Suggestive Notes by Editor

Pacific Press Publishing Company · Mountain View, California · Jul 22, 1908

FromSigns of the Times, Vol. 34, No. 30.

Suggestive Notes.

By Editor

Our readings for this week finish the books of Job and Matthew. In Job 32 to 36 we have the instructive discourses of Elihu. In chapters 38 to 41 God speaks to His servant. Job had asked that the Almighty should come and speak to him as a man, and the great God condescends to speak to His servant, bringing to him so many common things, things that were constantly before Job which he could not understand, and showing Job's folly in questioning the providences of God. And yet while He aims to speak to Job's understanding, how many wonderful revelations are disclosed in these few chapters!

Read verse 31 in the Revised Version, rather than in the Common Version, "Canst thou bind the cluster of the Pleiades?" There was an old heathen tradition that as the Pleiades appeared in the northern hemispheres in the spring, their influences had their effect upon the earth. That is not the thought of the passage. "Canst thou bind the cluster of the Pleiades?" The naked eye can discern six stars in that cluster. A common opera-glass will show fifteen or twenty, but a large telescope presents before us a great cluster of living diamonds of light, some of them perhaps millions of miles apart, and yet God's hand has bound that cluster of the Pleiades and kept them in their relative places during all the centuries. "Or loose the bands of Orion?" In the constellation of Orion are many mighty suns, stars of a peculiar character, which are called Orionic stars. It would seem as the great constellation would separate and the stars go different ways, but it is not possible for man to change them. The bands of Orion can be loosed only by Him who created them.

The last of the 32d verse in the Revised Version is: "Canst thou guide the bear with her train?"—the great dipper of the North; but in our Common Version it is: "Canst thou guide Arcturus with his suns?" Here are thoughts which none of the astronomers of ancient times knew, revealed in the word of God. It is only lately that astronomers have found that the great size and immensity of Arcturus was holding with him many other stars which were seemingly separated from all other constellations. God's challenge to Job is, Canst thou guide this immense sun with his retinue of followers? One astronomer who had delved deeply into the various modern sciences told the writer that one of the great reasons why he believed in the inspiration of the Bible was the wonderful truths told in the book of Job which were so far beyond his age, and which scientists at the present time had only to see.