The Folly of Comfortable Counsel: Job 12:1-6
Introduction: The School of Suffering
We come now to Job's reply to his friends, and particularly to Zophar. And what we find is not a man cowed by their theological certainties, but a man sharpened by them. Job has been enrolled in the school of suffering, a curriculum that God Himself has designed, and one of the first lessons you learn there is how to spot the hollow confidence of those who have never had to take the final exam. Job's friends have come to him with their neat little doctrinal packages, all tied up with the string of retributive justice. They have a very simple equation: righteousness plus piety equals prosperity, while sin equals suffering. Since Job is suffering, he must be a great sinner. Q.E.D.
This is the kind of tidy, black-and-white theology that works wonderfully well in a comfortable armchair, but it shatters to pieces on the ash heap. Job's friends are operating with a map of the world that is, in its basic outlines, correct. God does bless the righteous and judge the wicked. But their map is a cheap, two-dimensional printout, and Job is living in the rugged, three-dimensional territory. He knows, with the certainty of his own skin and his own soul, that their application of this truth to his situation is profoundly and cruelly wrong.
And so, Job responds not with a whimper, but with a blast of sanctified sarcasm. He is going to dismantle their simplistic worldview piece by piece. He is going to show them that their wisdom is the common property of every beast of the field and bird of the air. He is going to demonstrate that the sovereignty of God is far wilder, far more mysterious, and far more terrifying than their domesticated version allows. And in doing so, he is going to give voice to a truth that echoes down through the centuries: the man who truly fears God will often find himself a laughingstock to those whose theology is merely a tool for maintaining their own comfort and ease.
This passage is a necessary corrective for every generation of the church. We are always tempted to reduce the faith to a set of manageable formulas, to create a god who fits neatly into our systems. But the God of the Bible, the God of Job, refuses to be domesticated. He is the God who rides on the whirlwind, and sometimes, He brings the whirlwind right through our living rooms. Job is learning to trust this God, even as his friends are content to merely explain Him.
The Text
Then Job answered and said, "Truly then you are the people, And with you wisdom will die! But I have a heart of wisdom as well as you; I do not fall short of you. And who does not know such things as these? I am a laughingstock to my friends, The one who called on God and He answered him; The righteous and blameless man is a laughingstock. As for upheaval, there is only contempt by the one who acts at ease, But it is prepared for those whose feet slip. The tents of the destroyers are complacent, And those who provoke God are secure, Whom God brings into their power."
(Job 12:1-6 LSB)
Sanctified Sarcasm (v. 1-3)
Job opens his response with a heavy dose of irony, turning his friends' condescension back on them.
"Truly then you are the people, And with you wisdom will die! But I have a heart of wisdom as well as you; I do not fall short of you. And who does not know such things as these?" (Job 12:1-3)
You can almost hear the bitter laugh in Job's voice. "No doubt about it, you three are the ones. You've cornered the market on wisdom. When you die, the world will be plunged into intellectual darkness." This is not petty bitterness; it is a righteous rebuke of their intellectual pride. They had come as counselors, but they had acted as prosecutors, assuming a monopoly on understanding God's ways. Job's sarcasm is a pinprick to their inflated self-importance.
He then asserts his own standing. "But I have a heart of wisdom as well as you." The Hebrew word for heart, leb, refers to the seat of understanding and intellect. Job is saying, "I have a mind too. I am not your intellectual inferior." This is important. Job is not rejecting wisdom itself; he is rejecting their shallow, misapplied version of it. He is not setting feeling against fact, or experience against doctrine. He is arguing that his experience of suffering has given him a deeper, more profound insight into the very doctrines they are wielding like a club.
And then he delivers the knockout blow: "And who does not know such things as these?" He tells them that their profound insights, the theological gems they have been dispensing, are common knowledge. They are spiritual truisms. Later in the chapter, he will say that even the beasts and the birds could teach them these things. They think they are offering deep, surgical analysis, but they are merely stating the obvious, and stating it badly. The problem is not that what they say is entirely false, but that it is a simplistic truth that completely fails to account for the brutal reality of Job's life, or for the observable reality of the world.
The Mockery of the Righteous (v. 4)
Here, Job pivots from their intellectual pride to the painful irony of his own situation.
"I am a laughingstock to my friends, The one who called on God and He answered him; The righteous and blameless man is a laughingstock." (Job 12:4)
This is the heart of his lament. The very ones who should be his comfort have become his mockers. And the irony is thick. He is a man who had a genuine relationship with God, one "who called on God and He answered him." This was his testimony. His righteousness was not a sham. God Himself testified that Job was "blameless and upright" (Job 1:8). And for this very reason, he is now a laughingstock.
This is a profound spiritual principle. The world, and even the worldly church, can tolerate a certain kind of generic, civil religion. But it cannot tolerate genuine, God-attested righteousness when that righteousness is accompanied by inexplicable suffering. It short-circuits their entire system. If a man like Job can suffer like this, then their comfortable formulas are worthless. Their god is too small. And rather than abandon their system and worship the true, sovereign God, it is far easier to condemn the man. They mock him to protect their own fragile worldview.
