Job Ploughing.
Let us for a little bit of fun, explore the landholdings of Job, and his potential expansive empire. His first entry of the size of his empire is noted in Job 1:1-3 “There was a man in the land of Uz, whose name [was] Job; and that man was perfect and upright, and one that feared God, and eschewed evil. And there were born unto him seven sons and three daughters. His substance also was seven thousand sheep, and three thousand camels, and five hundred yoke of oxen, and five hundred she asses, and a very great household; so that this man was the greatest of all the men of the east.”
From my understanding, camels were like “Line-haul Trucking.” This was used for import export and trade, yoke of oxen were in today’s terms plain old tractors. And this is where we want to focus our attention upon today. Job had in his shed some 500 tractors to do his farm work. Now Wikipedia – “oxgang”, tells us that a yoke of oxen can plough about 30 acres per season, so 500 will plough 15,000 acres or some 60 square kilometres. Now taking that he was a good cropper, he actually used all tractors/yoke of oxen, and that got about normal yields, he sowed about 600 ton of seed and harvested about 5 ton per acre or about 75,000 ton of wheat. Now if he sold the whole lot at a medium today’s price, his bank balance jumps up by some meagre $26 million, give or take a few million for good or so so harvests, or prices rise or fall. Now this is at his starting point, so now we move to his later days which are even more bountiful, and have fun with that.
Job 42:12-13 “So the LORD blessed the latter end of Job more than his beginning: for he had fourteen thousand sheep, and six thousand camels, and a thousand yoke of oxen, and a thousand she asses. He had also seven sons and three daughters.” From this we find that Job has doubled his empire and now if we play our fun and guess work, this is what we get.
Now a thousand yoke of oxen will plough some 30,000 acres per season, or some 120 square kilometres and in an average season his bank balance jumps a meagre $52 million. We have not added to his income what the Camel Trains brought in or what the She Asses were doing, what wool clip he got from the sheep or what he garnered from the stock sales of excess animals from his breeding systems, we actually have a huge corporation sketched out here for us.
From this we can guess that the whole economy of the area was very much reliant of Job being productive, so when Job lost all his wealth in a single moment, there were many many households and connected industries shut down. The Flour Mill had no grain, the weavers had no yarn as there was no wool for the spinners, shearers and shepherds, stockman and connected industries came to a sudden stop. The Import Export trade stopped as there was no cash to buy and no produce for them to move to another location. This is a total community disaster and all overnight, the areas whole economy had just disappeared.
Question; if you or I were Job, and had that considerable income at our disposal each year, would we be an outstanding Christian and community spirited as Job. Pretty much everyone worked directly or indirectly for Job. Far flung cities and economies were all directly connected to Job for wool, meat, grain, herbs and spices, silks and Jewels, Gold, Silver and so much more that came back and forth on those camels from their hauling produce to and from markets by Job’s Camel Trains.
God has entrusted each one of us with his precious treasure, the Gospel, are we feeding the spiritually starving about us with the Bread of Life or the Water of Salvation, or even feeding ourselves? Are we looking after the assets he has entrusted us with, maintaining them and multiplying them? What about Gods funds, are we supporting the Gospel Spreading, or just hoarding it up for Moths and Rust?
Jesus is coming back very soon to shut down this world system and installing his Empire, have you warned your friends and neighbours to give them opportunity to live in Heaven or will they look at you and chastise you with, “you knew all along, why have you not warned us and shared the Gospel with us so that we could be saved?”
“If we neglect these opportunities, the time will come when there will be spoken to us by those we have not warned, words of reproach and bitterness: “You knew of these terrible judgments that were coming. We were associated together, but you did not tell us. Why did you not warn us, that we might have escaped?” May God help us that we may not have upon our garments, because of our neglect, the blood of souls! We have a work to do in our world, a work similar to that which Christ performed. This spiritual work must precede every other interest of our lives. That which is temporal must ever be made secondary to the requirements of God. It will not profit us to put ourselves forward in this world, at the expense of our Christianity.” {RH 1907 }
