Job 41
“Leviathan”
November 17, 2019 – Twenty-third Sunday after Pentecost
I’ve been carrying our text for today around on my back end for about ten years, but I’ve never preached on it before. It’s my Oregon salmon license plate letters and numbers, Job 41. I meant it to be a slightly subtle Bible joke about fishing, particularly thinking of the first verse, which always comes to my mind in the King James Version, “Canst thou draw out Leviathan with an hook?”
Out of a church context, even some Christians ask if that plate means I am on “job number 41.” Even folks who get it right as a Bible reference to a chapter in Job are usually hard pressed to bring to mind the fishy subject of it. Some mistake it for the hopeful last chapter in which God restores Job to health and prosperity and all his trials are over. But no, this chapter is only the last part of God’s speeches to Job before God restores him, and, for some reason, it focuses on an incredible denizen of the depths of the sea.
Leviathan is an amazing animal. Some interpreters try to identify it with some actual fish or amphibian. Probably the worst idea, in my opinion, is a crocodile. But humans catch and kill crocodiles and other big fish all the time. Yesterday morning, in my wife Beth’s eyes a confirmation of my call to preach on this text, NPR broadcast an interview with Chris Hernandez of San Benito, Texas. From a one-man kayak, Hernandez hooked, fought for forty minutes, and landed a 7-foot, 200-pound fish called an alligator gar. It was an amazing story, but Leviathan here in Job is much bigger and much more amazing.
There are a variety of spiritual interpretations of Leviathan. The name, which is just a Hebrew word carried over into English, shows up in a handful of other Bible verses. One of them is from Job himself, in chapter 3 verse 8, calling on those who dare to curse the sea and the monster who lives in it to curse the day of Job’s birth.
Two other Bible verses, Psalm 74:14 and Isaiah 27:1, talk about God defeating, crushing the head or even the “heads” of Leviathan in defense or care for His people. Isaiah elaborates on the creature as a “serpent” or “dragon.” And that has led to the long-standing, very early tradition begun by the church fathers of understanding Leviathan as an image of the devil, of Satan. The fathers connected this terrifying monster with the multi-headed red dragon which pursues a woman giving birth in Revelation chapter 12, and also perhaps with the “beast” which John saw “rise up out of the sea,” in Revelation 13.
So in his allegorical study of Job and the moral lessons we can learn from it, Gregory the Great talks about that great jaw of Leviathan which, according to the first couple of verses, no human can hook. That opening question is rhetorical from God to Job. “Can you catch Leviathan with a hook?” The answer is meant to be a resounding “No!” Nor could a man put a rope around that jaw or through its nose, nor drive a spike through it. So Gregory says that Leviathan’s jaw represents the temptation of the devil in which human beings are caught. Only the power of God can pierce it and set us free.[1]
Unlike some of my evangelical compadres, I don’t have a big problem with Gregory’s sort of allegorical interpretation, although it can get a little fanciful at times and can run wild like Leviathan itself if one is not careful. But I am quite willing to join Gregory and Origen and Ephrem and more of the church fathers to say that one part of the message of this chapter, and the previous one about a great ox-like beast named Behemoth, is that the monsters of this world are under God’s control. The immense forces of nature which terrify us, and even the dark spiritual forces beyond nature, are at the Lord’s beck and call. He rules over them and will protect us from them.
There in verses 8 and 9, at the top of page 325 in Poets, God talks to Job about what happens to those who even try to catch Leviathan,
If you lay a hand on it,
you will certainly remember the battle that follows.
You won’t try that again!
No, it is useless to try and capture it.
The hunter who attempts it will be knocked down.
Then God asks more rhetorical questions of Job in verses 10 and 11,
And since no one dares to disturb it,
who then can stand up to me?
Who has given me anything that I need to pay back?
Everything under heaven is mine.
Just like in those verses in which God first spoke at the beginning of chapter 38, over on page 319, asking Job where he was when God laid the foundations of the earth and set the morning stars singing for joy, God through this horrific picture of a sea monster is telling Job that He God is Lord of all creation. Even the most frightening creature on earth, with its terrible teeth and flaming nostrils and impenetrable scaly skin, is no match for God.