This is a prefiguring of the cross. Who was more righteous and blameless than the Lord Jesus? Who called on God and was heard by Him more than the Son? And yet, who was more mocked? "He saved others; let him save himself if he is the Christ of God, his Chosen One!" (Luke 23:35). The cross is the ultimate demonstration that the world's wisdom is foolishness. The deepest righteousness is met with the deepest scorn. The righteous man is a laughingstock. If you are determined to live a godly life in Christ Jesus, you must be prepared to be misunderstood, slandered, and yes, mocked, often by the very people who claim to be on God's side.
The Contempt of the Comfortable (v. 5)
Job now diagnoses the root of his friends' attitude: the arrogance that comes from a life of ease.
"As for upheaval, there is only contempt by the one who acts at ease, But it is prepared for those whose feet slip." (Job 12:5)
This is a sharp piece of wisdom literature in its own right. "The one who acts at ease," the man whose life is comfortable and secure, looks upon the calamity of another with contempt. He cannot imagine it happening to him, and so he assumes the sufferer must have done something to deserve it. It is a form of self-protection. By judging the man whose feet have slipped, he reassures himself that his own feet are firmly planted on the ground of his own merit.
The phrase "a lamp is despised in the thought of one who is at ease" (as some translations render it) paints a vivid picture. A man walking in broad daylight has no use for a lamp; he might even kick it out of his path. But when darkness falls, that lamp becomes precious. Job's friends are walking in the daylight of their prosperity. They despise the "lamp" of Job's suffering because they don't think they need the light it sheds on the true nature of God's sovereignty. They are content with their sunshine theology.
But Job says that this contempt, this upheaval, is "prepared for those whose feet slip." He is warning them. Their ease is not guaranteed. The same sovereign God who brought Job low can just as easily trip them up. Their smug security is an illusion. They are one bad day away from being in Job's position, and they are utterly unprepared for it because their theology has no category for a blameless man who suffers.
The Prosperity of the Wicked (v. 6)
Finally, Job throws the ultimate wrench into their simplistic system: the undeniable reality that the wicked often prosper.
"The tents of the destroyers are complacent, And those who provoke God are secure, Whom God brings into their power." (Job 12:6)
This is the fact that their neat equation cannot solve. If suffering is always the result of sin, then how do you explain the comfortable, secure, prosperous lives of wicked men? Job looks around and sees that "the tents of the destroyers are complacent." Robbers, tyrants, and idolaters are living the good life. Those who openly "provoke God are secure."
This is not the complaint of an envious man. This is the observation of a realist. Job is forcing his friends to look at the world as it actually is, not as their tidy theology says it ought to be. Asaph wrestled with this same problem in Psalm 73, where he says his feet almost slipped when he "saw the prosperity of the wicked." The world is filled with apparent contradictions to the justice of God.
And notice Job's final, devastating clause: "Whom God brings into their power." Or as it can be translated, "who bring their god in their hand." This could refer to idolaters who carry their gods with them, or more likely, it means that their own strength is their god. But the point is clear: God, in His mysterious sovereignty, allows this to happen. He is the one who ultimately governs all things. This is not a denial of God's justice, but an affirmation of His sovereignty, which is far more complex than a simple tit-for-tat system of rewards and punishments in this life. Job is affirming a bigger, more inscrutable doctrine of God's providence than his friends can handle.
Conclusion: From the Ash Heap to the Cross
In these six verses, Job has utterly dismantled the shallow counsel of his friends. He has exposed their pride, diagnosed their comfortable contempt, and confronted them with the hard realities of a world governed by a sovereign God whose ways are not our ways.
The problem of the righteous sufferer and the prosperous wicked is not ultimately resolved in the book of Job by a neat explanation. It is resolved by an encounter. God does not give Job a flowchart explaining the mechanics of His providence. He gives Job Himself. He shows up in the whirlwind and reveals His majesty, His wisdom, and His power in creation. The answer to Job's suffering is not a proposition, but a Person.
And for us, who live on this side of the whirlwind, the answer is the same, but clearer still. The answer is the Person of Jesus Christ. At the cross, we see the ultimate paradox. We see the only truly righteous and blameless man becoming the ultimate laughingstock. We see the Son of God, who was never "at ease," despised and rejected. We see the powers of darkness, the "tents of the destroyers," seemingly secure in their victory.
The cross is God's definitive statement on the problem of suffering. It tells us that God has not remained aloof from our pain, but has entered into it in the person of His Son. It tells us that suffering, in the hands of a sovereign God, can be the very instrument of our redemption. And it tells us that the prosperity of the wicked is a fleeting illusion, a tent pitched on the edge of a cliff. Their security will end at the grave, but the blameless man, the one who trusts in Christ, has a security that death cannot touch.
Therefore, when you suffer, do not listen to the comfortable counsel of those whose god is too small. Do not despair when you are made a laughingstock for your faith. Look to Job, and see a man who refused to let go of God even when he could not understand Him. And then look to Jesus, the greater Job, who endured the ultimate mockery and the ultimate suffering, so that in Him, we might be called the righteousness of God.