Job is a man in the Old Testament who was wealthy, faithful, and widely respected — and who lost everything in a devastatingly short period: his children, his livestock, his health. Three friends came to comfort him and ended up arguing that he must have sinned to deserve such suffering, because that's how they believed God works. Job pushes back hard throughout the book. In this verse, he's making the case that God's sovereignty is far larger than his friends' tidy moral equations. The phrase 'strength and victory' can also be rendered as 'power and sound wisdom.' Job is saying: even deception and the deceiver fall within God's ultimate domain — not that God approves of deception, but that nothing, not even evil, escapes his authority.
God, you hold what I cannot control and see what I cannot see. The injustice that keeps me up at night is not outside your awareness or beyond your authority. I don't understand how you work in the middle of it all — but I'm choosing to trust that you do. Carry what I can't. Amen.
Job's friends had a clean system: obedience brings blessing, sin brings suffering, and God functions like a reliable algorithm. It's a theology that works fine in the abstract — until you're Job, losing everything while being genuinely faithful. What's remarkable about this verse is that Job's argument is actually bigger than his friends' comfortable categories. He doesn't just say 'God is fair.' He says God holds the full, tangled chaos of human experience — including the parts where people deceive each other, where the manipulative prosper and the innocent get buried. God isn't absent from the wreckage. He holds it all. That isn't a comfortable thought. A God who holds both the deceived and the deceiver doesn't fit neatly into our preferred narratives about how the world should work. But it might be the truth you need on the specific day your trust was shattered by someone you counted on, or the day someone walked away with something they never should have had. Job isn't saying injustice is fine. He's saying it doesn't have the final word. What are you carrying right now that feels completely outside God's reach?
Why does it matter to Job, in the middle of his suffering, to make this argument about God's sovereignty over deceivers and the deceived? What is he trying to establish?
Have you ever been in a situation where real injustice happened and God felt absent from it? How did you make sense of that — or are you still making sense of it?
Does the idea that 'both deceived and deceiver are his' comfort you or disturb you? What does your honest reaction reveal about what you believe about God?
How does holding onto the belief in God's ultimate sovereignty actually affect how you treat someone who has wronged you — does it make forgiveness easier or more complicated?
Is there an injustice — something done to you or someone you love — that you've been holding onto because releasing it feels like letting the wrong person win? What might trusting God's sovereignty look like in that situation?
And deceiveth them that dwell on the earth by the means of those miracles which he had power to do in the sight of the beast; saying to them that dwell on the earth, that they should make an image to the beast, which had the wound by a sword, and did live.
Revelation 13:14
With him is wisdom and strength, he hath counsel and understanding.
Job 12:13
Daniel answered and said, Blessed be the name of God for ever and ever : for wisdom and might are his:
Daniel 2:20
And lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from evil: For thine is the kingdom, and the power, and the glory, for ever. Amen.
Matthew 6:13
But evil men and seducers shall wax worse and worse , deceiving, and being deceived.
2 Timothy 3:13
He disappointeth the devices of the crafty, so that their hands cannot perform their enterprise.
Job 5:12
"With Him are might and sound wisdom, The misled and the misleader are His [and in His power].
AMP
With him are strength and sound wisdom; the deceived and the deceiver are his.
ESV
'With Him are strength and sound wisdom, The misled and the misleader belong to Him.
NASB
To him belong strength and victory; both deceived and deceiver are his.
NIV
With Him are strength and prudence. The deceived and the deceiver are His.
NKJV
Yes, strength and wisdom are his; deceivers and deceived are both in his power.
NLT
Strength and success belong to God; both deceived and deceiver must answer to him.
MSG