The Journey Pattern
6239 words long.
Published on 2024-05-27
The Journey Begins
The moment Adam and Eve were expelled from Eden, mankind embarked upon a journey. Like Thomas Cole's painting above, it is a dark journey into a terrifying wilderness. It is our collective journey back to Eden. Some people are trying to force their way in. They wage war against God and hope to vanquish him and seize a place in paradise. Others have given up. They surrendered all hope and pursue transitory pleasures to kill time until the grave receives them. A select few have seized onto the promise given by the Apostle Paul:
To those who by patience in well-doing
seek for glory and honor and immortality,
he will give eternal life...
- Romans 2:7
They trust the words of Hebrews that there is a wonderful destination at the end of the road:
But as it is, they desire a better country,
that is, a heavenly one. Therefore God is
not ashamed to be called their God,
for he has prepared for them a city.
- Hebrews 11:16
Such people long for the glorious future vision of John to arrive:
Then the angel showed me the river of the water of life,
bright as crystal, flowing from the throne of God
and of the Lamb through the middle of the street of the city;
also, on either side of the river, the tree of life
with its twelve kinds of fruit, yielding its fruit each month.
The leaves of the tree were for the healing of the nations.
No longer will there be anything accursed, but
the throne of God and of the Lamb will be in it, and
his servants will worship him. They will see his face,
and his name will be on their foreheads.
And night will be no more. They will need no light
of lamp or sun, for the Lord God will be their light,
and they will reign forever and ever.
- Revelation 22:1-5
The journey back has been so long! Are we there yet? Is it open-ended, with our every sinful wrong turn extending our wandering through another Sinai? Or are the miles and the years fixed? More to the point, is this a question God will deign to answer?
Early in the last decade, I was reading Matthew's genealogy of Jesus. He made a point of dividing the genealogy in three parts of fourteen generations each. If you do the math, that suggests the sum forty-two, but the line from Abraham to Jesus only includes forty-one names! He counted David twice. What was Matthew getting at?
Some questions occurred to me. How does God measure time? Does he measure it in years? Years are products of His heavenly time pieces, the sun, moon and stars. They are perfect, they are mechanical, but they were not made in His image. People are important to God. Maybe, like Matthew, He measures time in generations of people?
An unlikely and likely untestable idea then popped into my head. If there were forty-two generations from Abraham to the savior, how many generations will there be from the creation until Christ returns? Is there a fixed number? What is that number? How long are those generations? Are they averages or the actual lengths of the lives of special people?
I reflected on God's mercy. If the Lord set the span from Abraham to Jesus as a count of generations, then the more those generations overlap, the fewer years before the savior would come. Forty-two overlapping generations, where the measurement of the length of the generation ends when a father has a son, thus is an expression of God's love. He wanted to send a savior as soon as possible to rescue fallen people and magnify His glory by their salvation.
Mercy
Turn it around. God's righteousness requires that He punish sin. Eventually the rebellion must be put down. He has promised to condemn the wicked and judge the whole earth. What is taking so long?
The Lord is not slow to fulfill his promise
as some count slowness, but is patient toward you,
not wishing that any should perish,
but that all should reach repentance.
- 2 Peter 3:9
What is taking so long is God's patience with us sinners. In Genesis, it was foretold of Methuselah that when he died, the judgment of God would come. The Flood of Noah occurred in the year that he died. What did God show us about his character in choosing Methuselah as his chronometer? I heard a sermon once where the preacher told us exactly what this showed us about God. When God chose a man as the measure of when he would send judgement...
- If He chose a short-lived man, then that would show us that God prefers judgment over mercy.
- If He chose a long-lived man, then that would show us that God favors mercy over judgment.
God chose the longest lived man who ever lived, a man who lived to the age of 969 years. God loves mercy! So if God had a set number of generations that he planned to wait before sending judgment, what would maximize the number of years before the end? The maximum delay would be achieved if:
- every generation was the longest length allowed
- every generation overlapped the next by a single year.
Thus instead of ending one generation at the age when the special person's chosen son was born, you mark off a set length of time.
The Length of a Generation
We can assume that God is maximally generous, but that still leaves us with three questions:
- Are all the generations the same length?
- How long is each longest-allowed generation?
- How many generations will the journey last?
I will spare you the details of my hours spent in assembling spreadsheets, poring over Scripture and world history looking for clues. The problem was not coming up with ideas. The problem was finding Bible verses that back them up. The conclusion was this:
- History will last forty-two generations.
