[Today’s run: Watson Road.\u00a0 Saturday:\u00a0 5k,\u00a0 Sunday: 2 miles]<\/p>\n
One sermon that I’ve never heard preached is about Job’s camels.<\/p>\n
There is a whole book in the Bible about Job. Job was a righteous man of ancient times.\u00a0 God allowed Satan to test Job by afflicting him with all sorts of difficulties.\u00a0 Satan wanted Job to turn against God because of his difficulties.\u00a0 Job was restless but held on.<\/p>\n
Job’s afflictions included the loss of his servants, livestock and children.<\/p>\n
Ok, so the interesting part:\u00a0 God allows Satan to test Job.\u00a0 But his servants, children and livestock are all collateral damage.\u00a0 The kids are enjoying a party when a “wind” comes and flattens the house, killing them all.\u00a0 The servants are doing their jobs, like good servants should, when bandits of various types appear and wreak mayhem, destroying or stealing all of Job’s livestock.<\/p>\n
Next time you are set upon by bandits or your house comes down in a windstorm, that may be God’s allowing Satan to afflict you.\u00a0 Or it could be God’s allowing Satan to afflict your insurance agent or the guy who holds your mortgage.<\/p>\n
I’ve always had this impression from the stories in the Bible, particularly the Old Testament:\u00a0 God cares about us deeply and individually.\u00a0 But people dying really isn’t that big of a deal to Him.<\/p>\n
I don’t mean to belittle God’s position or claim that He isn’t Good.\u00a0\u00a0 On the contrary, I’m confident\u00a0 He is able to orchestrate the whole thing so that the fatherless children of Job’s chief camel-herder (if there was\u00a0 such a guy)\u00a0 somehow survived without their father.\u00a0 At the minimum we can say that there are a lot of complex ripples from the nasty stuff that Satan is allowed to do.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
[Today’s run: Watson Road.\u00a0 Saturday:\u00a0 5k,\u00a0 Sunday: 2 miles] One sermon that I’ve never heard preached is about Job’s camels. There is a whole book in the Bible about Job. Job was a righteous man of ancient times.\u00a0 God allowed Satan to test Job by afflicting him with all sorts of difficulties.\u00a0 Satan wanted Job […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[8,11],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1767","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-other-thoughts","category-religion"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/w0ep.us\/OM\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1767","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/w0ep.us\/OM\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/w0ep.us\/OM\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/w0ep.us\/OM\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/w0ep.us\/OM\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1767"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"http:\/\/w0ep.us\/OM\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1767\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1772,"href":"http:\/\/w0ep.us\/OM\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1767\/revisions\/1772"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/w0ep.us\/OM\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1767"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/w0ep.us\/OM\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1767"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/w0ep.us\/OM\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1767"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}