Episode 1: Ominous Clouds Gather Momentum on the Horizon

                                                Job 1: 6 – 12.

6 Now there was a day when the sons of God came to present themselves before the Lord, and Satan came also among them.

                                                               Reviewing

               we have been preoccupied with consideration of the attitudinal substances of Job’s priesthood, which we said predated the more copious and more parablic Moses’s Law and its priesthood (Job 1: 5). From there we assayed to unravel the mind of God about priest and kings He is making on the earth. Further still, we explored the History of the Life of the Priest of God – again in the light of the New Testament, though the Holy Spirit also took us through the book of Ezekiel.

                Now, starting from verse 6 of chapter one of the book of Job, the story begins to gather momentum; there appear ominous clouds on the horizon. The sons of God came to present themselves before the Lord. Satan was also there! Evidently, God was fascinated and inquired of him of his activities. Satan was quick to present his case, but fell short of the whole truth. Between God and him the unspoken message was all of a shout. The Holy Spirit, the author, actually points out something to us.  Thew story continues.

                The Lord Himself pointed out to Satan on earth – upon which he said he had been going up and down; to and fro – a man who had the potentialities of His Son in whom and for whom He created the world and the cosmos. Satan’s arguments fall in successive rapidity. And, before one could draw a breath, he has succeeded in wrenching a permission to sift Job in order to prove his case; God, a stakeholder in the righteous walk of Job, also needs a point to prove in this case besides the point that He is the just and true One! Now, the battle is joined and Job, a representation of man in this story, is caught between the duo out to prove, each a point, not only contradicting in nature but are mutually exclusive.     

                Today, we shall be engaging a certain phrase which will ground and prepare us  for later reflections in our meditation.

                                                The  sons of God

                The phrase first occurs in Genesis 6: 2, 4; the second, third and fourth occurrences are in the book of Job.

 Genesis 6: 2: . . .that the sons of God saw the daughters of men. . .they took them wives of all which they chose. This phrase has been argued to mean the godly line of the sons of Seth coming to take wives from among the ungodly daughters of wicked Cain. It is not so clearly stated in that passage or any other passage for that matter that this is about the godly Sethites taking taking wives from wicked Cainites. Another school believes that the phrase means angels. A counter argument is that angels are sexless, do not marry, according to Jesus. But then again, Jude 6 speaks of the angels which kept not their first estate, but left their own habitation. Pastor Ernest Paul advanced an argument recently. He argued that if the phrase means the godly line of Set, then they, the godly line should have been spared in the course of the destruction of the flood.

                There is a need to get this clear. We are not here to argue a theological point; we are trying to get on a stable rock of faith.

 Job 38:7 reveals the identity of these beings called the sons of God, using parallelism in Hebraic poetry: when the morning stars sang together and all the sons of God shouted for joy. Here, the phrase morning stars parallels or is parallel to the other phrase sons of God. In other words, one means the other. Who or what are stars? According to the Lord Jesus, stars are angels – which may be spirit or human angels [Rev. 1: 20]. The word morning means brilliant, dawn, breaking of the day or daylight; this indicates that there are angels associated with the brightness or the brilliance of the dawn. It is worthy of note that the star is a gigantic mass of gas around which all other masses gravitate and orbit. In essence, stars are centres of life, above average. From what we have seen, it is evident that the sons of God of Job 1: 6 and 2:1 are of the realms of heaven; they were certainly spirits of stature, in their making and nature; they had the same configuration of existence as, but  are apart from, the being called Satan.