The Unvarnished God Text: Job 12:13-25
Introduction: The God We Get, Not the God We Want
We live in a soft age. Our Christianity is often a plush, padded thing, designed for comfort and therapeutic benefit. We want a God who is a celestial life coach, a divine butler, a cosmic affirmation machine. We want a God who is manageable, predictable, and above all, nice. We want a God who fits neatly into our political platforms and our personal development plans. We want a God who will help us build our little kingdoms, bless our little projects, and never, ever knock over our sandcastles.
And then we come to a passage like this one in Job. This is not the God of the inspirational coffee mug. This is not the God of the felt-board sermon. This is God unvarnished, God untamed, God in His raw and terrifying sovereignty. Job, sitting on his ash heap, scraped raw by loss and grief, has had his plush worldview incinerated. His friends, with their neat and tidy theological boxes, are offering him platitudes that smell of smoke. And in response, Job unleashes this breathtaking, brutal poem about who God actually is.
This is the God who pulls things down. This is the God who makes fools of judges and leads counselors away barefoot and ashamed. This is the God who pours contempt on nobles and makes nations great only to smash them to pieces. This is not a God who is running for office. He is not seeking our approval. He is God. And the fundamental divide in all of human thought is whether you will have this God, the God of the Bible, or a god of your own devising, an idol carved from the soft wood of your sentimentalities.
Modern man, and particularly the modern evangelical, wants to have a debate with the Almighty. He wants to put God in the dock and question His methods. But Job shows us the sheer absurdity of this posture. This passage is a frontal assault on human pride, on the conceited notion that we are in any position to critique the one who holds our next breath in His hand. This is the doctrine of absolute divine sovereignty, not as a sterile, abstract concept for seminary classrooms, but as a concrete, world-altering, man-humbling reality.
The Text
"With Him are wisdom and might; To Him belong counsel and discernment. Behold, He pulls down, and it cannot be rebuilt; He closes a man in, and it cannot be opened. Behold, He restrains the waters, and they dry up; And He sends them out, and they overturn the earth. With Him are strength and sound wisdom; The misled and the misleader belong to Him. He makes counselors walk barefoot And makes fools of judges. He opens the bond of kings And binds their loins with a belt. He makes priests walk barefoot And subverts the enduring ones. He removes speech from the faithful And takes away the discerning taste of the elders. He pours contempt on nobles And loosens the belt of the strong. He reveals mysteries from the darkness And brings out the shadows of death into light. He makes the nations great, then makes them perish; He enlarges the nations, then leads them away. He removes the heart of wisdom from the heads of the earth’s people And makes them wander in a pathless waste. They grope in darkness with no light, And He makes them wander about like a drunken man."
(Job 12:13-25 LSB)
The Source Code of Reality (v. 13-16)
Job begins by laying the foundation. All power, all wisdom, all reality, is sourced in God and nowhere else.
"With Him are wisdom and might; To Him belong counsel and discernment... With Him are strength and sound wisdom; The misled and the misleader belong to Him." (Job 12:13, 16)
Notice the possessive language. Wisdom and might are "with Him." Counsel and discernment "belong to Him." This is not to say that God has a large supply of wisdom, like a man with a large bank account. It means He is the very definition of wisdom. He is the standard. Anything we might call wisdom is, at best, a borrowed flicker from His infinite sun. He does not consult a focus group. He does not read the latest research. His counsel is His own eternal, perfect will.
And this wisdom is married to might. His wisdom is not the impotent philosophizing of an academic in an ivory tower. His wisdom has infinite power to accomplish everything it decrees. What He thinks, is. What He plans, happens. This is the bedrock of a sane universe. If power and wisdom were separated, if the one with all the power was a fool, or the one with all the wisdom was weak, the cosmos would be a madhouse.
But Job drives the point home with a razor's edge in verse 16. Not only does God possess strength and wisdom, but "The misled and the misleader belong to Him." This is a hard saying, and our modern sensibilities recoil from it. We want to believe that God is in charge of all the nice things, while the devil and bad men are responsible for all the messy bits. We want to assign God the victories and blame the opposition for the defeats. But the Bible will not let us do this. God is not a celestial cheerleader, hoping His team wins. He is the author, director, and producer of the entire play. The deceiver and the deceived are not rogue actors who have slipped past security. They are on His stage, speaking the lines He has written for them in His script, accomplishing His ultimate purposes, whether they know it or not. Think of Pharaoh. Think of Judas. Think of the cross itself, where the most wicked act in history accomplished the most glorious salvation (Acts 4:27-28). If God is not sovereign over sin and deception, then He is not sovereign at all.
The Great Deconstruction (v. 14-15, 17-21)
Having established the principle of God's absolute sovereignty, Job now gives us a portfolio of shattering examples. God is not a builder who simply adds to the world; He is the one who demolishes all rival constructions.
