I was aimlessly scrolling Facebook and came across this post. It is by Farmer Girl, who I find to be an incredible blogger. She is a young dairy farmer in northern Washington state. This blog resonated with me a lot, so I thought I’d share it with you. Her link is at the bottom in case you wish to follow her.
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There is a line in the book of Job that sounds like poetic exaggeration until you realize it is not.
God asks Job:
“Have you entered into the springs of the sea, or walked in the recesses of the deep?” (Job 38:16, ESV)
For most of human history, that would have sounded like a riddle. The ocean was deep, dark, and unknowable. People barely survived on its surface. No one was strolling around the bottom checking for underground waterways.
So when Scripture talked about springs and pathways beneath the sea, it felt symbolic. Beautiful. Mysterious. Probably not literal.
Except…they are literal.
For most of history, we thought the ocean floor was just mud, rock, and the occasional shipwreck. Then, in the last century, with deep-sea submersibles, sonar mapping, and underwater robots, we started finding something unexpected.
Rivers.
Not just cracks. Not just vents. Actual flowing systems. Hydrothermal vents. Brine pools so dense and salty they move like rivers along the seafloor. Entire networks of water moving through the earth’s crust beneath the ocean, with currents, boundaries, and even ecosystems that thrive without sunlight.
There are places where the bottom of the ocean looks like it has streams running through it. Places where super-salty water forms underwater “lakes” with shorelines and waves, only they exist thousands of feet below the surface in total darkness.
And suddenly, Job’s question does not sound poetic anymore. It sounds observant.
God is not flexing with random trivia in Job. He is asking, “Have you seen the places I go that you cannot?” Not to shame Job, but to remind him that the world is far bigger and more intricate than what fits inside human understanding.
For thousands of years, people read those lines and assumed they were metaphor.
Now we have cameras and submersibles confirming something quietly humbling: there really are springs of the sea. There really are pathways in the deep. There really is an entire hidden world beneath the surface, moving and alive while humanity went about its business unaware.
Which is the point.
Just because we cannot see something does not mean it does not exist. Just because we have not discovered it yet does not mean God was being poetic. Sometimes He was simply early.
Job did not need the answers. He needed perspective. And so do we.
Because the same God who carved rivers under the ocean also holds the parts of our lives we do not understand yet. The unseen. The unexplored. The places we have not reached.
We are not standing in chaos. We are standing in a world that is deeper than we thought.
And apparently, even the ocean has plumbing.
