Job 37 in plain modern English. New Ground English Translation.

At that, my own heart shakes and jumps clean out of its place.

Listen — really listen — to the roar of his voice, to the growl coming out of his mouth.

He turns it loose under the whole sky, his lightning out to the corners of the earth.

Behind it a voice roars. He thunders in that magnificent voice, and he holds nothing back once it is heard.

God thunders in his voice and it is past belief. He does great things we cannot begin to know.

He says to the snow, "Fall on the earth," and to the shower, and to the hammering rain, "Come down hard."

He puts a seal on every human hand, so that everyone he made has to stop and look at his work.

The wild animals slip into cover and stay put in their dens.

Out of its chamber comes the storm, and the cold out of the driving winds.

The breath of God hands over the ice, and the wide water goes hard as metal.

He loads the thunderhead with water and scatters his lightning through the cloud.

They wheel around wherever he steers them, doing whatever he orders them to do across the face of the whole inhabited world.

He brings it for a beating, or for his own land, or because he loves someone — and it lands.

Listen to this, Job. Stand still. Think hard about the things God does that nobody can explain.

Do you know how God gives them their orders, how he makes the light flash out of his cloud?

Do you know how the clouds hang balanced, the wonders of the one who is flawless in knowledge?

You, with your clothes sticking to you when the land goes still under the south wind —

can you hammer out the sky the way he does, hard as a mirror cast in bronze?

Tell us what we are supposed to say to him. We cannot lay our case out in order — it is too dark in here.

Should anyone tell him that I want to speak? Did a man ever ask to be swallowed alive?

And now nobody can look at the light — it is blinding up there — then a wind comes through and sweeps the sky clean.

Out of the north comes a gold glare. Around God there is a splendor that frightens you.

The Almighty — we cannot reach him. He is past us in strength. And justice, and doing right in full measure, he will never crush.

So people hold him in awe. He does not so much as glance at anyone who thinks himself wise.