A Meditation upon Leviathan

Chaos, be damned

I hear tell there are people out there who think the world is flat. I wish the world were flat. If the world were flat, we wouldn’t have time zones. If we didn’t have time zones, we wouldn’t have jet lag. If we didn’t have jet lag, I’d have slept a great deal more across the last week. I wouldn’t have had to caffeinate myself into coherence. Unfortunately, the world is more or less round.

One upside to jet lag, however, is that it’s given me more time to pray. I pray for friends and family, occasionally for enemies, and for myself. It’s a wild and wooly world out there. If I spend much time reading the news, I get the distinct sense that the world has gone completely bananas. We are bombarded with chaos.

Anyone with a sense of history knows that the chaos of this world is nothing new. Its generating sources remain largely the same across time: power, greed, pride, fear. We just experience the world’s chaos in keeping with our historical settings. In our own time, however, social media has accelerated its production. I haven’t spent much time on Facebook or X since the election, though I’ve seen a bit. One friend laments, another rages, another rejoices, another gloats. Such is the diversity of my friends, at least for now. Some may decide I’m not worth keeping. That would be consistent with the spirit of the age. When historians look back on this era, they will note the dawn of instantaneous public communication as an historical inflection point. If the tongue is a fire, social media is napalm.

I turned 54 years old in an airport lounge in Doha, Qatar, on the way back from Nairobi. I am a people watcher, and for six hours I was surrounded by people from all over the world, of different faiths or no faith, styled in different kinds of garb, speaking in various tongues. It reminded me of how small my world can be. I find this to be a common malady among Americans. Things in the USA seem chaotic but it is simply our brand of a common malady. Billions of chaotic manifestations take place each day in the lives of people whose names you and I will never know. People struggle in their marriages. They don’t know how they will pay the bills. They weep over their children. Jobs disappear. Crops fail.

The world is chaotic. Things don’t work the way they should. We stare down the gullet of Leviathan and smell its rancid breath but cannot seem to move the chaos from before our gaze.

JoeyWhisperz, CC BY-SA 4.0 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0>, via Wikimedia Commons

Yet God is not powerless amid what we experience as chaos. God is in the thick of it redeeming, making new, trading beauty for ashes even though this divine work is often invisible to us. Tragedy is real. Sin has consequences. We can really hurt one another, and we do. I’ve done my share. I have had to do plenty of repenting and, indeed, penance. I’m a man of unclean lips, and I live among a people of unclean lips. But chaos is no match for the work of God. Job 41 is a representation of God’s triumphant work over the forces of chaos, which is embodied in the figure of Leviathan.

Who can confront it and be safe? —under the whole heaven, who?

I will not keep silence concerning its limbs,

or its mighty strength, or its splendid frame….

Who can open the doors of its face?

There is terror all around its teeth.

Its back is made of shields in rows,

shut up closely as with a seal….

When it raises itself up, the gods are afraid;

at the crashing they are beside themselves….

On earth it has no equal,

a creature without fear.

It surveys everything that is lofty;

it is king over all that are proud

(Job 41: 11-12, 14-15, 25, 33-34).

Leviathan represents chaos. One study Bible I use calls it an “anti-cosmos” creature. Think of the ordering of God in Genesis 1. The earth was a formless void, but God began to bring order through a process of separation: light from darkness; the waters from waters; and the waters from dry land. God made plants to grow on the earth, not just of one kind, but “plants yielding seed, and fruit trees of every kind” (1:11). God separated the lights, creating the sun and moon, and then animals of both sky and sea, and then the animals that would live on dry land. Finally, God created humankind in his image, “male and female he created them” (1:27). God brought forth order out of chaos, but when sin entered in, the forces of chaos found a foothold in creation once again. Leviathan symbolizes those forces. It rebels against God’s good order. It twists our perception and confuses our understanding. It represents the undoing of God’s creative fashioning.

Of note is that Leviathan surveys “everything that is lofty; it is king over all that is proud.” The exaltation of the self is an invitation to chaos. It is a rejection of our proper relationship to God, and thus the proper created order. When pride takes root in the soul, many other sins are sure to follow. And pride gets to us all. “You will be like God,” said the serpent (Gen 3:5). It is a lie repeated across time. The confusion of Creator and creature invites chaos and ultimately death. Leviathan causes disorder and confusion that can mislead in subtle ways. It is crafty and cunning. It tells us what we want to hear. Through humility, however, we assume our rightful place before God and one another. We align ourselves with God’s victory over Leviathan.

These are chaotic times. We walk on a knife’s edge. It is easy to feel as if the world we have known is disintegrating around us. You and I are not powerful enough to tame Leviathan.

Yet God’s word to Job is that, whereas Job is powerless before such a chaotic monster, for God it is no match. God can put a rope in its nose and pierce its jaw with a hook (41:2-3). God will fill its skin with harpoons and its head with fishing spears (41:7). Our God is a redeemer. In the midst of a broken creation in which Leviathan rages at us from the deep, we can have peace as God tames our chaotic impulses and restores order to our souls. Redemption happens when God subdues the rebellious forces of chaos in our lives and brings us into alignment with the divine logos—the reason, order, and life-giving power of God. Christ took our disordered lives upon himself on the cross and trampled Leviathan under his feet when he rose from the dead. We thus become vessels of peace to the world around us, sharing the love of God as heralds of his goodness. Creation has been fractured by sin. Yet we who are in Christ are a new creation, and we look forward to that day when all of creation is restored. “He will wipe every tear from their eyes. Death will be no more; mourning and crying and pain will be no more, for the first things have passed away” (Rev 21:4). Leviathan rages, but its days are numbered.