New Shoots

Job 14:6-13 – So look away from him and let him alone, till he has put in his time like a hired laborer. “At least there is hope for a tree: If it is cut down, it will sprout again, and its new shoots will not fail. Its roots may grow old in the ground and its stump die in the soil, yet at the scent of water it will bud and put forth shoots like a plant. But a man dies and is laid low; he breathes his last and is no more. As the water of a lake dries up or a riverbed becomes parched and dry, so he lies down and does not rise; till the heavens are no more, people will not awake or be roused from their sleep. “If only you would hide me in the grave and conceal me till your anger has passed! If only you would set me a time and then remember me!

Isaiah 60:21 – Then all your people will be righteous and they will possess the land forever. They are the shoot I have planted, the work of my hands, for the display of my splendor.

Zechariah 10:1 – Ask the Lord for rain in the springtime; it is the Lord who sends the thunderstorms. He gives showers of rain to all people, and plants of the field to everyone.

Genesis 8:1 – But God remembered Noah and all the wild animals and the livestock that were with him in the ark, and he sent a wind over the earth, and the waters receded.

Application:

• ·         People are like a flower that lives its short life and is gone, not like a tree that revives even after it has been cut down.
• ·         The Lord, not the Canaanite god Baal, is the one who controls the weather and the rain, giving life and fertility to the land. Therefore God’s people are to pray to and trust in Him.
• ·         Although resurrection in the fullest sense is not taught here, Job is saying that if God so desires He is able to hide Job in the grave, then raise him back to life at a time when the divine anger is past.

All Scripture verses taken from NIV