Job 41:22

The Leviathan described here seems beyond doubt to be the crocodile, not the dolphin or the whale, as some learned men have argued... Nothing could be more vivid than these accounts, and nothing more forcible than the conclusion for Job or anyone else. If such is the might of mere animals, the effect of God's creative will, what folly it is to resist, criticise, or even judge His ways!

Strength lodges in his neck, and terror marks everything in front of him. The rest of him is firm and immovable, his heart solid as stone, hard as the lower millstone.

"Strength dwells in his neck" (v.22), for his neck is stiffened in rebellion against God. "And sorrow dances before him" — as though sorrow was trying to dress itself in false joy, but it only brings misery and wretchedness.

His neck is the embodiment of strength, causing despair, not joy, to dance before him — he is the herald of misery. Within is a heart like stone, indifferent to all fear.

In Isaiah 27:1 we read: "In that day the LORD with His hard and great and strong sword will punish Leviathan the fleeing serpent... and He will slay the dragon that is in the sea." Here leviathan typifies the power of darkness... And now the deduction which Job could easily make. If he is proud then he belongs to leviathan the king who rules over the sons of pride. Jehovah has touched the secret in Job's heart. He has searched out the depths of it. Pride, the Devil's crime, had been cherished by him.

What an unbroken stiffness of neck! It makes everyone bend before it, and it fills the earth with ruin and men's hearts with grief. A riot of misery, a carnival of despair dances before him with glee — sword and plague and death, the unavoidable companions of absolute, Satanic power. The Beast will have no weak side, and he will know no pity. From his unyielding heart come hatred, scorn, death.

Men talk as if God's object was merely to occupy us with His works. God, on the contrary, brings forward His works to turn us away from our own thoughts and bow us to Himself. If the works of God are so wonderful, who is He that made them? And what is man if he dares to judge such a God?... Do you think that after this Job was occupied with behemoth or with leviathan? Not at all, but with God; and this was the design of it all.

God now shows to Job, under the figure of leviathan, that the power of Satan is too great for him... But what could be God's object in thus describing the power of the adversary? Surely it was to lead Job into entire dependence on Himself.