"Behold, He pulls down, and it cannot be rebuilt; He closes a man in, and it cannot be opened. Behold, He restrains the waters, and they dry up; And He sends them out, and they overturn the earth." (Job 12:14-15 LSB)
God's work is final. When He tears something down, no human committee can reassemble it. When He shuts a door, no man can pick the lock. He is sovereign over nature itself. The very forces that pagans worshiped, the waters of chaos, are His to command. He can turn off the tap and create a drought, or He can open the floodgates and wash a civilization away. The tehom, the deep, is not a rival deity; it is His creature, and it does His bidding.
But His deconstructing work is most terrifyingly seen in the realm of human society and power. He systematically dismantles every source of human pride and security.
"He makes counselors walk barefoot And makes fools of judges. He opens the bond of kings... He makes priests walk barefoot And subverts the enduring ones. He removes speech from the faithful And takes away the discerning taste of the elders. He pours contempt on nobles And loosens the belt of the strong." (Job 12:17-21 LSB)
This is a list of the pillars of any civilization. You have the political advisors (counselors), the judicial system (judges), the executive branch (kings), the religious establishment (priests), the intellectual class (elders), the aristocracy (nobles), and the military (the strong). These are the people who run the world. They are the experts, the insiders, the ones with the credentials and the power. And God toys with them. He strips them of their dignity, making them walk barefoot like common prisoners. He addles their minds, turning their vaunted wisdom into foolishness. He silences the eloquent and confounds the experienced. He pours contempt on them. The word for contempt here is not mild disapproval; it is utter scorn. He holds up their pomp and prestige to divine ridicule.
This is a necessary work. Man is an inveterate idolater, and his favorite idol is himself, particularly his own wisdom and power. So God, in His mercy, comes and smashes these idols. He shows the world that the wisdom of the wise is foolishness, and the strength of the strong is weakness. He does this so that men might learn to trust not in princes, or experts, or institutions, but in Him alone.
The Lord of History (v. 22-25)
Job zooms out from individual leaders to the grand sweep of history, showing that God is sovereign not just over persons, but over peoples and nations.
"He reveals mysteries from the darkness And brings out the shadows of death into light. He makes the nations great, then makes them perish; He enlarges the nations, then leads them away." (Job 12:22-23 LSB)
God is the great illuminator. The secret counsels of men, the conspiracies hatched in darkness, are plain as day to Him. He drags them out into the light. But He is also the great historian. The rise and fall of empires, which secular historians attribute to economics, military strategy, or social trends, Job attributes to the direct, personal, and sovereign will of God. He is the one who makes a nation great. And He is the one who, when His purpose for that nation is complete, makes it perish. He is not a passive observer of history; He is its author.
And how does He bring about this rise and fall? Often, by removing the very thing men pride themselves on: their intelligence.
"He removes the heart of wisdom from the heads of the earth’s people And makes them wander in a pathless waste. They grope in darkness with no light, And He makes them wander about like a drunken man." (Job 12:24-25 LSB)
This is a terrifying picture. God doesn't need to send a thunderbolt or an earthquake to destroy a nation. All He has to do is remove their "heart of wisdom." He gives them over to their own foolishness. He lets them have what they want. He removes the restraints, and they wander off into a moral and intellectual wasteland. They become like drunken men, stumbling in the dark, confident in their own direction but utterly lost. They grope for solutions but find none, because they have rejected the only source of light and wisdom. Does this not describe our own age? We have more information than any society in history, and yet we wander in a pathless waste, unable to tell the difference between a man and a woman, a hero and a villain, a truth and a lie. This is a judicial act of God. He is giving us over to a reprobate mind.
The Cross as the Ultimate Deconstruction
Now, we cannot leave this passage on the ash heap with Job. This raw portrait of God's sovereignty is not the final word. It is the necessary preparation for the final word, which is Jesus Christ. All of this terrifying power, this deconstructing might, this authority over kings and nations, finds its ultimate purpose and meaning at the cross.
At the cross, God poured contempt on the ultimate noble, His own Son. He made the wisest counselor in the universe, the eternal Logos, a fool in the eyes of the world. He removed speech from the most faithful one, as Jesus stood silent before His accusers. He loosened the belt of the strongest man, as Jesus was stripped and nailed to a tree. He took the King of kings and let Him be mocked with a crown of thorns. He took the one who is the Light of the World and plunged Him into the outer darkness of divine wrath. God did all the things Job describes, and He did them to His own beloved Son.
Why? He did it to pull down the ultimate stronghold of human rebellion, which is our sin and self-righteousness. He did it to shut us up in the prison of our own guilt, so that He alone could open the door. He misled the misleader, Satan, who thought he was winning a great victory, when in fact he was sealing his own doom. God used the greatest act of human and demonic evil to accomplish the greatest act of divine love.
The God who makes nations wander like a drunken man is the same God who, in Christ, finds us in our drunken stupor and carries us home on His shoulders. The God who pulls down is the same God who, in the resurrection, rebuilt the temple of His Son's body in three days, a building that can never be torn down again. Because of the cross, the terrifying sovereignty of God described by Job is no longer a threat to those who are in Christ. It is our ultimate comfort. The one who controls everything, from the path of a hurricane to the fall of an empire, is the one who loves us and gave Himself for us. His wisdom and might are now deployed entirely for our good. And that is the firmest foundation in a world of sand.