Have you ever had to rebuke a friend with the use of biting sarcasm? To say something deeply cutting in order to try to get through to him? Something like: ″Oh, you are such a kind friend to me. I really appreciate your thoughtful and gentle words″–when the reality is, he has been unkind and without understanding. Job has to do that in today's reading. This is his final speech in the three cycles of speeches.

Job begins with this biting sarcasm (Job 26:2-4), which I paraphrase: ″I am so weak and feeble, and you have helped me so much! I had no wisdom, and you have really helped me to understand. I can't imagine the wonderful source you have for your wise and understanding words.″ (Or not!)

In verses 5-13, Job sings exultantly in praise of the sovereignty of God. This may surprise us, but one of the characteristics of Job's speeches is that he is inconsistent. His friends are consistent–their system is clear, but in their consistency, they are consistently wrong. Job, however, is inconsistent: sometimes, he struggles as he grapples with deep and painful things, though he grapples in faith; and, from time to time, his faith surfaces with a wonderful clarity.

In verses 5-6, Job praises God, saying that even when you go to the realm of the dead, the most remote, darkest, and wildest corner of the universe, even there, all is ″naked before God″. God sees it all, He knows it all, He rules it all. Even ″Destruction″ (referring to Abaddon in Hebrew, later Apollyon in Greek, the angel of the bottomless pit in Revelation 9:11) is under God's gaze and control.

Verses 7-10 poetically describe how God is sovereign over the whole world. And yet–and here Job goes beyond the tidy system of his friends–God has the power to make the creation order tremble in a kind of moral earthquake (v. 11). This is what is happening in Job's life, and it reaches its climax when the innocent Jesus dies and the earth shakes (Matthew 27:51).

The ″Rahab″ of Job 26:12 is the same as the ″gliding serpent″ of verse 13. This is the storybook monster who seeks to oppose the Creator. We shall meet it again under another name in chapter 41. In a way, this is Satan himself. And yet God is sovereign, even over supernatural evil. Nothing, absolutely nothing, is outside His control.

In 26:14, Job goes even further in his praise of God. He has sung the control of God over the whole universe, physical and spiritual. And yet this is ″but the outer fringe of his works″. For there is more in the inscrutable wisdom of God than we can yet see.