- The Generations do not all last the same amount of time.
- The first two generations were Adam and Methuselah, two very long-lived people who lived when lifespans were much longer than today.
- In an announcement preceding the flood, God reduced the length of a generation to 120 years. (Genesis 6:3)
- All generations after the flood last 120 years, but with a one year overlap, the year when one generation ends and the next begins, for a net of 119 years.
Methodological Evidence
What was my evidence for this? I compared events in ancient history to events in modern history, reflecting around a midpoint near the birth of Christ. I discovered a symmetry. For example, the generation when slavery began is paired with the generation when slavery ended. I called this the "Cosmic Chiasm". It appeared in an Appendix in Job Rises. Then after my understanding of prophecy improved, I presented a more accurate version in Peace, like Solomon Never Knew. It appeared in two chapters, "Generations Come and Go" and "Two Patterns in History".
Yet even with a more accurate date for the creation, a better Bible chronology, and a deeper understanding of world history, I nearly tossed my ideas. Indeed, I pushed them aside for years because I could see no warrant in Scripture for such an ordering of history as this. Many people have proposed philosophies of history based on patterns that they see. We can see all the patterns in history that we want, but if God did not author them then they are figments of our selection biases.
Then COVID started and I decided to study Ecclesiastes. That was when the Lord showed me His master index of the major patterns of prophecy and history. It was only after I for a second time refused to proceed with my ideas of a symmetry in history and a set number of generations that the Lord showed me where to look. God honored my humility of refusing to put my own ideas before His by graciously confirming that I was on the right track.
Generation Clocks:
A generation goes, and a generation comes,
but the earth remains forever.
- Ecclesiastes 1:4
Celestial Clocks:
The sun rises, and the sun goes down,
and hastens to the place where it rises.
- Ecclesiastes 1:5
Symmetric Parallelism (a Chiasm)
What has been is what will be,
and what has been done is what will be done,
and there is nothing new under the sun.
Is there a thing of which it is said,
“See, this is new”?
It has been already
in the ages before us.
- Ecclesiastes 1:9-10
Verse 4 above reveals that there are cycles of God's plan that are based on counts of generations.
Verse 5 above reveals that there are cycles of God's plan that are based on movements of the sun, hence counts of years.
Verses 9-10 above reveal that events that happened in the past mirror events later on, suggesting the mirrored symmetry of a chiasm that I had spotted years before.
The above was the methodological evidence for my ideas. All that meant is that there are prophetic patterns based on counts of generations and mirroring events around the midpoint. It does not mean that I found the ones that are there, or if I found them, that I quantified them correctly. For that we need Biblical evidence and historical evidence.
Biblical Evidence
What do we need Biblical evidence to demonstrate?
- There is a consistent symbolic meaning of the number forty-two (42) and it is relevant to people on a long journey of many stages.
- There is a consistent symbolic meaning of the number 119 and it is relevant to the measurement of time and to a necessary milestone along that journey.
- Lots of prophecies arranged in chronological sequence to fill up a structure of forty-two eras. These prophecies are the ones we shall need to match to the historical evidence to show that these Bible's prophecies are present and predicted the future accurately, both as to the nature of the events and to their timing.
The following articles deal with the symbolic numerology of forty-two and one hundred twenty:
Forty-two. Let's pull a few observations out of that first article. For forty years, the Jewish people wandered in the desert. Numbers 33 summarizes this long journey. It lists forty-one travel legs, giving the place where they set off on that leg of the journey and the place where they again rested. After the forty-first leg, Moses prophesied their final leg, then he died. The final leg was to cross the Jordan River, fight a battle at Jericho and take possession of the Promised Land. This sets the pattern 42 = 40 + 1 + 1:
- Forty years of wandering and suffering
- One great battle
- Victory and Peace
One commentator showed how Numbers 33 is structurally broken into three parts of fourteen legs. This mirrors Matthew's division of Jesus' genealogy into three parts of fourteen names. This points us to another similarity. There were forty generations of people from Abraham to Jesus' parents. Those were forty years of wandering and struggle. This is consistent with the generally accepted idea that Forty is for Suffering. Jesus is thus the forty-first generation. Just as Moses died at the forty-first leg, so did Jesus. Christ's death on the cross was the battle that won the great victory. The forty-second generation is therefore the church, who entered the Promised Land of the Kingdom of Heaven.
