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Job 26:13
13 By his spirit [ruwach] he hath garnished [shiphrah] the heavens [shamayim]; his hand [yad] hath formed [chuwl] the crooked [bariyach] serpent [nachash]. KJV-Interlinear
13 'By His breath the heavens are cleared; His hand has pierced the fleeing serpent. NASB
The word for spirit sometimes refers to ones breath, to the spirit of ones essence, to the power of ones own will. Sometimes it refers to the Holy Spirit, but that deity is not in view here. Not by Himself anyway.
Job is referring to Gods creative function in the creation of the heavens of the universe. He created the sun and the moon and the stars beyond. God did not randomly throw these objects into space, but arranged them as one would decorate a large room.
The serpent is the dragon. Typically this is a reference to the constellation Draco, which circles the North Pole. Today the North Star is Polaris, but back in 2700 B.C., Thuban was the North Polar star. Thuban was in the head of the dragon constellation.
There a lot of mythical stories surrounding the constellations, including the oldest of those myths, which was that battles occurred on the earth between man and dragons, and when the dragons were defeated, the gods threw the dragons up into the night sky, sometimes breaking them into two pieces, one piece residing in the sky and the other piece remaining on the earth.
Though the origins of the constellation names is not known, this book of Job along with other ancient writings points to the ancient Mesopotamians as the source. This would imply that Noah and his three sons, who lived both before and after the flood, told stories of the great creature people (breeding between women and angels) from Gen. 6, and these stories developed into the stories and mythology that we are familiar with today.
The constellations become a means of recording the stories of the battles between good and evil, between God and Satan, between man and demon.
Psa. 33:6
6 By the word of the Lord the heavens were made, And by the breath of His mouth all their host. NASB
God not only created the universe, but He arranged the stars, decorated the heavens, not by some random or natural explosive event, but by means of His will through design and arrangement.
Not only were the stories of ancient events handed down through verbal communication, recorded in the written scriptures, but they are also recorded in the names and mythological stories (as we know them), from the stars themselves.
Back in those ancient times, people knew of God and the stories of creation. People knew the fundamental proverbs and principles of truth. As we have seen, their applications sometimes differed but their knowledge and acceptance of life and history did not.
Today, we face a very different view of doctrine. Today we have a growing trend of anti-truth, anti-God, anti-Christian attitudes.
Not only are the stories of old being systematically rejected as nonsense, but principles of fundamental social order are being rejected as well.
Through attempts to render illegal all prayer in the schools, to separate all links between faith and government, to gain acceptance between for all sorts of alternate lifestyles, and to separate people from their responsibilities at home and abroad, thus the trends of the world to disengage itself totally from God is all too evident.
To disengage from God is to disengage from truth. And once truth is gone, then lies are all that remain.
Way back then, people had virtually no technology, no science, no knowledge as we have today, but they did have common sense and could see life reasonably clearly. People knew their place and they knew Gods place.
Today we have so much information saturating the airways, and yet the attitude of the day is to ridicule the stories from scripture, and to disregard the teachings of old, as outdated and non-relevant to life.
Today people think that they know more, and are better off than those who lived in the past. But today, beliefs are formed from theories, conjecture, imagination, consensus and so forth, rather than on objective facts. Even the methodologies in todays sciences, of the past, make many assumptions in order to make themselves legitimate.
Mans attitude will vacillate for and against God, and in time, it will generally fade away from truth, but Gods truth will never change and man can never totally eliminate it from history. For man can no more change truth than he can change the positions of the stars.
