Creation's Unavoidable Sermon Text: Job 12:7-12
Introduction: The Arrogance of the Comfortable
We come now to the book of Job, a book that many people, including many Christians, find profoundly unsettling. It is a book that refuses to give us easy, sentimental answers. It confronts us with the raw reality of righteous suffering and the even more painful reality of foolish counsel. We are in the middle of a debate. Job, having lost everything, is sitting on an ash heap, scraping his sores with a piece of pottery. And his friends, his counselors, have come to him with their tidy, systematic theology neatly packed in their luggage. Their central thesis is simple, straightforward, and dead wrong. It is the thesis of all karma-based religions and every prosperity preacher: God is a cosmic vending machine. If you put in a coin of righteousness, you get a candy bar of blessing. If you are suffering, it is because you put in a slug of sin.
Job's friends are not wicked men in the common sense. They are pious. They are religious. They say many things that are true, in the abstract. If you were to pull out many of their statements and put them on a decorative plaque, they would sound quite spiritual. But their application of these truths is a pastoral and theological disaster. They are trying to solve the mystery of God's providence with a pocket calculator. They are woodenly applying a general principle, that God blesses the righteous and punishes the wicked, to a specific case where God is doing something far more profound. They have a two-dimensional faith, and they are trying to make sense of a three-dimensional God.
In our text today, Job responds to this flat-earth theology. He is speaking to Zophar, but his words are for all the miserable comforters. And his essential point is this: what you are telling me is not some deep, secret wisdom. It is remedial. It is basic. In fact, it is so basic that even the animals know it. You are trying to school me with the ABCs, when the reality of my situation is a far more complex grammar. Job's response is a masterclass in sarcasm, but it is a holy sarcasm. He is not just defending his own integrity; he is defending the very character of God against the small, manageable idol his friends have constructed.
Our secular age commits the same error as Job's friends, just from the other direction. They see suffering and conclude there is no God, or that if He exists, He must be either impotent or malicious. They too have a small, manageable god, the god of their own reason, and he must operate according to their standards of fairness. Job, in his anguish, pushes back against both the simplistic piety of his friends and the incipient atheism that such piety produces. He does so by pointing to the world itself. The world is God's sermon, preached every moment of every day, and its central theme is the absolute sovereignty of its Creator.
The Text
"But now ask the beasts, and let them instruct you; And the birds of the sky, and let them tell you. Or muse to the earth, and let it instruct you; And let the fish of the sea recount it to you. Who among all these does not know That the hand of Yahweh has done this, In whose hand is the life of every living thing, And the breath of all the flesh of man? Does not the ear test words, As the palate tastes its food? Wisdom is with aged men, With long life is discernment."
(Job 12:7-12 LSB)
The Mute Theologians (v. 7-8)
Job begins his counter-argument by directing his friends to the most basic of classrooms: the created order.
"But now ask the beasts, and let them instruct you; And the birds of the sky, and let them tell you. Or muse to the earth, and let it instruct you; And let the fish of the sea recount it to you." (Job 12:7-8)
This is a brilliant rhetorical move. Zophar and the others are puffed up with their own wisdom, and Job tells them to go get a lesson from a donkey. Go learn your theology from a sparrow. The very ground beneath your feet has more to teach you than your worn-out platitudes. This is the doctrine of general revelation in its rawest form. Paul says in Romans that God's invisible attributes, His eternal power and divine nature, have been clearly perceived, ever since the creation of the world, in the things that have been made (Romans 1:20). Creation is not silent. It is shouting. It is testifying. It is preaching a constant sermon about its Maker.
Every beast, every bird, every fish is a living, breathing testament to the God who designed it. The flight of an eagle, the raw power of a lion, the sheer teeming life of the sea, all of it points beyond itself. The materialist looks at a bird and sees a random collection of evolved traits driven by survival. The Christian looks at a bird and sees a thought of God, embodied. The world is not a random assortment of facts; it is a coherent sentence, and God is the one speaking it.
Job's point is that the truth his friends are peddling, the truth that God is powerful and sovereign, is not a profound insight. It is Creation 101. A cow knows who made it more than you seem to understand the implications of it. This is a direct assault on their intellectual pride. They think they are offering Job a PhD seminar, and Job is telling them they need to go back to kindergarten and learn the alphabet from the ants.
The Open Secret (v. 9-10)
And what is this lesson that all creation teaches? Job makes it explicit.
"Who among all these does not know That the hand of Yahweh has done this, In whose hand is the life of every living thing, And the breath of all the flesh of man?" (Job 12:9-10 LSB)
The universal, undeniable testimony of creation is the absolute sovereignty of God. "The hand of Yahweh has done this." The "this" refers to everything. The "this" refers to the created order, but in the context of Job's suffering, it also refers to his calamity. This is the point his friends cannot grasp. They believe God's hand only does the nice things, the blessings, the sunshine. They have a boutique God who is responsible for the potluck but not the funeral.
