Job 38: 19-41 CEV – Where is the home of light, and where – Bible Gateway// // //
ASTRONOMERS SAY OUR GALAXY IS PART OF A SUPERCLUSTER
Job 38:19-41Contemporary English Version (CEV)(God speaks to Job) 19 Where is the home of light, 22 Have you been to the places Can You Arrange Stars?31 Can you arrange stars in groups 39 When lions are hungry, This is a continuation of God’s answer to Job, which I began considering in Blog 1416 yesterday. These are familiar aspects of the ecosystem, yet they are also infinitely strange, as the author shows us by his poetry. This is the way the world is; but THAT it is so, is marvellous, as the questions suggest. Even with all our present scientific knowledge, we are still looking for the “home of light”. The questions move Job and his troubles away from the centre of the drama and present the reader with intimate details of the functioning of the world of which human beings are a part-but not the only part. The rain falls in the desert and the young ravens need food. These are presented as acts of a creator who delights in what he has made and is making. The author is saying that if in response to our experience of the world we imagine a creator, then there’s no point in imagining we could comprehend him/ her/ it. But if we allow our imagination to fix on God’s creative process, as we see it, then our minds can be prompted to transcend our own categories, realisng that God is not “the supreme being”, that is, like other beings in the universe only greater, but rather a presence who addresses us from “beyond” us by means of his/her creation. That annoying his/her in the last sentence is a useful illustration, for of course the division of humankind into male and female can’t be asserted of God, who is beyond sexual division yet also known through it. “God created human beings in his own likness. Male and female he created them.” The book of Genesis uses the complementary sexuality of humankind to point towards the nature of God. Here the author’s vivid poetry presents how God sees creation, appreciating the specialness and interrelationships of each item.
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