Forty-two pops up in several prophecies. The most significant one relates to time. It is Pharaoh's Dream from Genesis. Pharaoh tells the dream to his wise men. Then he tells it to Joseph. Then Joseph gives the interpretation. The same story is repeated three times (with subtle additions). That mirrors the threefold division of Matthew's chronology and the desert march of Israel. The dreams speak of seven healthy heads of wheat and seven shriveled ones, or fourteen in all. By tripling them, you get forty-two heads. The same is true of the cattle. We are told that the counts of the heads of wheat and cattle stand for numbers of years. This firmly establishes that forty-two is a number associated with time, often divided in three, suggesting the presence of the Trinity.
Forty-two surfaces in a powerful way in the life of Nehemiah. He organized the rebuilding of the walls of Jerusalem following the Babylonian Exile. Despite violent threats from their neighbors, Nehemiah remained courageous and his leadership steadied the fearful hearts of his people, enabling them to succeed. Our long journey will end when the New Jerusalem descends from heaven. Nehemiah's leadership thus symbolizes the long journey from a broken world to a repaired one. During the rebuilding of that wall, each individual, family or team took responsibility to repair one section of wall or one tower. How may sections were the repairs divided into?
Forty-two!
The number forty-two pops up in other Bible stories, but one more observation is significant. In ancient Hebrew, they did not have separate numerals. Each letter of their alphabet also doubled as a number. The singular form of God is Eloah, spelled in Hebrew (right-to-left) as:
אלוה
The values of the letters are:
א = 1
ל = 30
ו = 6
ה = 5
אלוה = 42
This means that forty-two is the measure of the immeasurable God.
This means that our journey of forty-two steps is a journey that takes us from exile back to God.
120. From the number 120 we get the theme of consecration. People who follow God's voice and embark on the journey following his direction have like Abraham separated themselves from the world and its goals and ethics. They are consecrated to His service. When Solomon consecrated the temple, he sacrificed 120,000 sheep.
119. However, though this chronology overlaps generations of 120 years to get a net generation length of 119, the number 119 has a meaning of its own. Between the Old and New Testaments, the Sin Offering is mentioned 119 times. Jesus was the ultimate sin offering. Psalm 119 is an extended prophecy of the coming of Christ, as demonstrated in the chapter "Psalm 119: The Shepherd's Clock" of Peace, like Solomon Never Knew. That psalm is a prophetic clock of twenty-two generations which begins with the Creation. Like our journey pattern, the first two eras in that clock were the generations of Adam and Methuselah, followed by twenty more generations of 119 years in length. However, that clock does not go to the end of time; it stops with the first coming of Christ. The similarity between the 22 and 42 generation clocks reinforces the idea that each is correct.
In Genesis, the flood of Noah ended on the seventeenth day of the seventh month:
119 = 17 x 7
Seventeen symbolizes victory, for God was victorious over man's sin, as noted in 17 is for Victory. Seven symbolizes completeness but also the purity of the Holy Spirit, as evidenced by the washing of the polluted earth by the waters of the flood and explored in 7 is for the Holy Spirit
A Prophetic Sequence. I have found three extensive examples of the Journey Pattern in the Bible:
- The Journey of Mankind from Eden to the New Jerusalem
- The Journey of Israel from Abraham to Jesus
- The Journey of a Church in Bondage to Rome to Religious Freedom following the Reformation
Finding even one example of this pattern was surely a gift from God. After decoding Ecclesiastes 3 and discovering several prophetic clocks related to that Growth Pattern, only one thing made it possible for me to discover the first example above. That collection of prophecies was found in Job and I had just finished two years researching and writing Job Rises. I believe that God orchestrated the order in which I studied certain books in the Bible so that I could leverage that knowledge when I moved on to the next book. Only a prior deep familiarity with Job - including finding a few prophecies about Jesus there - would have prompted me to look in it for even more prophecies.
That first prophetic clock is explored throughout five chapters in Peace, like Solomon Never Knew, from "Months of Futility" to "Father Time: Job 38-42". Job most conveniently has forty-two chapters. The cited chapters show how every chapter of Job corresponds to an era of history and has prophecies related to that era. (Cited events that occurred before Job was born are not prophecies, they are remembrances. Many prophetic clocks begin by recalling past events before moving on to future ones.) Of the five chapters, the one with the most detailed prophecy is "CSI Babylon: Job 20". Dozens of prophetic details render an accurate and comprehensive account of the death of Alexander the Great over a thousand years before he was born. As near as I can tell, no one else has ever made this connection before. Some of the marvelous details of this prophecy and its fulfillment are repeated in Quantification.
