Tick Tock – Tick Tock
Tick Tock – Tick Tock
Never smile at leviathan
No, you can’t get friendly with leviathan
Don’t be taken in by his welcome grin
He’s imagining how well you’d look dead in your sin
Never smile at leviathan
Never trust good works can make a righteous man
Never run, walk away, say good-night, not good-day
Clear the aisle but never smile at King Leviathan
Once upon a time, there was an upright and blameless man, who did good deeds and shunned evil.
And then one day, life ran him over like a semi-truck loaded to the brim with cement blocks going 80 mph. It was very messy.
He lost his property; some to theft, the rest to fire. He lost his home, his children and finally he lost his health. But that was not enough. When his friends arrived they mourned with him for a time before he lost them too, because they turned on him and leveled this common charge: What have you done to deserve this?
It is the question that tends to trump all other questions in life. It is the one that we all ask ourselves eventually. God’s answer to Job will surprise you, but without understanding the answer there is no hope at all.
So what was God’s answer after thirty-eight chapters of Job and his “friends” going back and forth regarding God’s justice, Job’s righteousness and Job’s circumstances? The answer that God gave Job ended discussion. It put Job firmly in his place and made him realize that all his good deeds amounted to zilch. And it was not what Job was expecting at all. The answer God gave to Job was Leviathan.
You can’t help but marvel, in wonder or dumbfounded disbelief, when the response of the creator of our universe to the question of our personal pain is the same answer coming out of the gaping mouth of an old Japanese man as he points towards the horizon in wide-eyed terror and cries out, “GO-ZEE-RAH”
However, that might be a good time to pause, as Job did, and begin to contemplate just exactly what God is trying communicate when he resorts to unleashing a thirty-story water-monster on your world.
How God describes Leviathan is far more interesting than Leviathan himself, for the creature that God illustrates for Job is one so formidable that it makes SyFys weekly creature feature pale by comparison. A lot of silly Bible readers will pick and choose which pieces they take away from the chapter to justify their reasoning that God is describing a demon, but there are huge problems with this. A demon cannot quench the Holy Spirit, and that’s precisely what God describes Leviathan doing when he says, “His strong scales are his pride, shut up as with a tight seal. One is so near to another that no air can come between them. They are joined one to another; they clasp each other and cannot be separated.”
If the Holy Spirit comes as a strong wind, and no air can come between them, then the Holy Spirit cannot penetrate Leviathan’s scales.
So what is Leviathan if he is not a demon? What is God truly describing here that is capable of holding back the hand of God from giving aid to those he yearns to help?
The same thing that held back the hand of King Darius: the Law.
Suddenly, the entire circumstances surrounding Job’s downfall begin to make sense. The reason God seems to entertain what appears to be a bet between himself and Job’s accuser, Satan, over Job’s fate comes clearly into focus. It is not a bet at all, but a legal proceeding; one where Satan has come to exercise his claims on a man God is protecting despite His sovereign law. Look back in Job 1 where Satan lays out the core point to his accusation: “he will surely curse You to Your face.”
Almost everyone of us reading Job for the first, second, or third time make the same basic presumption regarding Job when we read how he is upright and blameless, shunning evil and doing good. We assume that because the narrator tells us these things, and that God reaffirms these things, that Job is a good guy. And he is. But this is where the horrible revelation of Leviathan as the Law is revealed: Our being good, is simply not good enough to put us in right standing before God.
This just so happens to be the fundamental dispute between Job and his friends. Job crosses a very fine line where he equates all his good works and evil-shunning to more than being blameless and upright straight into implying that his good works means he is righteous and that is a quality the narrator and God never attributes to Job! The hubris of his claim is the equivalent of a lowly peasant suggesting that because of all his hard labor in the fields he now stands on equal footing with the King’s son. It is arrogance regarding the quality of one’s efforts that stems from the pride of one’s own sense of self.
You see, the real reason Job lost everything wasn’t because he had done something wrong; the reason Satan had a legal right to test him is because Job still had a blood debt before the Law!
You will notice in Job 1 that he was conscious of the sins his sons ‘may’ have committed inwardly, and so made sacrifices regularly for them in case they had cursed God in their hearts, but where does it ever suggest he offered a sacrifice for himself? Nowhere! We make a grave error in assuming that because Job offered a sacrifice for his sons, on their behalf, that he did the same for himself when the scriptures take great pains to sidestep that detail entirely. If it’s left out, don’t assume that he did, especially considering how verbose Job is later in his story regarding all the good works he has done. This has all the makings of Cain and Abel all over again. Cain offered God the works of his hands, and God had no regard for his offering. On the other hand, Abel offered a blood sacrifice, and God had regard for his offering.
Here’s the deal folks. The Law is mighty Leviathan in that it does not give a shit about what you are, what you think you are, what you believe, what you don’t believe, what you can do, what you think you can do; or anything you can muster whatsoever. Not even the Holy Spirit can stop the mighty Law from charging in for a kill. Now God can hold the Law off for a time, but as with the case of Satan concerning Job, eventually God must acquiesce to the claims God has decreed as King. The Law is the quintessential Honey Badger of the bible, because the Law doesn’t care.
