Louis, I don't think I'm going to take the time right now to respond again to the "we used to be angels" claim, since we've had scriptures before that clearly indicate a temporal and fleshly beginning for each human being. And I won't try to explain that Job is a book of poetry, and uses rhetorical questions (such as Where were you when I laid the foundation of the earth? in Job 38:4 or Can you lift up your voice to the clouds, so that a flood of waters may cover you? in Job 38:34 or Do you give the horse its might in Job 39:19) when God confronts Job with Job's own shortcomings, resulting in Job's complete embarassment (Job 42:1-6) because he wasn't there, didn't have those answers, and didn't have that power or knowledge. Nor will I dwell on the fact that "made with" the behemoth (Job 40:15) doesn't tell us anything about the time of origin of Job, except that he and the behemoth are both creatures whose origin lies in God's design, nothing there about time, whether we speculate about dinosaurs or not, just that God made both Job and the Behemoth. I won't even delve into the problems of making Job a descendant of Abraham, and there are plenty of reasons to doubt that, nor go into reasons to be sure that the "Job" or Jashub of Genesis 46:13 (as in Num. 26:24, 1 Chron. 7:1) was not the Job of the poetic book. I will at the moment say very little about the argument you raise based on "torah" or "law" in Job 22:22, except that Abraham had already been commended for keeping God's laws (torah) in Genesis 26:5, long before Sinai, and apparently before Job. I do appreciate that Job had an expectation of resurrection from the dead and believed a redeemer would come. But the one thing I really want to know, and hope you will answer for me, is who is "Dr. Stier"? If you've referred to him before I overlooked it, and I am curious.
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