A normal person, having found something so startling and detailed as scores of previously undiscovered prophecies in a single book of the Bible, would move on. They would never return to Job in search of more. Instead, I was led again and again to Job and found additional prophetic structures in Job. These other clocks draw from different verses in the same chapters. Untangling this has taken me years to accomplish. Without the Spirit's prompting and encouragement, I would have given up long ago. When God decides to hide something, He hides it well!
The second journey clock listed above is also found in Job. It is described in three consecutive chapters of Plague, Precept, Prophet, Peace. Those chapters are "Job's Anti-jubilee Clock, Defined", "Prophecies from Abraham to David: Job 1-20", and Prophecies from Solomon to Christ: Job 21-42. The most stunning prophecy in that clock concerns the crucifixion of Jesus, which I discovered while writing Job Rises. That prophecy is in Job 41. That it is a messianic prophecy is not original to me. That it is the penultimate prophecy of a series of forty-two, one per chapter of Job, covering every forty-nine year period from Abraham to the death of the Apostle John - that is original. Though I have delved into this prophecy in three of my books, each time drawing out more, here are my original thoughts from Job Rises, an excerpt from "Chapter 24: Broken Pattern, Broken Man".
Now for the revelation hidden in chapter 41. Before we can wear this garment, we must weave it from words implied, not said. Each thread is a promise proud Leviathan will never keep, or a beneficial outcome the beast will never willingly permit. Yet for every promise that faithless monster breaks, is a promise kept by the “faithful and true witness, the ruler of God’s creation” (Revelation 3:14, NIV). Below, observe many verses from Job 41 paired with how they may be applied to Jesus:
Tongue-tied
Can you pull in Leviathan with a fishhook
or tie down its tongue with a rope?
- Job 41:1
He was oppressed and afflicted,
yet he did not open his mouth;
he was led like a lamb to the slaughter,
and as a sheep before its shearers is silent,
so he did not open his mouth.
- Isaiah 53:7, NIV
Pierced
Can you put a cord through its nose
or pierce its jaw with a hook?
- Job 41:2
But he was pierced for our transgressions,
he was crushed for our iniquities;
the punishment that brought us peace was on him,
and by his wounds we are healed.
- Isaiah 53:5, NIV
Begging for Mercy? Or offering it?
Will it keep begging you for mercy?
- Job 41:3a
As Jesus was getting into the boat, the man who
had been demon-possessed begged to go with him.
Jesus did not let him, but said,
“Go home to your own people and tell them
how much the Lord has done for you, and how
he has had mercy on you.”
- Mark 5:18-19, NIV
Gentle
Will it speak to you with gentle words?
- Job 41:3b
Take my yoke upon you and learn from me,
for I am gentle and humble in heart,
and you will find rest for your souls.
- Matthew 11:29, NIV
Covenant Maker
Will it make a covenant with you...
- Job 41:4a
This is my blood of the covenant,
which is poured out for many for the forgiveness of sins.
- Matthew 26:28, NIV
The Form of a Slave
...for you to take it as your slave for life?
- Job 41:4b
... Make your own attitude that of Christ Jesus,
who, existing in the form of God,
did not consider equality with God
as something to be used for His own advantage.
Instead He emptied Himself
by assuming the form of a slave,
taking on the likeness of men.
And when He had come as a man in His external form,
He humbled Himself by becoming obedient
to the point of death —
even to death on a cross.
- Philippians 2:5-8, HCSB
Bound
Can you make a pet of it like a bird
or put it on a leash for the
young women in your house?
- Job 41:5
... So they bound Jesus, led him away
and handed him over to Pilate.
- Mark 15:1, NIV
Bartered Away
Will traders barter for it?
Will they divide it up among the merchants?
- Job 41:6
“They divided my clothes among them
and cast lots for my garment.”
- John 19:24, NIV
Speared
Can you fill its hide with harpoons
or its head with fishing spears?
- Job 41:7
Instead, one of the soldiers pierced Jesus’
side with a spear, bringing a sudden flow
of blood and water.
- John 19:34, NIV
Blinding Light
Any hope of subduing it is false;
the mere sight of it is overpowering.
- Job 41:9
“About noon as I came near Damascus, suddenly
a bright light from heaven flashed around me.
