God wears The North's face

Not only is there a tremendous amount of information in the Book of Job about creation--the mechanics, the structure, the purpose, how it’s designed to operate, etc.—but the information was already on the table for people when the Book of Genesis was written.

“When you study Genesis 1, it’s good to work from a frame of reference in your mind that’s given in the Book of Job, the oldest book in the Bible,” advises Richard Jordan (shorewoodbiblechurch.org). “In Job 26, for example, Job is answering Bildad and is going to make some statements about what his understanding of creation is.

“Verse 5 says, ‘Dead things are formed from under the waters, and the inhabitants thereof.’ Notice the connection with water and dead things under the water. Verse 6 says, ‘Hell is naked before him, and destruction hath no covering.’ Hell is naked before God and destruction can’t hide from Him. 

“There’s some people living under the water and Hell is under the water. Destruction, or those things connected with dead people and hell, are underneath the water.

“Verse 7 says, [7] He stretcheth out the north over the empty place, and hangeth the earth upon nothing.

“There’s a place up there in the heavens that’s empty; it doesn’t have a bunch of inhabitants. This place is not given to anybody. It’s an empty field and above it is ‘the north.’ There is an absolute direction for the universe.

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“Psalm 75 says, ‘[6] For promotion cometh neither from the east, nor from the west, nor from the south.'

“You’ll notice a lot of these verses like this one are just kind of stuck in places. People say, ‘Well, why isn’t all this stuff just laid out for you—bop, bop, bop, bop, bop?’ Well, one reason is it would be kind of boring.

"Have you ever read a scientific textbook? Did you ever take Physics? Didn’t you just get a real thrill reading through the Physics textbook? Didn’t you just go home at night and want to read it again?!

“Did you know the easiest way to learn is as a corollary to some life experience? And if your Bible was written like a theological textbook . . . I’ve studied them for 30 years and I never saw a one—I’ve read dozens of them—that I thought was good reading again.

“I’d rather read a Tom Clancy or a Robert Ludlum novel any day than to read a theological textbook. It’s like choosing between ‘Gone with the Wind’ and an Encyclopedia Britannica. Which one you want to read, you know. Why would you want a Bible written like that? It’s written in a way to captivate your interest and cause you to learn because you keep reading and studying it!

“A preacher told me just the other day, ‘You know, I just get tired of studying.’ That’s something I never have done. I’ve been studying the Bible over 30 years. Just yesterday I spent about 15 hours studying. I was researching something and I turned the phone off and went to it.

“I study at least 20 hours a week and have the personal discipline to do that and I’m fairly busy in other things. It’s the one thing I do that NEVER has been a burden to me. Now, sometimes it’s frustrating—you don’t understand something—and sometime your old flesh says, ‘Boy, I’d sure like to not do that,’ and sometime I can’t read it—I got to get closer or put it away from me, but it’s wonderful to study it.

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“But getting back to ‘the north.’ You’re going to find these verses in strange little places and they’re just going to be dropped in. Little explanations, little statements dropped in because the Bible is written in such a way to assume that you’re going to read all of it and pay attention to the details, picking them up as you go along. It’s meant to be a treasure hunt.

“When Psalm 75:6 says, ‘For promotion cometh neither from the east, nor from the west, nor from the south,’ do you see from the Book of Job how God is put in the place of the fourth direction? He does that because that’s where God is!

“The message is, ‘Look, promotion doesn’t come from the east, it doesn’t come from the west, it doesn’t come from the south—it comes from, only one direction left. But he doesn’t tell you the direction; he tells you WHO it comes from that lives there! It comes from ‘the north,’ but Job says it comes from God because God . . .

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“Now you understand God is omnipresent. That’s a theological term to try and describe the immensity of who God is. He is not limited by time or space. And yet you know, although God is everywhere, as theologians would say, you know He’s not everywhere in the same sense. You know if God the Holy Spirit indwells you as a Believer, He is in you, in communion with your spirit, in a sense in which He is not in an unsaved person.

“God isn’t limited by where He can be, but He chooses to manifest the glory of His person and His personality in certain places, and the place where He has chosen to manifest for His creation, the glory and the majesty of His person, is a place located in ‘the north.’

“So when I start Genesis 1, I’m going to need to know that there is a place that God calls 'north.' Anytime you get a map out, the first thing you need to do if you’re going to get directions is find the little arrow that is always pointing north. Why doesn’t it always point south, or east or west? That’s interesting but now you know.”

(to be continued)