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Day 143, or May the 23rd. Let me tell you the facts again. Our thoughts today are rooted

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in Job chapter 21 verse 2. Listen carefully to my words. Let this be the consolation you

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give me.

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First the big picture surrounding this verse. Job's friend Zophar gets rather frustrated

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with Job, as he doesn't seem to have heard what he told him earlier, so he repeats it.

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He repeats that the wicked do not thrive, and stresses this truth by telling Job that

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everyone knows that, and it's a fact that is rooted in history and believed by everyone

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who knows anything. He seems to ignore the fact that some wicked men do seem to thrive

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in order to make his point. After all, why let a fact or two get in the way of a great

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theory that you have believed all your life? With a note of desperation, Job responds by

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asking Zophar to listen carefully, and he will explain again why he doesn't believe

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what Zophar has told him for the second time. He sounds a little like a primary school teacher,

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who has a pupil in front of them who will not change their mind even though a perfectly

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reasonable explanation has been given to encourage them to do so.

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And now our action step for today. Of course, simply repeating something doesn't make

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it true, but it does make it memorable. That's why it's very helpful, indeed essential,

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to regularly re-read and ponder the truths of the Bible. If we are not careful, things

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can get jumbled in our Western minds that are so used to writing things down rather

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than relying on our memory. I can recall too many times checking a detail in a Bible story

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or parable only to find that the text doesn't actually say what I thought. In the days of

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oral tradition, memories were very reliable because that's all they had to pass on an

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account from generation to generation. Today we need to read and re-read. We need to marinate

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our minds with the Scriptures, and then we know we have the truth. And as the Bible says,

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the truth will set us free.