Well, Job asked for a “trial” to plead his case. More importantly, he just wanted to hear from God. He believed in God’s Sovereignty and knew if he could just hear from Him he would have Peace. So he finally gets to hear from God. However, I think in Job’s head this trial would have gone a little different. He thought he was going to plead his case. Instead, he is left speechless! ❤️
Chapter 38 and 39. The first verse alone is actually all that Job needed to hear.
Then the LORD spoke to Job out of the storm.
The LORD=Yahweh. Yahweh is the self-existent eternal God- “I AM”. He is completely whole within himself, and he is eternal – he has always existed, and he always will. He is the beginning and the end, the Alpha and the Omega.
Job has asked WHY (nothing wrong with that). He was looking for answers? (nothing wrong with that either) But He does not answer Job directly. Instead, He reminds him us WHO HE IS. We need to trust God for WHO He is, not for what he does.
God begins with over 60 rhetorical questions that cannot be answered by humans. Our view of God tells us a lot about our relationship with God.
God describes how he is the Creator of not just the earth, but the galaxy. He tells the oceans how far they can go in a tide, and where the light is to shine. He directs rain, snow, and hail for His purposes. Nature reports to Him ( v. 35). He grows crops and orchestrates the food chain/web. He gives strength to the animals that need power, and agility to the smallest creatures. He created each detail in the animal kingdom.
Do not skim chapter 38/39, you may miss His awesomeness. Click here to listen to it.
What gave you wonder? I will share mine. Rain. I thought about how heavy water is, yet God keeps it suspended in the air until He commands it to fall. I thought about how we say “I hope it does not rain. When in reality, when it rains we should be sitting in awe and offering thanks. I am amazed at my own selfishness that I think of rain as an inconvenience, not as God’s provision and blessing for the earth”.
Reading the Bible - 2021 
So many details daily that make up life on earth. Wow. Just the amount of details alone creates awe!
But I also think I enjoy what sounds like sarcasm: 38:21 “Don’t you know, … you have lived so long!” And 35 “can you send lightening bolts out and they go? Do they report to you: “Here we are?”
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21 Surely you know, for you were already born!
You have lived so many years!
1. I always thought I got my sarcasm from my dad… It appears we both got it from The Father.
2. These verses just SCREAMED out how little I am, how little I know, and how little I truly understand anything compared to God who made and controls EVERYTHING.
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If anyone loves God’s sarcasm it me and you. Every time I read the Bible, listen to a podcast, read a commentary and we try to explain God, it’s like I hear this voice (sounds like James Earl Jones in my head”). You think you know? You can’t even imagine the depth of my plan, my reason, and my love.
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Thank you for providing the audio clips, especially on these chapters hearing these words out loud had such a profound effect for me. So many things grabbed hold of me when listening and reading, I have re-read it multiple times this morning. I had to look up a video of an ostrich running after that part, I love the different animals He chose to highlight.
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Water? Is there truth to the Bible in the water?
-2 Samuel 22:16
“The valleys of the sea were exposed and the foundations of the earth laid bare at the rebuke of The Lord, at the blast of breath from his nostrils.”
-Job 38:16
“Have you entered into the springs of the sea or walked in the recesses (valleys) of the deep?”
-This is the oldest book talking about how the ocean floor has valleys.
-Jonah 2:5-6
“The great deep engulfed me, weeds were wrapped around my head. I descended to the roots of the mountains.
-Until about the 19th century most people believed the ocean floor was sandy like a beach and shaped like a bowl. And if you wanted to find the deepest part, you simply went to the middle.
-Marianas Trench- Wasn’t founded until 1875.
-Mid-Atlantic Range- Wasn’t founded until 1872. (10,000-mile long mountain range in the Atlantic Ocean.
-Sound like anyone could have figured this out? Well that’s not what the ancient cultures were guessing. ONLY the Jews in the Old Testament. Everyone else was either silent on the issue or mistaken.
WATER CONTINUED: Fountains and Springs of the deep
-Genesis 7:11
“In the six hundredth year of Noah’s life, on the seventeenth day of the second month, on that day all the springs of the great deep burst forth, and the floodgates of the heavens were opened.”
-Genesis 8:1-2
“But God remembered Noah and all the wild animals and the livestock that were with him in the ark, and he sent a wind over the earth, and the waters receded. Now the springs of the deep and the floodgates of the heavens had been closed, and the rain had stopped falling from the sky.”
-Proverbs 8:27-28
“I was there when he set the heavens in place, when he marked out the horizon on the face of the deep, when he established the clouds above and fixed securely the fountains of the deep.”
-Fountains and springs of the deep? For centuries people thought this was just a figure of speech.
-In 1977 they discovered the first spring off the coast of Ecuador, 1 ½ miles under water, pumping out water at 450 degrees.