I fell to the ground and heard a voice say to me,
‘Saul! Saul! Why do you persecute me?’
-Acts 22:6-7, NIV
Dominion
Who has a claim against me that I must pay?
Everything under heaven belongs to me.
- Job 41:11
Then the end will come, when he hands over
the kingdom to God the Father after he has
destroyed all dominion, authority and power.
- 1 Corinthians 15:24, NIV
Is the preceding analysis merely a fanciful exercise in concordance hopping? Does the Bible offer any warrant for connecting Jesus to a fish? We can start with the ichthus, the fish symbol adorning millions of cars as a symbol of Christianity. Next, the first disciples that Jesus called were fishermen. Concerning his time in the grave, Jesus said, “For as Jonah was three days and three nights in the belly of a huge fish, so the Son of Man will be three days and three nights in the heart of the earth.” (Matthew 12:40, NIV) There were two miraculous catches of fish, two miracles of loaves and fish, and the fetching of a coin for the tax from a fish’s mouth. Something tells me that to Jesus, fish were a big deal.
How shall we understand this fishy business, then? Speaking from the whirlwind, God extolled His son, who would willingly offer himself up as a slave, to be bound and pierced, and so enact for us a covenant in his own blood. Both gentle and in possession of kingly authority, though his very clothes were stripped from him and gambled away, Christ gives us all things. In D&D parlance, Jesus is “lawful good”.
The third journey patterned clock is also in Job. It is a variation of the Journey Pattern, a part of the Motherhood Pattern. It is covered in the chapter "Epilogue: The Fifth Commandment" of Plague, Precept, Prophet, Peace. The Motherhood Pattern begins and ends the same as the Growth Pattern, except that from "a time to mourn" until "a time to heal", it tracks the common experience of women, not men. Thus halfway through a time to dance is when a woman becomes pregnant. Then for much of history, during the next range of years most women repeatedly become pregnant, bear and raise children. The time that symbolizes giving birth is "a time to tear", when a baby is torn from her womb. Then "a time to mend" is the laying-in period after giving birth, when a woman heals.
A woman's pregnancy lasts 38 to 40 weeks, followed by a laying-in period of 2-4 weeks, for an average pregnancy plus recovery time of 42 weeks. That forty-two month period is a woman's journey through pregnancy and a baby's forty-two month journey from conception to birth and beyond. This aligns with a series of ten-and-a-half "times" from Ecclesiastes 3. Those times are broken into nine-and-a-half times, matching the nine-and-a-half months of pregnancy, and one more time, for recovery. On the larger scale of a woman's whole life, four of Solomon's times occupy one seven year phase of life, so ten-and-a-half times match 10.5 x (7/4) years = 18.75 years, which closely approximates the length of a woman's childbearing years. (The actual length of the childbearing years is longer, because women were forced to marry before the range from 21 to 28 years old - the Amity phase - which is the wise and proper time for marriage in Solomon's plan for life.)
How does the preceding relate to Job? The entire book of Job is a parable about the suffering of women. It uses words specific to women's lives and struggles more than any other book in the Bible, words like womb, conceived, birth, and nursed. Each chapter of Job thus matches an era of history that saw a metaphorical marriage, pregnancy and birth. That time period ran from the time when the Roman empire "married"" the Church to the time of a special "Childbearing". That childbearing was the birth of a new civilization, beginning with the Protestant Reformation and continuing onwards with the development of modern Western Civilization. The chapter by chapter analysis that matches prophecies in Job to history is found in "Epilogue: The Fifth Commandment" from Plague, Precept, Prophet, Peace. Some of that analysis is repeated on this website in two articles:
Historical Evidence
The historical evidence that verifies the existence and accuracy of the prophecies that belong to these three examples of the Journey Pattern fills hundreds of pages in my books. Prophecy-wise, my three favorite chapters in Job are chapters 20, 38 and 41.
- Job 20 holds the comprehensive prophecy of the death of Alexander the Great.
- Job 38 holds prophecies about scientific developments in the 19th century.
- Job 41 holds the prophecy about the crucifixion of Jesus Christ.
