The Bankruptcy of Earthly Wisdom Text: Job 17:10-12
Introduction: The Counsel of Fools
The book of Job is a furnace. It is designed by God to burn away all our sentimental, shallow, and altogether flimsy notions about how the world works. We come to this book, as Job's friends came to him, armed with our tidy systems of retributive justice, our pocket-sized proverbs, and our confident assertions about who has it coming to them. And like Job's friends, we find that our wisdom, when brought into the presence of true, gut-wrenching suffering under the hand of a sovereign God, is revealed to be nothing more than pious-sounding nonsense.
Job's friends were not atheists. They were not, in the main, heretics. They believed in God. They believed God was just. Their problem was not that they were wrong, but as I've said before, they were right woodenly. They possessed a two-dimensional faith in a three-dimensional world, a black-and-white photograph of a universe exploding with color, terror, and grace. Their theology was a simple equation: righteousness plus piety equals prosperity, while sin plus rebellion equals suffering. When they saw Job's immense suffering, they did their math and concluded there must be some immense, hidden sin. They were detectives, not comforters, prosecutors disguised as friends.
In our passage today, Job is responding to this relentless barrage of what we might call sanctified bullying. He has been poked, prodded, and accused by men who claim to speak for God but who understand neither God nor Job. His patience is worn thin, not with God, but with the insufferable counsel of men who think they have God figured out. He is a man drowning, and his friends are standing on the shore, lecturing him on the finer points of swimming. What we find in these verses is Job's utter disillusionment with human wisdom. He looks at his so-called comforters, and he looks at his own shattered life, and he sees a massive gulf. This is the cry of a man who has discovered that the wisdom of this world, even the religious wisdom of this world, is bankrupt. It is a dead-end street.
And this is a necessary discovery for any of us to make. Before you can receive true wisdom, you must first be thoroughly convinced of the foolishness of your own. Before you can be filled with the hope of the gospel, you must see the utter hopelessness of every other alternative. Job is being driven to the end of himself, to the end of all earthly solutions, so that he might find his only hope in God alone.
The Text
But come again all of you now, For I do not find a wise man among you. My days are past; my plans are torn apart, Even the wishes of my heart. They make night into day, saying, ‘The light is near,’ in the presence of darkness.
(Job 17:10-12 LSB)
A Scathing Indictment (v. 10)
Job begins with a challenge, dripping with weary sarcasm.
"But come again all of you now, For I do not find a wise man among you." (Job 17:10 LSB)
You can hear the exhaustion in his voice. "Go on, give it another shot. Try me again. Line up, all of you, and present your arguments one more time." It is as though he is saying, "Surely, one of you must have something intelligent to say. I've been waiting." But it is a challenge he knows they will fail. He has already rendered his verdict: "I do not find a wise man among you."
This is a frontal assault on their credentials. These men, Eliphaz, Bildad, and Zophar, were elders, patriarchs, men who would have been revered in their society as sages. They were the ancient equivalent of seminary professors and conference speakers. They came to Job with all the authority of age and reputation. And Job, from his ash heap, dismisses them all. He declares them intellectually and spiritually bankrupt. Their wisdom is worthless.
And why? Because their wisdom could not account for him. Their system had no category for a righteous man suffering under the hand of a sovereign God. Their neat and tidy world had been shattered by the reality of Job's life, and rather than adjust their system, they tried to adjust Job. They insisted he must be a secret sinner, a hypocrite of the highest order. True wisdom, biblical wisdom, is humble. It starts with the fear of the Lord, which is a recognition that we do not have all the answers, that God's ways are higher than our ways. Job's friends lacked this fear; they had, in its place, a fear of untidy circumstances. They were more committed to their theological grid than they were to the God who is Lord over every grid.
This is a permanent temptation for the religious. We build our systems, our denominations, our traditions, and they are often good and helpful. But the moment we value the system more than the sovereign God the system is meant to describe, we have become idolaters. We become like Job's friends, unable to see the man in front of us because we are too busy defending the map in our hands. Job's declaration is a necessary one for all of us: all human wisdom, when it sets itself up as the final arbiter of reality, is folly.
The Anatomy of Despair (v. 11)
Having dismissed his friends' wisdom, Job turns inward to describe the wreckage of his own life.
"My days are past; my plans are torn apart, Even the wishes of my heart." (Job 17:11 LSB)
Here we see the profound personal cost of his suffering. First, his sense of time is broken. "My days are past." He sees no future. His life is over. The past is a memory of blessing, the present is unendurable pain, and the future is a blank wall. Hope requires a future, and for Job, the future has been cancelled.
