The sum of our complaints is neatly captured in God’s challenge to Job: “Shall a faultfinder contend with the Almighty? He who argues with God, let him answer it.” Here then is what all our murmuring amounts to: not justified expressions of displeasure, but rank rebellion against the King of heaven; clay daring to find fault with the Potter. 

And the LORD said to Job: “Shall a faultfinder contend with the Almighty? He who argues with God, let him answer it.’”
Job 40:1-2

One antidote against a bitter, complaining spirit is to remember the very obvious truth that you are not God.

What you are is a creature made in the image of God. But He is the eternal Creator and sovereign ruler of all things in heaven and earth. To put things in focus, before you ever existed—before matter arranged itself by divine decree into an embryonic conglomerate of cells and tissues joined to an eternal soul—God was speaking worlds into existence. He was commanding the rise and fall of empires. He was fashioning such creatures as the hippo and crocodile, the common house fly and the Japanese murder hornet. He was setting the bounds of created reality, speaking stars and galaxies into existence that no human eye would ever see, and delighting in the divine joke that would one day be the ostrich.

All these God created and upholds by the power of His Word. But we’re upset that the light turned red. Or that the toothpaste is empty again. Or that the gas light is on and we’re already running late. To put not too fine a point on it, each day a veritable tsunami of blessing goes forth from the throne of the triune God, and each day a near ceaseless drone of nitpicking ascends in return. Like Israel grumbling in the wilderness, shockingly blind to God’s goodness and provision, so are we on a normal Tuesday afternoon. We really are stunningly audacious creatures.

The sum of our complaints, however, is neatly captured in God’s challenge to Job: “Shall a faultfinder contend with the Almighty? He who argues with God, let him answer it.” Here then is what all our murmuring amounts to: not justified expressions of displeasure, but rank rebellion against the King of heaven; clay daring to find fault with the Potter.

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