Job, in his agony, has a far more robust and biblical theology. He knows that the same hand that gives also takes away (Job 1:21). The same hand that fashions the gazelle also permits the lion to devour it. The same hand that gives life to Job's children is the hand that allowed them to be taken. This is not to say God is the author of sin, but it is to say that nothing, absolutely nothing, happens outside of His sovereign decree. This is the Creator/creature distinction at its sharpest. God is the potter, we are the clay. He is the author, we are the characters in His story. To deny this is to make God a limited, finite being, a mere member of the universe instead of its transcendent Creator.
Verse 10 reinforces this: "In whose hand is the life of every living thing, And the breath of all the flesh of man?" God is not a deist's clockmaker who wound up the universe and walked away. He is actively sustaining every molecule of His creation at every moment. Your next breath is a gift from His hand. The sparrow that falls to the ground does not do so apart from your Father's will (Matthew 10:29). This is the doctrine that modern man, and comfortable Christians, find so offensive. We want to be autonomous. We want to be in control. Job is telling us that this is the fundamental illusion. We are utterly, completely, and gloriously dependent upon God for our very existence.
Discerning Words and Men (v. 11-12)
Having established the foundational truth, Job now turns to the issue of how we process and evaluate what we are told about that truth.
"Does not the ear test words, As the palate tastes its food? Wisdom is with aged men, With long life is discernment." (Job 12:11-12 LSB)
Just as the tongue can distinguish between sweet and bitter, so the discerning ear can distinguish between true and false wisdom. Job is appealing to his friends to use their heads. You are hearing my words, and you are hearing your own. Test them. Do they line up with reality? Your neat little system says that I must be a secret, heinous sinner. But you have known me for years. Does that taste right to you? Does it square with what you know of my life? Your words are like food that has gone bad; they may look like food, but the palate of a discerning man rejects them.
And where does this discernment come from? "Wisdom is with aged men, With long life is discernment." This is a general principle found throughout the wisdom literature. Gray hair is a crown of glory when it is found in the way of righteousness (Proverbs 16:31). A long life provides a man with a catalog of experiences, a history of God's providences, from which to draw wise conclusions. Our modern world despises this. We have a cult of youth. We think innovation is the highest virtue and that all old ideas are outdated. The Bible teaches the opposite. True wisdom is found by standing on the shoulders of the faithful saints who have gone before us.
But this is also a subtle jab. Job is saying to his friends, "You are old men. You should know better. You have the years, but you have not acquired the discernment that ought to have come with them." They have the gray hair of experience, but their theology is childishly simplistic. They have not learned to test words. They are simply repeating the slogans they have always heard without thinking through their application in the messy, painful realities of a fallen world. They have the age, but not the wisdom.
Conclusion: The Wisdom of the Cross
So where does this leave us? Job is in an impossible position. He knows God is sovereign, and he knows he is righteous. His friends say these two things cannot coexist in his situation. They insist he must abandon one of them, his claim to righteousness. But Job refuses. He holds both truths in a tension that is tearing him apart, but he will not let go of what he knows to be true.
This is a profound picture of the gospel. The cross of Jesus Christ is the ultimate expression of the truths Job is wrestling with. At the cross, we see the absolute, meticulous sovereignty of God. Peter preaches on the day of Pentecost that Jesus was delivered up according to the definite plan and foreknowledge of God (Acts 2:23). Nothing was random. The cross was the hand of Yahweh at its most active.
And at the cross, we see the ultimate righteous sufferer. Jesus Christ, the only truly innocent man, was treated as the greatest sinner. If Job's friends were at the foot of the cross, they would have nodded knowingly. "See? He must have done something to deserve this. He claimed to be the Son of God. What blasphemy! God is just." They would have been the first to say, "He saved others; let him save himself, if he is the Christ of God, his Chosen One!" (Luke 23:35).
The wisdom of Job's friends is the wisdom of the world. It cannot make sense of a God who would sovereignly ordain the suffering of a righteous one. But the wisdom of God, revealed in the gospel, shows us that it is precisely through the sovereignly ordained suffering of the truly Righteous One that our salvation is accomplished. God's hand did this. He took the greatest evil, the murder of His Son, and turned it into the greatest good, the redemption of His people.
The beasts of the field can teach us that God is sovereign. But only the Word made flesh can teach us that this sovereign God is for us. Job longed for a mediator (Job 9:33), and we have one in Jesus Christ. The wisdom of the aged is good, but the wisdom of the Ancient of Days is better. The ear that tests words must ultimately test them against the final Word, Jesus Christ. He is the palate that perfectly discerns truth. And in Him, the painful riddle of Job finds its glorious and final answer.