I've Been WAITING For This Day

First and foremost, a huge thank you to those who attended not only the Read Your Bible In a Year Bible Class today, but either of the other two as well. I’m working from rough numbers, but in the recent past about 100 people attended Sunday morning Bible classes, and it was closer to 160 or so today. THANK YOU SO MUCH, and I sincerely hope that you got out of the classes what you hoped, and please stick with it. Second, thanks to the many kind folks who have commented on my blog posts. I promise to start continue to put thought and worthwhile content into them and not just write stuff for my own vainglorious reasons.

And yes, I HAVE been waiting for this day in eager anticipation, and I will warn you this will be a longer-than-normal post. My most recent brush with this passage was when I was assigned to read it one Sunday morning about 5 years ago or so. As usual, I read my assignment in advance to see what it was, and after I got my jaw off the floor, said to myself “That’s going to be a GOOD Sunday.” I can summarize today’s readings in three words:

WHERE WERE YOU?

Job and his friends have been arguing back and forth over who is responsible for what, who’s more holy, etc., and even though Job has a point (really, what DID he do to deserve what befell him), what right does he (or any of us) have to question God? He created the UNIVERSE (spot decision—I’m going do a special BONUS POST that will deal specifically with that), and we’re going to say to God “That just isn’t FAIR!” and then stomp our feet and hold our breath until our face turns blue? Seriously? I’m going to go out on a limb here and state that’s probably not a great idea.

We’re all an amalgam of our experiences, and one of the primary drivers for the reason I’m the person with the sunny disposition I am today is that I was a debater in high school and college (I’m pretty sure David was too). Being a debater in those days meant that you were a budding geopolitician, always looking for new and novel ways to instigate a nuclear war. As such, I learned much on that subject, one item of which was that at the time (late ‘70’s), there were enough nuclear weapons to assure planet-wide destruction 100+ times over, but what would that destruction mean? Would it mean NO life? I doubt it—through the vagaries of winds, sea currents, population densities, etc., there would have to be a place that would escape the devastation. In addition, some form of life, being it plant or bacterial, would likely survive somewhere.

My point? The world will end some day, but it will most explicitly NOT be at the hands of man. We can mess it up in a big way with a nuclear war, we can do serious environmental damage by either acts of commission or omission, but we couldn’t destroy this planet EVEN IF WE TRIED. In these two glorious chapters in Job, God is clearly telling us it’s HIS world. We can think what we want, we can even go so far as to do what we want, and it won’t change a thing. Do NOT misconstrue me—I do not advocate this as carte blanche to do what we wish and care nothing for the environment, since God clearly placed us as stewards of this beautiful place, but in my humble opinion, to even think that our puny efforts can ruin this planet is the height of arrogance, and since I’m on the verge of rambling, I’ll comment further if you wish via posting on this blog. For a pretentious windbag like me, these are the chapters that knock me down and put me in my place, and I LOVE to read them. I seriously doubt you enjoyed them as much as I do, but I hope I’m able to accurately convey just what they mean to me.
Scott