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Snobbery


I know that my Redeemer lives, and that in the end, he will stand on the earth. (Job 19:25)
          We don’t know when Job was written, or by whom. There are indications that place it around the time of Abraham, somewhere around 2000 BC. Some people suggest that it was written around the time of Solomon, roughly 1000 BC. Still, others place it about the time of Daniel, about 600 BC. He is mentioned in the book of Ezekiel (14:14) where God tells Ezekiel that even if Noah, Daniel, and Job were in a sinful land, they, not the sinning people, would be spared. For me, the fact that there is no mention of the Jews or anything specifically Jewish suggests the earliest date. We know that there were God-followers other than Abraham at that time, because Melchizedek, the king of Salem was a priest of God that Abraham met. 
         The reason all of this is important is that, at least to the best of my knowledge, the prophecies about a redeemer standing on the earth came later. This brings us to the question of whether Job was a prophet, or whether this idea was shared in writings we have since lost. 
          We tend to be temporally biased in that we think that we are so smart, and the people of the times before ours were somehow less intelligent. I’m not sure that snobbery is justified. Job said he knew that his Redeemer lives. Whether he knew because God revealed it specifically to him, or because he was taught so in his childhood education, the idea of a Redeemer who not only lived then but would also live at the end and stand on the earth was part of the bedrock of his faith.
          Jesus once taught that when we go to a feast, we should not sit in the place of honor, because we might get kicked out. I have to wonder whether the rug of our superiority isn’t going to be pulled out from under us when we discover how much of our supposed knowledge isn’t all we claim it to be.

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