"And these are but the outer fringe of his works; how faint the whisper we hear of him!" (Job 26:14)
Job responds to Bildad with biting irony: how you have helped the powerless! How you have saved the arm that is feeble! What advice you have offered to one without wisdom! He then launches into a magnificent doxology of divine power that exceeds anything the friends have said: the dead are in deep anguish below; Death is naked before God; he suspends the earth over nothing; he wraps up the waters in his clouds; he marks out the horizon on the face of the waters for a boundary between light and darkness. By his power he churned up the sea. By his breath the skies became fair. And these are but the outer fringe of his works; how faint the whisper we hear of him! Who then can understand the thunder of his power?
The Catechism identifies Job's declaration that the visible creation is only the outer fringe of God's works as the poetic expression of divine transcendence: all that we can see and know of God is the merest edge of what he is (CCC 300).
Brothers and sisters, how faint the whisper we hear of him. The cosmos that staggers human comprehension is only the outer fringe of God's works. The God you worship is incomprehensibly greater than the largest description your theology can produce. Stand in awe before the fringe. What must the fullness be?
Lord God, the outer fringe of your works fills us with awe. We worship what we cannot yet fully see. Through Christ our Lord. Amen.