The Scheme for January and February can be found here

Job 24-26; Acts 10; Psalm 43-44

It is hard to read the complaint of Job and not see how all he sees is to be seen around us in this day. Bildad rebukes him, but Job immediately reveals how Bildad has proved the words of Job. So ready with his answer, Bildad is the one who has failed to help the powerless or assist the one who has not strength. Bildad seeks to make of God, nothing but an idol – one who can readily be described. So it is with the powerful and wicked who live by their own rules.

Job will have none of it – this attempt to reduce the mystery of the one before whom Sheol is naked and Abbadon has no covering, to a neat and tidy answer which will give comfort in the night. His ways are past finding out, as even the infant church discovers.

As it moves on in the story, as the gospel has gone seemingly as far as it can to those apprently on the edge of God’s story, the Samaritans – so it is discovered that the world of grace is not flat, it is round. Peter sees the sail let down, and is bid take his ship over the horizon of possibility. The vastness of God’s mercy is past finding out. The discovery that the Gentiles are recipients of Grace is as unimagineable to those in the days of the Apostles as . . . ? What is our horizon? How have we limited the Living one, the thunder of whose power none can understand?