Job 38:10

The Lord turns from the earth to "that great and wide sea." He does not describe it in its original creation, as part of the heavens and the earth, but as gushing out from its mother's womb. It covered the whole face of the world, and "darkness was over the face of the deep." Left to itself it would have swallowed everything. But its Maker was its Master. He set bounds to it, breaking the land, so to speak, into great mountain chains to make a place for it, barred and shut so that it could not escape.

People may speak of "natural laws" as causing this phenomenon, but who is the Author of natural law?

At the beginning God restrained this restless mighty ocean. He restrained it again when in judgment He let it swallow the earth. Man gazes at it with awe, but cannot control its power. His "thousand fleets sweep over it in vain"; he "marks the earth with ruin," but his control stops at the shore.

Job had not a single answer to these questions, and if he had spoken, his words would have been folly. And we, 3000 years or more later, with all our boasted progress and scientific discoveries of the great laws of nature, still cannot answer these questions in a satisfying way. … But what is the Lord's aim in putting these questions? To show that God is greater than man, and to humble man. To bring Job to the true knowledge of himself that he needed, and to free him from the pride of his heart.

So too in the ocean of evil — the pride of Satan that burst out in rebellion against God, when the angels did not keep their first position. God's restraining hand holds everything in check. The wicked, like the foaming sea, seem to rise higher and higher in violence and pride. But God says to them, "Thus far shall you come, and no farther." This shows His restraining power over evil. Job watched wickedness that seemed to be winning, and he looked into the dark surging of his own self-willed heart. He might well have been horrified. Who but God can control evil?

How striking is the spiritual meaning of God's control of the seas! Job felt as though the waves of the sea were swallowing him in a string of painful troubles that seemed out of control. Believers may pass through times of turbulent unrest and distress, as though tossed by the waves of a rolling sea. But God is in perfect control of it all, and He can quiet the sea at once, just as the Lord Jesus did when His disciples were so alarmed: "He awoke and rebuked the wind and said to the sea, 'Peace! Be still!' And the wind ceased, and there was a great calm" (Mark 4:39).