And therein lies the truth for all non-Jews and non-Christians: without the shedding of blood, the Law is not satisfied that Adam’s debt(carried on in you) has been paid and if the debt is not paid, you deserve to die. It is why Israel’s Ark of the Covenant has two cherubim facing one another with their eyes focused down on the empty space between them where the blood from the regular sacrifice was splattered. Unless the Law sees blood, you do not deserve to have good things happen to you; you deserve bad things. Unless the Law sees blood, you do not deserve, health, you deserve illness. Unless the Law sees blood, you do not deserve happiness, you deserve mourning. Unless the Law sees blood, you do not deserve a family, prosperity, and wholeness; you deserve the isolation that comes with loss, poverty, and brokenness. Unless the Law sees blood, you do not deserve to even live; you deserve death.
“But that’s not fair! I’m a good person. I do my best to live a good life and I don’t need a God to do good!”
According to the Law, you are absolutely 100% right. It is not fair!
According to the Law, Adam should have died on the spot, which means he would never have had any children, which means you and I would not even be here complaining about how unfair it is. So it’s not fair that you think all the good things you can do cancel out the fact that you should not even exist! In essence, the Honey Badger Leviathan don’t give two shits if you are Mother Theresa, if the Law had been honored on the spot in the first place, Mother Theresa would not even be a topic of contention!
Which is why the Law demands blood. Grace may have prevented Adam from dying on the spot, but a delay alone is not enough to preserve the offspring of fallen Adam. Because Adam’s descendants ought not even exist under a fulfilled Law, their deaths are also required for the Law to be appeased and not even the Holy Spirit can say no to that.
Which brings us to the issue of who will rule over you.
The scriptures say much about pride. Pride goes before destruction, and a haughty spirit before stumbling. When pride comes, then comes dishonor. A man’s pride will bring him low. But the most important thing the scriptures speak of Pride is this: He[Leviathan] looks on everything that is high; he is king over all the sons of pride.
We each have one choice to make in this world before the end comes. Either like Cain and Job, we believe that we are good enough as we are; that no one has to die for us and the debt does not exist. Or we believe what is evident to our eyes, people are dying, the world is not becoming a nicer place, something is very wrong with basic humanity which leads us to learning about the debt that Adam incurred when he violated God’s Law and put himself under the dominion of Death. Once we understand the debt and the position it places us in, it does us well to realize we’re in the water and need to climb into the life raft before the King of the Deep is overcome by hunger and rises up to swallow us.
So the choice is simple: Either Leviathan will rule you in death; or Jesus will rule you in life.
But if you choose death, don’t come to a false conclusion that you will cease to exist. God is an eternal being and his breath is in you from whence Adam came. You will exist in one form or another, it is simply a matter of whose dominion you choose to live under: the pride of yourself or the humility of a free gift in your place.
Choose wisely, but remember. Leviathan does not care. By Leviathan Sodom and Gammorah fell. By Leviathan the Flood waters covered the earth. By Leviathan Lucifer was cast from heaven. By Leviathan the walls of Jericho were destroyed, the armies marching against King Jehoshaphat were routed, the plagues fell upon Egypt, and the firstborn of every house NOT covered by the lamb’s blood was slain. By Leviathan, the end will come upon the Earth quickly with much terror and destruction because God will finally step out of the way and end the time of His Grace. Because Leviathan is not some mighty Godzilla; rather, Leviathan is the word that proceeds from God accomplishing all that he desires when he spoke it; and that word will not return to God void.
And when that time comes, if you do not have a valid blood ransom covering you like the lamb’s blood covered the doorposts of the Jews when the Lord sent his angel of Death into all of Egypt, just like those non-believing Egyptians or Job you will have nothing to keep the wrath of the Leviathanical Law out. You will be witness to its awesome power and magnitude and it shall have dominion over you, whether you want it to or not, whether you believe it to or not, because Honey Badger don’t care.
Against that there is nothing that can be offered or extended, except an invitation to Christ. Wishing you luck, safety, or godspeed amounts to nothing more than “You in danger girl.” Because the Law requires blood, either your blood pays the debt, in which case you who sprang from dust return to dust(that God has ordained as food for Satan) or your debt is paid with righteous blood that the Law had no authority to subject to Death: that of Jesus Christ. There is nothing for you to do to earn this but to confess with your mouth and believe in your heart that God sent His own son Jesus Christ, who knew no sin, to die a death he did not deserve so that he could act as your substitute in dying the death the Law requires. Once you confess this and believe, you are counted among Christ’s and the Law no longer has any dominion over you.
Or you can continue to live your life as you have and whenever the Accuser, Satan, wants to terrorize you, he simply needs to remind God: “Hey, you know that one you’ve been protecting for the last 30 years-well, he’s still deserves death and I want to cash in.”
And there’s nothing God can do to protect you, because, well, that’s the Law.