-You can go on the geological societies website and find there is no other information on the springs of the deep until that discovery in 1977.
-Most modern writings prior to 1977 don’t describe this, and NO OTHER ancient text besides the bible does.
-Either the ancient biblical writers are consistently lucky, or they’re accurate.
WATER CONTINUED: Currents or “paths of the sea”
-Psalms 8:1,3,6,8
“1 O Lord, our Lord, how majestic is your name in all the earth.
3… When I consider your heavens, the work of your fingers, the moon and the stars, which you have set in place.
6… You made him (man) ruler over the works of your hands; you put everything under his foot.
8… the birds of the air, and the fish of the sea, all that swim the paths of the seas.
-He is describing currents in the ocean!
-They didn’t discover currents until the 1800’s. They were discovered by Lieutenant Matthew Maury. He was a CHRISTAIN officer in the navy. His interest on the “paths of the sea” was sparked from reading Psalms 8. All his time in the navy, he had never seen or heard of such a thing but he wound up writing a book about it, and now he is known as “the father of modern navigation” and he’s called, “The Pathfinder of the Seas.”
WATER CONTINUED: Water cycle?
-Job 26:8
“He wraps up the waters in his clouds, yet the clouds do not burst under their weight.”
-Job 36:27-28
“He draws up the drops of water, which distill as rain to the streams; the clouds pour down their moisture and abundant showers fall on mankind.”
-Ecclesiastes 1:6-7
“The wind blows to the South and turns to the North; round and round it goes, ever returning on its course. All streams flow into the sea, yet the sea is never full. To the place the streams come from, there they return again.”
-They’re describing the water cycle.
-Genesis 8:22
“As long as the earth endure, seedtime and harvest, cold and heat, summer and winter, day and night will never cease.”
-Job 28:26
“God made decrees (rules) for the rain. And he set a path for the thunderstorm.”
-They’re describing rules… The idea that God set forth rules for a certain process that’s repeated. We would call them natural laws. God’s laws.
-This idea of a hydrological cycle like you see in the ancient biblical text is not described in any other ancient text.
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STARS CONTINUED:
-Job 38:31-32
“Canst thou bind the sweet influences of Pleiades, or loose the bands of Orion? Canst thou bring forth Mazzaroth in his season? Or canst thou guide Arcturus with his sons?”
-He is describing constellations in the night time sky. Remember Job kind of pushes back at God, and in this text God kind of ask him who he thinks he is. (God is saying, he can move these constellations, but Job cannot.)
Pleiades
– (“God: Hey Job, you think you can keep this constellation together? Well I can!”)
-Pleiades looks like 7 stars. But we now know it is actually 7 clusters of stars. There are 250 suns in those clusters. But they look like one star because they’re o tightly clustered together. Turns out, they’re all moving in the same direction… So they will always look this way!
-Isabel Lewis was the United States Naval Observatory astronomer and she wrote in a book called, “Wonder World,” “Astronomers have identified 250 stars are actual members of this group. All sharing a common motion and drifting through space in the same direction.” Lewis says they are, “Journeying onward together through the immensity of space.”
-How would Job know this? How would he know how this specific cluster operates? How would Job know that these stars will stay together forever?
Orion
-Orion’s Belt is made up of 3 stars: Mintaka, Alnilam, Alnitak.
-(God: “Hey Job, you think you can loosen Orion’s belt? I can!”)
-Garret Serviss: An astronomer who wrote “Curiosities of the sky,” wrote, “This band consist of almost a perfectly straight line of second magnitude stars, theyre equally spaced and very beautiful. In the course of time however, the two right hand stars, Mintaka and Alnilam will approach each other and form a naked eye double. The other star will drift away eastward so that the band will no longer exist.”
-How would Job have known this would happen?
Mazzaroth
We still can’t figure out what he’s talking about. There is lot of speculation but nothing concrete.
Arcturus
-(God: Hey Job, you think that you can guide Arcturus anywhere you want? I can!)
-Garrett Serviss again, wrote that: “Arcturus one of the greatest suns in the universe, is a runaway star whose speed of flight is about 257 miles per second.”
– It is so massive that it isn’t affected by the gravitational pull of other objects.
-1000’s of times bigger than our sun, it is like a bull in a china shop and goes wherever it wants to go.
-Charles Buckhalter of the Ellis Observatory wrote in a book called “Wonder Worlds,” he says, “Arcturus high velocity places it in a very small class of stars that apparently area a law unto themselves.”
-Someone read this passage from Job to Charles and asked him to comment. It took him aback, and he spent some time studying it… Later he wrote, “The study of the book of Job, its comparison with the latest scientific discoveries, has brought me to the matured conviction that the bible was an inspired book and was written by the one who made the stars.”
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Pretty much word for word from someone else’s lecture (J Warner Wallace)…please give credit where credit is due.
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