Hello readers, new blog today, and I hope this is helpful to you. The book of Job is such an amazing book. Maybe you’ve been wondering about this chapter about “leviathan” your whole life, or since you read it… what on earth was God talking about?

Well maybe there’s a lot more in it than you ever thought. And today we will consider leviathan.

… Who is found in Job 41. Job 41 is the penultimate chapter in the book of Job. We’re near the end of Job’s ordeal!

But after all of 40 chapters, God uses the description of a serpent creature called “leviathan” as an object lesson to show to Job the heart of the issue.

And in leviathan, God shows the condition of the human heart, which is what God only can truly see, can see to deal with, and has power to deal with… which he does in all of our lives.

Leviathan is summed up at the end of this chapter as “a king over all the children of pride”. So we can learn some valuable things from this chapter about pride… what it is, what it looks like, how it behaves etc.

PRIDE. You heard that word recently? But pride doesn’t just belong to the LGBTQI community. Pride is a condition we all share, and pride is why most people go to hell. It’s in us all and God really wants to expose our pride and deal with it, and hopefully by the end of this blog, you are willing to crucify that pride once and for all.

So let’s learn about pride from leviathan.

Here are some verses describing leviathan:

Job 41:15 “His scales are his pride, shut up together as with a close seal.”

Job 41:16 “One is so near to another, that no air can come between them.”

Job 41:24 “His heart is as firm as a stone; yea, as hard as a piece of the nether millstone.”

Wow. These verses are unbelievably accurate and informative in the figurative sense from this literal description. In this chapter, if you have ears to hear and eyes to see, you will learn more about man and the problem and state of his pride than all the psychology and counselling textbooks in the world.

Why do people reject the gospel? Why aren’t they saved? Isn’t salvation easy and available to all? Sure. So why reject Jesus Christ? Well, people reject the gospel because of pride and particularly the hard condition of the heart that pride creates and continues to nurse “Pride goeth before destruction, and an haughty spirit before a fall”.

I have been that way in my life, my pride has made me hard hearted and utterly resistant to truth. And I’ve seen it to be true in others also in the reception (or lack thereof) of people to the gospel of Jesus Christ.

In our generation, people have become so incredibly resistant to God’s word, nothing can get through or between, there is no crack in that walled up and hard heart where the grace and light of Jesus Christ can shine through and into.

People are closed off completely to the truth. Their eyes glaze over. The shutters come down. The wall goes up. The automatic defense that never sleeps … the “iron dome” as it were to truth is fully operational.

Not even the tiniest bit of air can come between the scales of pride, it’s a complete shut out, and it’s bad to be in such a state that not even a sliver of truth can get through to us. You cannot reason with leviathan and in our state of pride we are totally unreasonable.

If you are stuck in your pride, as stuck as those scales are together, I can only pray that God will abase the proud. Because he is able to. The best thing that can happen to a proud man is that God abases him. Because there is no hope for you while you are walled up in pride “God resisteth the proud, but giveth grace unto the humble.”

In another part of this same chapter the Bible says “the flakes of his flesh cannot be moved”. How many people “cannot be moved” no matter how much Bible they’re given, no matter how much grace and mercy and longsuffering God has bestowed on them. How can you be unmoved by the free gift of salvation? Yet most are.

You can tell people about hell. Unmoved. Yet Noah was moved with fear. You can tell people about repentance. But they remain unmoved in their sin. God’s word should move us, but for many people, they are unmoved in their rebellion to God and determination to go their way “who can come to him with his double bridle?”. All the best trying to turn a proud person around… it cannot be done. That’s why people go to hell. Because they will not be turned away no matter what you say.

… But this is ok, because although God was showing Job what Job could not do or deal with… God was also showing what he can do and in fact what his work is. And he can and does it in time.

Reader, I know I cannot change your heart. I know I can’t convince anyone of anything, and I’m not really even trying to. As a Christian we tell people the gospel, but salvation and the human operation of the heart is God’s work entirely. You can’t see your problem of pride that God can, and you can’t fix it even if you could.

But God’s business is the human heart. And he can and will move pieces around in life to break down and break through. Not for his good, but for our good.

Please learn that the thing with a life of sin is that it will harden you to Jesus Christ. The Bible talks elsewhere about being hardened through the deceitfulness of sin. Because the more you reject Christ and defy him, the more firm that heart of stone within will be “set in stone”.

There are also other descriptors of leviathan such as which talk about sparks of fire out his mouth and smoke out his nostrils… and I’ve experienced a tiny little bit of that too in witnessing to others…

When the heart is hard, the response can be pretty hard too!!! And it will be. And I know what that’s like because I’ve been that myself many times over. I can identify with smoke and fire towards someone that has told me truth that I didn’t want to hear. You know how the sparks fly? Well the gospel can certainly make the sparks fly.

Job 41:33 says “Upon earth there is not his like, who is made without fear.” You know why you don’t fear God? Because you’re proud. Your proud heart has deceived you so you do not fear God who you should fear.

What a creature this leviathan is. But such a beast that man cannot tame still answers to his Creator. Hopefully one day God gets us all to a place where our pride is broken before him as it needs to be. I don’t want to take after Satan, I want to take after Jesus Christ. But only when the pride is smashed, only then will the light of Jesus Christ shine in, with the healing and salvation that he only can bring.

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