting is not easy. It’s an act of faith. As difficult as it is, we need to try and find the middle ground between the two extremes of helicopter parenting on the one hand and ostrich parenting on the other.

While we don’t want to neglect our children or be careless with them, we also don’t want to overthink things. The ostrich reminds us not to overthink it.

Oh for the wisdom to know when to intervene and when to stand back and let our kids figure it out for themselves. 

That being said, it seems a little unfair to laugh at the ostrich for the way it takes care of its young. It’s not the ostrich’s fault that God did not endow her with good sense. Quite apart from that, ostriches are hardly equipped to build their nest in trees or rocky crags, like other birds.

Perhaps this is one of the reasons ostriches are included in God’s speech to Job. For while Job’s parenting style is the opposite of the ostrich, he does share some things in common with this bird.

Through his misfortune Job was misunderstood. He became a sad joke, an object of ridicule, much like the ostrich is misunderstood and is often the object of ridicule. In this way at least, I imagine Job felt like an ostrich. Ostracised.

I said before that God made the world good but not perfect. Weakness is built into creation. That is true but it is not the whole truth. God also gives strength and special abilities.

The ostrich has a significant advantage. It can maintain a speed of up to 50 miles per hour for some distance and therefore can outrun most horses.

Contrary to popular belief, the male ostrich does not bury his head in the sand when trouble comes. Rather he starts running to try and draw the predator into a chase, away from his family. The ostrich knows the predator is unlikely to keep pace. So, while the ostrich may not be the smartest animal, he is fast and he does have some sense, which he uses to protect his family.   

God gives every creature a way to survive and excel. What is your strength? And how are you using the strengths God has given you?

Conclusion:

To recap then. As unlikely as it seems, the ostrich helps us when we suffer. 

The ostrich reminds us to joyfully accept ourselves as God made us.

The ostrich reminds us that this world is not perfect. God allows mistakes and therefore an element of randomness, so we cannot expect to go through life without some suffering.

The ostrich reminds us not to overthink it. Try and find the middle ground between worrying too much and being careless.

The ostrich also reminds us that we all have God given strengths and we should exercise our strengths for good.

One final thing the ostrich teaches us. Don’t take yourself too seriously. Try and keep your sense of humour.

In the end, the Lord restored Job. That is our hope too. In and through Christ, God is restoring his creation. He is making all things new.

May God give each of us the grace and courage we need to keep our feet on the ground and face life without fear. Amen.

Questions for discussion or reflection:

What stands out for you in reading this Scripture and/or in listening to the sermon? Why do you think this stood out to you?

• How do you feel when you think of Job’s story? What does Job’s story put you in touch with?

• Why does God speak to Job out of a storm? Why does God ask Job a whole raft of questions about creation?

• Discuss / reflect on the things Yahweh says about the ostrich in his speech to Job (39:13-18). How do these words about the ostrich help us when we suffer? 

• What are your weaknesses? What are your strengths? How are you using the strengths God has given you? 

• If you have children, where would you place yourself on the spectrum between helicopter parent and ostrich parent? Why? Does anything need to change?

• Why is it important to accept that creation is good but not perfect?

Outtakes

The idea that ostriches neglect their young comes up again in Lamentations 4, which reads: Even jackals offer the breast, they nurse their young; But the daughter of my people has become cruel like ostriches in the wilderness.

There is no comedy in this verse, only tragedy. Lamentations recalls the siege of Jerusalem in 587 BC. This siege (like all war) affected the young in particular. During the siege, children received worse treatment than ostrich chicks. Because of a shortage of food, nursing mothers could not feed their babies.