God intended man to have dominion over all the animal creation and to literally be able to control the ordinances of the heavens from earth.

What’s incredible is that this means there’s a way for man today to do these types of things if only he can discover it!

“There are thirteen animals God points out to Job that he should be able to control but can’t, and the behemoth is the thirteenth one,” says Jordan. “The behemoth, when you study the passage, turns out to be the Antichrist. Leviathan, who is the fourteenth in chapter 41, is Satan. By the way, thirteen’s a bad number in the Bible; it’s the number associated with rebellion.”

God asks Job, in essence, “Can you identify the gestation period of these animals and control that, Job?”

In Job 39:5, the question is, “Who hath sent out the wild ass free? or who hath loosed the bands of the wild ass?” He’s saying, “Can you go out there and tame a wild ass and tell him what to do?” In verse 9, He asks, “Will the unicorn be willing to serve thee, or abide by thy crib?”

*****

During Paul’s ministry there were many evil reports about him; lies and defamation kind of stuff.

As a result, says Jordan, “It seemed as if he was unknown. It seemed what he was doing was little and insignificant and dying out, and it looked like God was chastening him and that he was a sorrowful, poor, pitiful, wretched mess of a ministry. That’s just the way it looked. You see, we’re not the first people anybody ever asked, ‘How many people go to your church?’ ”

*****

Paul says he was beaten “in stripes above measure. . . Of the Jews five times received I forty stripes save one. Thrice was I beaten with rods, once was I stoned, thrice I suffered shipwreck, a night and a day I have been in the deep. . .”

Jordan explains, “The guy had been beaten so many times he couldn’t even remember it. There are four other times he was beaten that aren’t recorded in the Book of Acts. Paul says he was beaten ‘within an inch of his life.’

“He says he was shipwrecked three times. You know, if I’d been in an airplane crash once I think I probably wouldn’t fly again. He’d been in three shipwrecks before Acts 20 and none of them are recorded in the Book of Acts!”

*****

Jordan continues, “The Corinthians had accused Paul of being fickle and undependable—‘You say one thing and do something else; You can’t trust this guy,’ and that kind of thing.

“And so he talks to them about something you and I have to do all the time in life and that’s make decisions. You know, in your Christian life, decision-making according to the will of God is a real issue, and Paul, rather than using theologian terminology, and talking about it all as though he thought God had this pre-arranged life map laid out for him, and that all he had to do was find the specific place God wanted him to be tomorrow, and was God calling him to go to this town or that town, and rather than after going somewhere saying, ‘See how God led me here; that circumstance was God telling me to go here, and God had his hand in leading me’. . . You see, Paul was not a Calvinist; he was not a super-predestinarian and he did not use that kind of terminology. II Cor. 2:1 is one the great verses in Paul’s epistles about how he describes what he did. He says, ‘But I determined this with myself. . .’

“That is, he made wise decisions based on the way of wisdom. He took the truth of God’s Word—what he understood God’s Word to mandate and teach—and he made the best decisions he could make in the circumstances he found himself in.

“By the way, Paul lived in the era in the Acts period—in the transition period before the Word of God was complete—where there were times he did have direct instructions from God about where to go and where not to go. For example, He was going into an area one time and the Spirit of God came and said, ‘You can’t go there.’ So he had direct intervention in times of his life as an apostle. They were not the norm, they were the abnormal; extra-normal kind of thing.

“Now, you today won’t have any of those experiences at all. One, you’re not an apostle and, two, you’ve got the completed Word of God that Paul didn’t have, so you don’t need to look for God appearing to you or sending an angel to talk to you; you have all the instruction you’ll ever need in His Word!”