Job Speaks of the Power of God
13 “With Him are wisdom and might;
To Him belong counsel and understanding.
14 “Behold, He tears down, and it cannot be rebuilt;
He [h]imprisons a man, and [i]there can be no release.
15 “Behold, He restrains the waters, and they dry up;
And He sends them out, and they [j]inundate the earth.
16 “With Him are strength and sound wisdom,
The misled and the misleader belong to Him.
17 “He makes counselors walk [k]barefoot
And makes fools of judges.
18 “He loosens the [l]bond of kings
And binds their loins with a girdle.
19 “He makes priests walk [m]barefoot
And overthrows the secure ones.
20 “He deprives the trusted ones of speech
And takes away the discernment of the elders.
21 “He pours contempt on nobles
And loosens the belt of the strong.
22 “He reveals mysteries from the darkness
And brings the deep darkness into light.
23 “He makes the nations great, then destroys them;
He [n]enlarges the nations, then leads them away.
24 “He deprives of intelligence the chiefs of the earth’s people
And makes them wander in a pathless waste.
25 “They grope in darkness with no light,
And He makes them stagger like a drunken man.
One could look at this passage and think God is a capricious trickster. One minute he makes someone wise, and then he makes them look like a fool. He makes someone strong, only to thwart their strength when they need it most. God raises up nations, and then He obliterates them… On the surface, that’s the way it looks, but the important bit is right off the bat in verse 13.
Wisdom and might belong to God alone. So the main reason wise people sometimes look foolish is that God knows the future and we don’t. Sure, we have some sound principles we can glean from the Bible, and there are things that mankind has learned over the ages. Yet truthfully, if you can’t find the principle in the Bible, it’s a poor stick to lean on. And ultimately, for all our collective “wisdom”, we still don’t know what’s coming next.
Do we then throw up our hands and give up? No, we need to lean on God, and ask Him for wisdom and He will give it. Ask him for strength to make it through what is coming on the road ahead, and He will be your strength. It is when we lean on our own wisdom and trust in our own strength that we are disappointed. God is always “more than enough” for whatever we are facing, no matter what happens, he will be our rock and salvation.