So I would tie what God has to say about His power over Leviathan to what Jesus told His followers in our Gospel reading from Luke 21 this morning about rumors of war and insurrection, “do not be terrified.” Jesus went on to talk about coming persecution, betrayal, arrest, hatred and even martyrdom. But then our Lord told them and tells us, “But not a hair of your head will perish.”
That sort of divine reassurance is the first half of what I’d like you to take away from hearing about Leviathan today. God is more immense, more powerful, even more terrifying than any monster that can stalk this earth, including the devil himself. God says about Leviathan there in verse 25,
When it rises, the mighty are afraid,
gripped by terror.
But through both Job and Jesus we know that we need not be afraid, no matter what dark and dreadful forces arise in this world and in our own lives. We may have no human power over the darkness, just as Jesus said about the persecution to come, but our Lord and Savior is greater than it all and will be with us in it bring us through it.
One of the truly frightening monsters that seems to be rising around us today all over the world is a new round of tough guy, strong man national leaders. Wherever you look, west, south, east, one country or another is not listening to the voices of peaceful, democratic agents of change, but to the loud, boastful messages of individuals who promise to wield power and beat down those who oppose them. Government led by those who put their own interests before those of their people seems to be on the rise.
Back in the 17th century a political philosopher named Thomas Hobbes actually took the name Leviathan as the title of his book about powerful government centered in a single human being. He told us that human life without government is wretched. Our natural condition, apart from a political community, is a state of “war of all against all,” which is, in a famous line, “nasty, brutish, and short.” The only hope for human beings is to yield their individual rights and power to a sovereign who will defend them and keep order.
For Hobbes it did not matter if the sovereign were a good person or even told the truth. All that matters is that someone be in control. A strong, even vicious government is better than no government at all. And it feels right now like Hobbes’ Leviathan is rising up in the world around us. It’s frightening.
Yet the book of Job here tells us that even Leviathan swims under the control of God. That person, that government, which thinks it need not answer to anyone on earth, must still answer to God. In times like these, we may still take Paul’s advice to the Thessalonians in our reading this morning, “to do their work quietly and to earn their own living,” and “do not be weary in doing what is right.” In other words, when powerful forces out of our control swirl around us, God invites us to keep on simply living and working for Him, not afraid of the teeth and jaws and fearsome forms slicing through the water around us.
It’s true on a more personal level also. The overwhelming form of “Leviathan” can take many shapes in our own individual lives. He can be a crushing physical disability, an absolutely corrosive relationship, or an inescapable addiction. We may find ourselves caught in the jaws of such things and completely paralyzed with fear. As verse 22 says,
The tremendous strength in Leviathan’s neck
strikes terror wherever it goes.
We may think our task in the midst of such things is to fight back, to develop strategies, to work out a battle plan for coping with disability or getting free from a relationship or addiction, but Leviathan reminds us that sometimes that is just not possible, not by our own strength, not by any power in our control.
Beth and I appreciated what Valley Covenant’s former pastor’s wife Pam Gaderlund said about her husband Jim’s cancer that took him from her last year. As she spoke of his illness she called it “Jim’s journey with cancer.” She said she deliberately avoided language other people often use, the image of a “battle” or a “fight” with cancer. That might be helpful for some, but she and Jim preferred to see themselves on a journey in which God was leading them, which He was directing, rather than in a struggle they had to engage with their own strength. When Jim’s death came, it was terribly sad, but it was also a peaceful, beautiful witness to the faith by which he journeyed through life, including cancer.
So the first lesson of Leviathan is all that I’ve just said. Do not be afraid of him. No matter how terrifying the shape facing you, no matter horribly some monster “makes the water boil with its commotion,” as it says in verse 31 on the top of page 326, God is stronger and God is with you. As Jesus said, “do not be terrified.” That’s a great lesson, but there is one here which may be even greater.
I held back on you. There is one more verse of Scripture which mentions Leviathan, and which puts him in a slightly different perspective in relation to God. In Psalm 104, page 113 in Poets, as the psalmist celebrates God’s creation, mountains, trees, rivers, sun and moon, he comes to the ocean, “teeming with life of every kind.” Then in verse 26 he sings,
See the ships sailing along,
and Leviathan, which you made to play in the sea.
