Job 12:6

In verse 6 Job challenged the main position that his friends had taken. They said that God always rewards good people with prosperity in this life, and always brings disaster on the wicked. Job said it was not so. There were cases where robbers prospered and where those who provoked God were secure.

The charges and empty sayings of the friends sting Job. He answers with bitter sarcasm, and then charges them with mocking him. They are at ease, while they hold on to their unfair suspicions of him. He almost compares them to robbers, who keep their loot undisturbed (verses 1-6).

There had been that great robber Nimrod. He first began to hunt beasts, and then to subdue men for his own purposes. God gave him no authority to do it. And yet God allowed it. Nimrod built great cities and became a great man. "The tents of robbers prosper, and those who provoke God are secure; into whose hand God brings abundantly." That is the present state of the earth. Any state of the earth since man fell is no adequate proof of what God thinks of people. It is not bringing out His judgment of men yet. God may deal with a particular case now and then. But that is an exception. His ordinary way is to leave things, to all appearance, to run their own course. And that is just why a judgment must come. Things have not been judged according to God, but they will be.

Job meets the theory that God repays everyone in this life with a direct denial and disproof. And this was not limited to man. Every form of living nature declares the same fact. The beasts of the earth, the birds of the air and the fish of the sea all show that the violent get the better of the weak. God is sovereign. For that very reason their law of government is a false argument, and to apply it to him is unjust.

Faith finds the answer to the painful riddle of human affairs in the secret of God. That answer does not come from studying facts. It does not come from long experience of God's apparent dealings as the Governor of the world. Power is His alone, and He is the only and the righteous God. Yet weigh events and the actual state of human society by the light of divine truth. Nothing is more constantly obvious than this: everywhere the world appears to reverse the known and eternal principles of divine government. "The tents of robbers prosper, and those who provoke God are secure" (Job 12:6). Evildoers go unpunished now. Truth is continually crushed, and its servants are often persecuted. In every age this has tested the faith and patience of God's saints (Jeremiah 12:1; Habakkuk 1:1-4).

Job knew that the tents of robbers prosper and that those who provoke God are secure (Job 12:6). But Eliphaz thought that "in prosperity the destroyer shall come upon" the wicked (Job 15:21). What Eliphaz thought was sometimes right, but not always. The writer of Psalm 73 knew that, and we know it from what is all around us. God has allowed Satan to become the god and prince of this world. Satan has authority to dispose in some way of the kingdoms of this world (Luke 4:6). Once we realise this, we will not be perplexed at the prosperity of the wicked.