We have already covered the prophecies from Job 20 and 41, so we shall round things off with Job 38. The prophecies in question are from the main prophetic clock in Job, the one that runs from the Creation until near Christ's return. For that clock, the first two eras span the lives of Adam and Methuselah, bringing us to the flood. All remaining eras last 119 years. We currently live in the era of Job 39, which runs from 1923 to 2042 AD. The era for Job 38 ran from 1804 to 1923 AD. Here is an excerpt from the chapter named "Father Time: Job 38-42" in Peace, like Solomon Never Knew. It makes the additional claim that while Job 1-42 conforms to the Journey Pattern (which was not so named until my subsequent book), the subset of Job 15-42 conforms to the Growth Pattern of Solomon. That makes Job 38 coincide with "a time to speak", the great era of Christian overseas missions.
38th generation (1804-1923 AD).
In the chiastic outline of Elihu and God’s speeches in Job Rises, the theme of chapter 38 is “God speaks of his power”. The social upheaval and turmoil of this generation and the one to follow it (our own) are His doing, unparalleled in human history.
The earth takes shape like clay under a seal;
its features stand out like those of a garment.
- Job 38:14, NIV
How did God put his stamp upon humanity during this generation?
- Slavery forcefully outlawed in most of the world
- Serfs freed in Russia
- Dalits (untouchables) & other low caste peoples in British India enjoyed modest improvements in status and rights
- Women gained the right to vote and hold office in dozens of nations
- Democratic institutions matured
- Prisons reformed
- Public education expanded, literacy increased
- Mentally ill treated more humanely
- Old age pensions instituted
- Science, Medicine & public health advanced
- Agriculture, industry & transportation revolutionized
- Christianity spread by missionaries worldwide
Have you comprehended the vast expanses of the earth?
Tell me, if you know all this.
- Job 38:18, NIV
Explorers searched out those “vast expanses”, with Roald Amundsen in 1911 reaching the South Pole, the heart of earth’s greatest “storehouse of snow”.
“Have you entered the storehouses of the snow
or seen the storehouses of the hail,
which I reserve for times of trouble,
for days of war and battle?"
- Job 38:22-23, NIV
Those storehouses proved decisive against Napoleon in 1812. First, the Russian Winter, worsened by the continuing Little Ice Age, killed, crippled or captured hundreds of thousands of Napoleon’s soldiers, humbling the largest army ever assembled in Europe up to that time. This was critical, because Napoleon’s treaties, alliances, and wars were directed at isolating and weakening Britain, God’s primary agent for eradicating slavery throughout the world.
After Napoleon returned from exile in Elba following his first defeat, he was bested once more by bad weather. Torrential rains contributed to his downfall at Waterloo in 1815. What caused those rains? According to Caroline Brogan in Science Daily, scientists finally have a logical explanation: volcanoes.
In Napoleon's defeat at Waterloo caused in part by Indonesian volcanic eruption, Brogan lays out the case. Six volcanoes erupted between 1808 and 1815 with a VEI of four or more, the last being Mount Tambora in Indonesia with a VEI magnitude of seven, the most powerful eruption in 1,300 years. When volcanic ash fills the atmosphere, it blocks the sun, cooling the earth. The major impact of the final eruption was felt in 1816, the famous “year without a summer”.
Have the gates of death been shown to you?
Have you seen the gates of the deepest darkness?
- Job 38:17
Snow in June and frost in August caused crop failure, famine, and widespread typhus outbreaks.
From whose womb comes the ice?
Who gives birth to the frost from the heavens
- 38:29
The death and suffering was felt worldwide. It forced many New Englanders to migrate, accelerating America’s westward expansion. Eery fog blocked the light of the sun at midday. Mary Shelley and her friends in England encamped together to wait it out. The macabre noctilucent clouds, fog, and chill put them in a strange mood so they challenged each other to see who could write the scariest story. Shelley wrote Frankenstein.
The strangest effect of the volcano was on the ionosphere. The ash short-circuited the earth’s electric field, producing a pulse of cloud formation two months later on the other side of the world, handing the victory to Wellington and leaving England as Europe’s dominant power.
What is the way to the place
where the lightning is dispersed,
or the place where the east
winds are scattered over the earth?
Who cuts a channel for the torrents of rain,
and a path for the thunderstorm,
to water a land where no one lives,
an uninhabited desert,
to satisfy a desolate wasteland
and make it sprout with grass?
Does the rain have a father?
Who fathers the drops of dew?
- Job 38:24-28, NIV
Yes, God prepared the snow and ice for “days of war and battle” and destroyed the Grand Armee, one of the largest armies ever assembled. He used volcanoes to disperse lightning and cause condensation, literally fathering the drops of dew.