I like the New Revised Standard version, which renders it, “Leviathan that you formed to sport in it.” I think that little verse gives us another way to look at this big creature.
Go back to Job 41, in those verses right after that opening rhetoric about whether Job can catch Leviathan. There are more rhetorical questions about what Job obviously cannot do with this monster. But in verse 5 there is a cute, intimate picture for Job to ponder,
Can you make it a pet like a bird,
or give to your little girls to play with?
The answer for Job is obviously as before, “No way!” But by implication, the fact is that God can. God can treat Leviathan like His favorite pet or play fetch with it in the waves of the ocean. And that verse from Psalm 104 suggests that He just might actually want to do that. God may have created what to us is a monstrosity just for the fun of it.
Actually, as philosopher Eleonore Stump invites us to consider,[2] most of what God says to Job may have just this purpose: to show us how God loves and enjoys everything He has made. That bit about the morning stars singing for joy—who hears that music except God? Go back and look at the catalogue of nature God recites in chapters 38 and 39, not just stars and clouds and weather, but how God feeds and also speaks to and with lions and ravens and goats and donkeys, how He takes care of the ox and the ostrich, the horse and the hawk. It’s all said in a kind of dialogue with nature which Stump suggests is evidence of God’s loving and personal relationship with what He has made.
In Job 41 God may not so much be asserting His power over Leviathan as asserting His love for Leviathan. In his wonderful paraphrase, The Message, Eugene Peterson, another pastor who is also a fly-fisherman, renders the first verse,
Or can you pull in the sea beast, Leviathan, with a fly rod
and stuff him in your creel?
Given what we just learned about God’s delight with Leviathan and His creation of it for the sake of play, I might make it:
Can you tie a fly that Leviathan will swallow
and then play him on your line for five or ten minutes?
Are you able to bring him to the net
and then hoist him from the water?
Can you take him in your hand and admire the pattern of his scales,
then gently put him down, releasing him to swim again?
In Job, God’s approach to His beloved creation Leviathan is more like a good fly-fisherman practicing catch-and-release with a cherished and respected quarry than a battle with an evil foe. And, Stump says, that tells us what God wanted Job to understand. God wanted that sort of intimate, loving, personal relationship with him. He wanted a conversation with Job as one person to another.
We get a little more direct hint of that conversing, interacting, personal relationship God wants in the middle of chapter 40 of Job, verse 15, the top of page 324, when God introduces the land monster Behemoth,
Take a look at Behemoth,
which I made, just as I made you.
“Just as I made you, Job,” says God. That’s something very like Jesus said in the Sermon on the Mount, Matthew 6:26:
Look at the birds of the air; they neither sow nor reap nor gather into barns, and yet your heavenly Father feeds them. Are you not of more value than they?
God wanted a close, intimate, personal relationship with Job. That was the point of it all. And in the end, it happened. Job says at the beginning of chapter 42, page 326,
I had only heard about you before,
but now I have seen you with my own eyes.
That’s what God wanted for his servant Job, to see Him clearly, to know just how much God loved and cherished Job in spite of everything that happened, in spite of all the calamity which implied some other kind of relationship with God.
That same kind of personal relationship is what God wants with you. And He has done even more to show you that than He did for Job. He told you everything Job heard about His love for what He has made, then He showed you how true that is by sending His Son Jesus to demonstrate His love with His own blood.
God wants you to come and play with Him, to enjoy Him forever, as the Westminster Catechism says. He was willing to die to offer you that invitation, to enter into all that suffering which might have made you think He was up to something else or wasn’t even there. But He is there, waiting on the other end of a line of love, baited with the gift of His own life given on the Cross. Take the bait and trust Him. You won’t regret it.
Amen.
Valley Covenant Church
Eugene/Springfield, Oregon
Copyright © 2019 by Stephen S. Bilynskyj
[1] See the Ancient Christian Commentary on Scripture volume Job, edited by Manlio Simonetti and Marco Conti (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 2006), p. 212f.
[2] See Wandering in Darkness: Narrative and the Problem of Suffering (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010), pp. 186-190.