10. The flood is passed in chapter eight, and “man’s days become as a shadow.” The law of God’s natural Providence, in cause and effect, is by Job and his friends completely ignored. His own condition will look him in the face with terrible effect, asking an explanation. To such an ordeal, with Bildad framing an enthusiastic argument upon the evidences of special Providence in the affliction, was Job brought. He can logically prove Job to be one of the worst of men. “Doth God pervert judgment?” To Job he saith, “If thou wast pure and upright, surely now he would awake for thee.” Job with his intuitions cannot see why the argument is not sound. “I know it is so of a truth.” To work thus upon the nerves of a sick man, who has been shut off from comprehensive views of God’s general Providence in law, is well calculated to break him down in impatience toward God. But Job replies, “If I say I am perfect it shall also prove me perverse. Though I were perfect, yet would I not know my soul; neither is there any daysman betwixt us, that he should lay his hand upon us both.” Zophar replied, “Know therefore that God exacteth of thee less than thine iniquity deserveth.” Job replied, “I could speak as you do if I were in your stead.” “Though he slay me, yet will I trust in him.” Job claims an honest integrity of purpose, though denying perfection in attainment. 10. For this noble stand he is rewarded on the spot with a prophetic view of what forms the first chapter in the “Little Book” of star-dates. Tracing time back by the precession of the equinoxes to where the sun crossed its spring equinox in Orion’s belt, he saw the commencement of man. Tracing the same line forward to the end of our race, where indeed time ends, he saw that it rested in Ash or the Great Bear (margin) incorrectly translated Arcturus; new version, Great Bear. Looking to the same kind of date of his own time, he saw the sun crossing the Pleiades. Looking at the full inauguration of Christ’s Kingdom on earth, represented by the termination of Job’s own sufferings, he saw the time measured in the Summer Solstitial colure going from under the Altar. “Thou madest Ash, Orion and the Pleiades, and the chambers of the south.” Here commences the “Little Book,” alluded to so often in prophecy, with four of the most important dates of history, but sealed upon the back part until the opening of the same by the “Lion of the Tribe of Judah” to his servant John. Here, perhaps all unconscious of their bearings on future history, he is picturing in the heavens, and dating by means of the precession of the equinoxes, the long periods, revolutions, changes and triumphs his sufferings were to take him, followed by the long prosperity of the Church of Christ in the latter day.