Job 17
1
My breath is corrupt, my days are extinct, the graves are ready for me.
2
Are there not mockers with me? and doth not mine eye continue in their provocation?
3
Lay down now, put me in a surety with thee; who is he that will strike hands with me?
4
For thou hast hid their heart from understanding: therefore shalt thou not exalt them.
5
He that speaketh flattery to his friends, even the eyes of his children shall fail.
6
He hath made me also a byword of the people; and aforetime I was as a tabret.
7
Mine eye also is dim by reason of sorrow, and all my members are as a shadow.
8
Upright men shall be astonied at this, and the innocent shall stir up himself against the hypocrite.
9
The righteous also shall hold on his way, and he that hath clean hands shall be stronger and stronger.
10
But as for you all, do ye return, and come now: for I cannot find one wise man among you.
11
My days are past, my purposes are broken off, even the thoughts of my heart.
12
They change the night into day: the light is short because of darkness.
13
If I wait, the grave is mine house: I have made my bed in the darkness.
14
I have said to corruption, Thou art my father: to the worm, Thou are my mother, and my sister.
15
And where is now my hope? as for my hope, who shall see it?
16
They shall go down to the bars of the pit, when our rest together is in the dust.
True Christian Religion #49
49. THE OMNIPOTENCE, OMNISCIENCE AND OMNIPRESENCE OF GOD
I have dealt with the Divine Love and the Divine Wisdom and shown that these two make up the Divine Essence. I now proceed to the omnipotence, omniscience and omnipresence of God, because these three emanate from the Divine Love and the Divine Wisdom, much as the power and presence of the sun are felt in every single part of this world by means of its heat and light. The heat from the sun of the spiritual world, in the midst of which is Jehovah God, is in its essence Divine Love, and its light is in its essence Divine Wisdom. Hence it is plain that just as infinity, immensity and eternity are properties of the Divine Being (Esse), so omnipotence, omniscience and omnipresence are properties of the Divine Essence. However, these three properties of the Divine Essence have up to now not been understood, through ignorance of the ways in which they proceed, that is, the laws of order. They need therefore to have light shed upon them by the following series of propositions.
(i) Omnipotence, omniscience and omnipresence are properties of the Divine Wisdom resulting from the Divine Love.
(ii) The omnipotence, omniscience and omnipresence of God cannot be recognised except through a knowledge of order, and these facts about order: that God is order, and that He introduced order into the universe and all its parts simultaneously with its creation.
(iii) God's omnipotence proceeds and works in the universe and all its parts in accordance with the laws of His order.
(iv) God is omniscient, that is, He perceives, sees and knows down to the tiniest detail everything that happens according to order; and from these things also what happens contrary to order.
(v) God is present everywhere from first to last in His order.
(vi) Man was created to be a form for Divine Order.
(vii) Man has from Divine Omnipotence power against evil and falsity, and from Divine Omniscience wisdom about good and truth, and from Divine Omnipresence is in God, to the extent that he lives in accordance with the Divine order.
These propositions must now be discussed one by one.
