Held by God
“In his hand is the life of every creature and the breath of all mankind.” — Job 12:10 (NIV)
I just love how real Scripture is. When you strip it down and read it without any pretense or “haughty” ideas, you see the incredible ways God relates to us. Scripture is full of humor, sarcasm, emotions, and just real human beings doing human things and a perfect God responding and providing.
Job 12 opens with what may be one of the greatest responses ever given to unsolicited advice:
“Doubtless you are the only people who matter, and wisdom will die with you!” (Job 12:2, NIV).
Translation: Thank goodness you got here. Apparently no one else has ever had a thought.
Job has been listening to his friends explain his own suffering to him. They are convinced they understand how God works: righteous people prosper, wicked people suffer, Job is suffering, therefore Job must have done something to deserve it. The logic is neat. The theology fits nicely into a box. Case closed.
The only problem is that they are wrong!
Job knows this. God knows this. We, as readers, know this because the opening chapters have already told us Job’s suffering is not punishment for some secret sin. His friends, however, have apparently appointed themselves to the theological investigative committee and are making excellent progress toward solving a case that does not exist.
So Job finally responds,
“I have a mind as well as you; I am not inferior to you. Who does not know all these things?” (Job 12:3, NIV).
His friends aren’t necessarily wrong about everything they believe about God. They are wrong in assuming that what they know about God gives them the ability to explain everything God does.
We all like explanations. Explanations make suffering feel manageable. If we can identify exactly why something happened, what God is doing through it, and preferably when He plans to wrap it up, we can organize the pain into something that makes sense.
Job’s friends desperately want to do that.
Job refuses!
Instead, he points them toward creation.
“But ask the animals, and they will teach you, or the birds in the sky, and they will tell you; or speak to the earth, and it will teach you, or let the fish in the sea inform you” (Job 12:7–8, NIV).
Basically, Job tells some of the men most confident in their own wisdom to go ask a fish. Which is objectively a little funny.
But his point is deeply serious.
“Which of all these does not know that the hand of the LORD has done this? In his hand is the life of every creature and the breath of all mankind” (Job 12:9–10, NIV).
Look around, Job says. Every bird overhead. Every animal on the ground. Every fish beneath the water. Every human being drawing another breath.
All of it exists because God sustains it.
And suddenly Job 12 becomes much bigger than an argument between one suffering man and his overly confident friends. Job is wrestling with the sovereignty of God Himself.
“In his hand is the life of every creature and the breath of all mankind.”
That is a staggering statement coming from Job. Remember what he has lost by this point. His wealth is gone. His children have died. His body is covered in painful sores. His wife has told him to curse God and die. His friends have arrived ostensibly to comfort him and somehow turned the visit into a trial in which Job is both defendant and audience.
And this is the man saying that life remains in the hand of God.
Job does not arrive at God’s sovereignty from a comfortable life. He clings to it from the ashes.
What follows is even more striking. Job says that God tears down and no one can rebuild. God withholds water and there is drought; He releases it and the waters overwhelm the land.
“To him belong strength and insight” (Job 12:13, NIV). Counselors, judges, kings, priests, nobles, nations—every human being who appears powerful is still ultimately subject to Him (Job 12:13–25, NIV).
Job’s view of God has not become smaller because his life has become harder. If anything, it has become bigger.
And that is precisely where his friends have gone wrong. They have reduced God’s sovereignty to a formula they can understand. Good behavior produces blessing. Bad behavior produces suffering. Therefore, if we know someone’s circumstances, we can determine what God thinks of them.
Job knows God is not that manageable. Neither is suffering.
Scripture certainly teaches that sin has consequences. It also teaches that we live in a fallen world where suffering cannot always be traced neatly back to the behavior of the person experiencing it. Jesus Himself rejects that assumption when His disciples encounter a man born blind and ask whose sin caused his blindness.
“Neither this man nor his parents sinned,” Jesus tells them (John 9:3, NIV).
Sometimes we simply do not know why. And we really, really dislike not knowing.
We would often rather have a bad explanation than no explanation at all. So we try to fill in God’s silence. We assume the closed door must mean this. The loss must have happened because of that. God is obviously teaching us this particular lesson. Everything will definitely make sense when this particular thing happens next.
We can become a lot like Job’s friends without realizing it—so determined to explain God’s ways that we start speaking for Him where He has not spoken.
Job 12 offers another way. When Job cannot understand the hand of God, he remembers what is in the hand of God.
Everything.
“In his hand is the life of every creature and the breath of all mankind.”
There is enormous comfort in that truth, although it is not always an easy comfort. God’s sovereignty does not mean we will understand everything He permits. Job certainly doesn’t. In fact, much of the book is Job demanding an explanation he never fully receives.
But sovereignty means suffering is never evidence that God has lost control.
Nothing catches Him off guard. Nothing requires Him to scramble for a backup plan. There is no moment in which God looks at the events of our lives and thinks, Well, that certainly wasn’t supposed to happen.
He is God there too.
That doesn’t make evil good. It doesn’t make grief painless. It doesn’t mean every tragedy should be met with a cheerful declaration that “everything happens for a reason,” which is generally not what anyone in the depths of suffering needs to hear.
Job’s friends are a fairly compelling case study in what not to say to someone in pain. What it does mean is that suffering does not get the final word.
The God who holds our lives is also the God Paul describes in Romans 8:28, who “works for the good of those who love him, who have been called according to his purpose” (NIV). He does not call everything that happens good. He is powerful enough to work for good even through what is not.
Joseph understood this when, years after being sold into slavery by his own brothers, he told them, “You intended to harm me, but God intended it for good” (Genesis 50:20, NIV).
The harm was real - So was the sovereignty of God.
We may not always get to see those two realities come together as clearly as Joseph did. Job certainly couldn’t see what was happening beyond the boundaries of his own story while he sat in the ashes. But he knew whose hand held the story.
And maybe that is enough for the days when we cannot make sense of ours.
We don’t have to manufacture an explanation for everything God allows. We don’t have to pretend suffering doesn’t hurt. We don’t have to understand the purposes of God well enough to produce a color-coded flowchart explaining His providence. We can admit that we don’t know. There is humility in that.
And then we can remember what we do know.
“To God belong wisdom and power; counsel and understanding are his” (Job 12:13, NIV).
Our wisdom has limits. His does not.
Our understanding reaches its end. His never does.
And when everything we thought we understood seems to fall apart, our lives have not fallen out of His hands. They are still there.
Every creature. Every breath. Every moment - Held by God.
bytaylormcgee