Second, his sense of purpose is shattered. "My plans are torn apart." The Hebrew word for plans here can also mean "schemes" or "purposes." Everything he had worked for, everything he had built, his entire life's project, has been violently ripped to shreds. We must remember that Job was a great man, a man of industry and vision. He had plans for his children, his business, his legacy. Now, all of it is gone. His life's work lies in ruins around him. This is the death of ambition, the end of a man's story, cut short in the middle of a sentence.
Third, and most intimately, his desires are extinguished. "Even the wishes of my heart." This goes deeper than plans. These are the deep-seated longings, the possessions of the heart. What does a man wish for? Health, family, peace, joy. For Job, these are not just absent; they have been uprooted and destroyed. There is nothing left to want, nothing left to hope for. This is the essence of true despair. It is not simply sadness; it is the hollowing out of the soul. It is the death of desire.
Job is describing a complete internal collapse. His past is gone, his future is void, and his heart is empty. This is what suffering, under the mysterious providence of God, can do. It strips a man down to nothing. And we must be honest here. The Bible does not paper over this kind of agony. It gives it full voice. God is not afraid of our despair. He is not offended by our honest cries from the ash heap. He would rather have our honest anguish than our pious platitudes.
False Light in the Darkness (v. 12)
In the final verse, Job returns to his comforters and delivers his most cutting critique of their counsel.
"They make night into day, saying, ‘The light is near,’ in the presence of darkness." (Job 17:12 LSB)
This is a profound accusation. He says his friends are trying to perform an act of semantic alchemy. They are trying to redefine his reality. He is in the pitch-black night of suffering, and they keep insisting that it's actually daytime. They are offering him cheap, plastic hope. "Cheer up, Job! It can't be that bad. Just repent, and everything will be fine. The light is just around the corner!"
But Job says this is a lie. It is a lie because it is spoken "in the presence of darkness." Their words do not match his reality. To offer easy hope in the face of profound darkness is not a kindness; it is a cruelty. It is to deny the reality of the sufferer's pain. It is to communicate that you don't truly see them or understand what they are going through. This is the core failure of the prosperity gospel and all its cousins. It cannot deal with intractable darkness. It has no theology for the cross, only for the crown. When faced with a Job, it can only offer shallow slogans and false promises.
Job's friends are peddlers of false light. They speak of a light that is "near," but it is a light of their own making, a light generated by their own faulty theological system. It is not the true light. Job, in his anguish, is actually closer to the truth than they are. He knows it is dark. He is not pretending otherwise. And paradoxically, acknowledging the depth of the darkness is the first step toward seeing the true light. You cannot appreciate the dawn until you have fully admitted that it is night.
The Gospel for the Hopeless
So where does this leave us? It leaves us on the ash heap with Job, convinced of the bankruptcy of human wisdom and crushed by the reality of a broken world. And from a human perspective, this is the end. If this is all there is, then despair is the only rational response.
But this is precisely where the gospel does its most profound work. The gospel does not begin by telling Job that it isn't really that dark. The gospel begins by agreeing with him. It says, "Yes, Job, you are right. Your days are past. Your plans are torn apart. The world is a place of profound darkness, a valley of the shadow of death." The gospel does not offer cheap comfort; it enters into the suffering. The Son of God Himself became a man of sorrows, acquainted with grief.
Look at how Christ fulfills this passage. On the cross, Jesus's days were past. His life was cut short. His plans, from a human perspective, were torn apart. The wishes of His heart were crushed under the full weight of God's wrath against our sin. He cried out, "My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?" He entered into the ultimate darkness, a darkness that makes Job's look like twilight.
And on that cross, the false counselors were there too. They mocked Him, saying, "He trusts in God; let God deliver him now, if he desires him." They offered the same kind of conditional, performance-based hope that Job's friends offered. They were saying, "If you were truly righteous, you wouldn't be suffering like this."
But here is the glorious reversal. The friends of Job said, "The light is near," in the presence of darkness, and it was a lie. But on the third day, God the Father spoke a true word into the darkness of the tomb. He said, "Let there be light," and the Son rose again. This was not a cheap, man-made light. This was the uncreated light of the resurrection, a light that invades the darkness and swallows it up forever.
The gospel, therefore, is the only true answer to Job's despair. It does not deny the darkness, but overcomes it. It tells us that our plans may be torn apart, but God's plans never are. It tells us that our days in this life may be past, but in Christ we have an eternity of days to come. It tells us that the wishes of our heart may die, but God will give us new hearts with new and better desires. Because of the resurrection of Jesus Christ, we can have a hope that is not a flimsy wish, but a rugged certainty. It is a light that does not pretend the darkness isn't real, but a light that shines in the darkness, and the darkness has not, and cannot, overcome it.