Sunday Sermonette

Sending Messages by Lightning
December 20, 2009

"Canst thou send lightnings, that they may go, and say unto thee, Here we are?" (Job 38:35)

This question posed to Job was one of about 77 rhetorical questions in the remarkable divine monologue of God recorded in Job 38 and 39. This question included a reference to the fearful phenomena of thunder and lightning, which in ancient times were well-known, of course, and so was static electricity.

However, the fact that lightning is really just moving electricity was not fully recognized until Ben Franklin's famous kite experiment in the mid-eighteenth century. Furthermore, the fact that electricity can actually "go," and even carry information with it, was a discovery of quite recent times. God had even spoken of "a way |that is, a path| for the lightning of thunder" (Job 38:25).

Nowadays we have telegraph lines and telephones and radios and televisions and all sorts of devices whereby information is carried by these "lightnings" all over the world. There is even a worldwide web (an "information super highway," some have called it), enabling anyone to communicate electronically with the whole wide world if he wishes to do so, and to acquire just about any information he needs or which someone wants to "e-mail" him.

It is interesting, too, that any kind of formal information transmission program (such as from a television studio) will usually begin with an announcer saying, in effect: "Well, here we are!" and the "lightnings" carry these greetings practically instantaneously to any who are there to receive them.

All of this is the result of modern, sophisticated science and technology. Yet here it is clearly intimated as at least a possibility in what is probably the oldest book in the Bible!

h/t: Henry M Morris, Institute For Creation Research