God offered mankind this challenge:
Who has the wisdom to count the clouds?
Who can tip over the water jars of the heavens
when the dust becomes hard
and the clods of earth stick together?
- Job 38:37-38
In 1891, Louis Gathmann first theorized a means of seeding clouds using liquid CO2 to cause rain on command, to tip the water jars of heaven. Practical methods would become feasible during the next generation.
The laws of gravity were discovered during the previous generation, but during this time, men like Gauss, Faraday and Maxwell discovered the laws of electromagnetism:
Do you know the laws of the heavens?
Can you set up God’s dominion over the earth?
...
Do you send the lightning bolts on their way?
Do they report to you, ‘Here we are’?
- 38:33,35, NIV
How amazing! It was during this generation that mankind learned just that – how to send lightning bolts on their way. Samuel F. B. Morse, Leonard Gale, and Joseph Henry created the Telegraph, which can report “Here we are” at great distances. This was followed by the telephone (by Meucci of Italy, Borseul of France, and Bell of America), and electrical power transmission systems of Edison, Tesla and Westinghouse. Truly, in those days, God spoke of his power – electric power. Even Bell acknowledged this, for his first Telegraph message was, “What hath God wrought?”
What God wrought during this period was to thrust England into prominence as the greatest empire of all time:
“Do you hunt the prey for the lioness
and satisfy the hunger of the lions
when they crouch in their dens
or lie in wait in a thicket?
- Job 38:39-40, NIV
Who was the lioness? Victoria, Queen of England and Empress of India. Britain’s symbol is a lion, and Victoria ruled as its lioness for sixty-three years. (A prophecy in Revelation also invokes a female lion, another reference the the British Empire under Victoria. See 153 and the Fifth Trumpet for details.) She reigned longer than all her predecessors and oversaw a massive expansion of the British Empire. Many peoples fell prey to her navy. At one point, Britain devoted a quarter of all expenditures to fighting the slave trade on land and sea.
“Have you ever given orders to the morning,
or shown the dawn its place,
that it might take the earth by the edges
and shake the wicked out of it?
- Job 38:12-13, NIV
It was once said that “the sun never sets on the British Empire”. For a time, a part of Britain was always seeing the dawn. She took the whole earth by the edges (roughly a quarter of all the world’s land and people) and shook the wicked – slave traders – out of it.
And for her pride and thievery of the wealth of the nations, for exceeding the authority granted to her by God, England would be punished in the next generation by the Second World War, then be stripped of most of her colonies. As for this generation, it ended with the horror of the Great War.
Who provides food for the raven
when its young cry out to God
and wander about for lack of food?
- Job 38:41, NIV
God provided food for the raven, from the corpses littering the battlefields of Europe. The end of Job 38 announced the end of the great kingdoms and empires of Europe.
Quite the journey we are on, no?
Links to the other articles in this section:
Spiritual Growth Introduction to the articles about spiritual growth.
What are Life's Twelve Most Important Questions? If you can answer these questions, you know the way better than the Mandelorian.
What are the Heavenly Treasures? It is one thing to list these treasures, quite another to acquire them!
The Harvest Pattern of Jesus A tactical pattern for overcoming an individual obstacle and reaping a single spiritual harvest.
The Growth Pattern of Solomon Overview of a strategic pattern to help you plan your whole life.
There is a Season The chapter from Peace, like Solomon Never Knew where I first introduced the Growth Pattern.
The Apostle Paul's Discipleship Program Shows how the first seven letters of Paul to the churches are arranged according to the Growth Pattern.
Seven Facets of Spirit-led Discipleship The Sermon on the Mount conforms to the Growth Pattern.
The Motherhood Pattern A strategic pattern for women.
The Law Pattern of Moses The law does more than restrict; it also guides.
- Which Ten Commandments? The Harvest and Growth Patterns fit perfectly into the Law Pattern.
- Matthew and the Law of Christ The Gospel of Matthew is a perfect realization of the Law Pattern. It helps us understand what the Apostle Paul meant by the phrase "the law of Christ".
The Journey Pattern It is a long journey back to Eden.
Emotional Prophecies of the Psalms
Job and the Ways to Talk to God
Job Description for a Savior Job knew what he needed in a savior. Do you?
Dreams Dreams can guide you, paralyze you, or lead you astray. In my case, it was all three.
Spiritual Warfare Somebody IS out to get you.
