Walking on the wings of the wind

 In Job 26, Job, answering Bildad, makes some statements about what his understanding of creation is.

Verses 5-6 read: [5] Dead things are formed from under the waters, and the inhabitants thereof.

[6] Hell is naked before him, and destruction hath no covering.

“Notice the connection with water and dead things under the water?” observes Richard Jordan. “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.

“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.

*****

“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 . . .

*****

“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.”

*****

In Bible commentary notes below Genesis 1:2 (‘And the earth was without form, and void; and darkness was upon the face of the deep. And the Spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters’), there’s commonly a reference given to Deuteronomy 32:11 (‘As an eagle stirreth up her nest, fluttereth over her young, spreadeth abroad her wings, taketh them, beareth them on her wings’), because that’s where the other occurrence for the Hebrew word that is translated “move,” lies.

“When it says that thing about her fluttering over her young, the Hebrew word translated ‘flutter’ is the same word for ‘moved’ in Genesis 1:2,” explains Jordan. “So all the commentaries say, ‘See, the Spirit of God fluttered over the face of the deep.’ Now, did that help you understand something? Well, it never did me.

“I look that word up in the dictionary and I say, ‘Flutter? The Spirit of God fluttered? What’s He doing?! What does that mean?!’

“The commentaries never made any sense to me until one day I met up with a fellow, a farmer down in Alabama, who had chickens. You learn a lot from people who just know about life.

“I was asking him, ‘Doug, what in the world is a chicken doing when it’s fluttering?!’ He says, ‘Oh, that’s no problem; she’s roosting on her nest.’

“It’s not a bird off flying all around or soaring up; its when a bird tries to sit down on its nest and get settled in on it and kind of flutters around and gets its feathers all up and you don’t know what they’re doing and she’s trying to get her brood together and sit down on it.

“I went back and looked at that verse: ‘As an eagle stirreth up her nest.’ You know what she’s doing? She’s getting her family together; she’s putting her house in order and she’s going to settle down on her nest.

“I thought, ‘Oh, that’s what the Spirit of God was doing!’ When God began to move on the face of that water, He began to give some attention to this place. He was doing the same thing a bird does, not just flying willy-nilly around, but fluttering over the nest. The nest is your home.

“So immediately in Genesis, God’s doing something that’s going to relate to some place He’s going to call home. Now, here’s His home up (in the third heaven) but He’s doing something down here that is going to have something to do with His nest.

*****

“Psalm 104 is a Millennial psalm—a psalm about the Second Coming of Christ—when Christ comes, looks back and is able to praise God for what He’s done. He’s come down and is living—Emmanuel God living with us on the EARTH.

“Psalm 104: [1] Bless the LORD, O my soul. O LORD my God, thou art very great; thou art clothed with honour and majesty.
[2] Who coverest thyself with light as with a garment: who stretchest out the heavens like a curtain:

“He’s got His curtain up there and He blocks out His light. This thing in here is all dark because the curtain keeps the light out.

“Verse 3 says, [3] Who layeth the beams of his chambers in the waters: who maketh the clouds his chariot: who walketh upon the wings of the wind.

“Tell me something--what are God’s chambers? That’s a building; that’s where He lives! There’s a particular place on the earth that He created to dwell in. That place is known all through your Bible.

“Understand, when God created this stuff, the reason He created the earth was He was creating a place to put His house and to live on.

“He created it for the purpose of bringing His chambers down here to dwell on. So God, in six days, creates an environment on the earth suitable for His chambers--His palace, the mini-mansions--to exist.”