Week 23 Job 1
Some day I might make a list of stories from the bible and call it Key Stories From the Bible (subtitle: Stories That – If They Were Missing – Would Leave a Huge Gap in My Understanding About What’s-Going-On).
One good candidate for that list is Job 1 & 2. That’s the one I’m sitting here thinking about today.
There’s a gathering – a kind of convention – in a location that’s inaccessible to humans. The conferees are non-human-beings and there’s two main categories of them:
…the angels came to present themselves before the Lord
…and Satan also came with them.
It’s surprising to see that a) the Lord has a gathering that includes Satan and b) the Lord has a personal conversation with him.
Part of that conversation is this:
The Lord: where have you come from?
Satan: from roaming through the earth and going back and forth in it.
I wonder about Satan’s daily agenda. What percentage of his time did he spend roaming-through-the-earth? Does he still do that? I see an NT cross-reference: your enemy the devil prowls around like a roaring lion looking for someone to devour. It sounds like he’s spending a lot of time.
In Job 1 & 2 Satan is looking to bring Job to the point where Job curses the Lord.
Meanwhile the Lord is looking on…seeing what Job will do.
And meanwhile Job’s completely in the dark about what’s happening behind the scenes.
Note: quotes from Job 1:6 7 & 1 Peter 5:8 (NIV)