Job XIII

 Being who he was, Satan tried to get God to be the instrument of Job’s testing, but God saw through his ruse. “But now stretch out your hand and touch all that he has, and he will surely curse You to Your face!”

If you think he is unshakeable and unbreakable, that he will remain faithful regardless of creature comforts or blessing, then why not stretch out your hand against all that he has? That was Satan’s opening salvo, his opening gambit, but God would not take the bait. Instead, God said to Satan, “Behold, all that he has is in your power; only do not lay a hand on his person.”

There was a line Satan was not allowed to cross, that being the person of Job. Everything else was up for grabs. Yes, even Satan is subject to the authority of God. He is on a leash, even though it may not seem like it at times, and there are limits to what he can do; otherwise, the havoc he would wreak would be unfathomable.

There is a difference between the consequence of one’s actions and testing the likes of which Job was about to endure. When one suffers because of sin, it’s not testing; it’s the direct result of disobedience and rebellion. Men love to spiritualize their failures and insist that being exposed for being a philanderer or adulterer, to say nothing of worse things certain high profile individuals have been criminally charged for committing, is God testing them or allowing them to be tested. It’s not. It’s their sin finding them out. It has nothing to do with testing but everything to do with the consequence of action.

The testing of the righteous allows for their faithfulness to shine all the brighter once the testing is done. It strengthens an already established faith and dependency on God that grows the spiritual man beyond the stage of what he’d been thus far. The sin of the compromised being exposed only serves to give an already battered church another bruise. We cannot conflate the two.

Job was a blameless and upright man not by his standard, or some other arbitrary standard, but by God’s standard. God saw him as blameless and upright. Job himself didn’t claim to be so; he didn’t brag about his uprightness; he simply loved God, served God, and worshiped God.

If you are more concerned about your image than you are about serving God, then you’ve lost the plot somewhere along the way. You have preachers and teachers spending hundreds of thousands of dollars on image consultants because they want to put their best foot forward and present their best face to the world when it’s not about them, nor has it ever been. Rather than make crisis management firms rich beyond their wildest dreams, why not walk circumspectly with your Lord and serve Him as a faithful servant should?

Job wasn’t trying to make a name for himself; he wasn’t trying to build a brand; he wasn’t trying to put on airs or pretend he was something he wasn’t for the sake of a following or a guest TV spot on some talk show. He was a man satisfied in God and desired only true fellowship with Him. That’s what Satan didn’t understand when it came to Job. Since Job was so rare, he’d never run across anyone like him and assumed offhand that if he was serving God, then Job had an ulterior motive for doing so.

You may look at Satan’s assumption and think it jaded, but all the evidence he’d had up until that point lent credibility to it. Thus far, his success had been predicated on his ability to find that one thing he could offer a given individual to make them take their eyes off their goal, purpose, or calling. In his mind, there was always something if you looked hard enough. There was always something that men would be swayed or tempted by, and he’d just have to find it when it came to Job.

It’s not as though the enemy’s cockiness wasn’t justified to a certain extent. He’d been at this long enough to understand human nature and knew how rare it was for someone to be wholly surrendered to God and serve Him out of purity of heart. He’d likely applied pressure the likes of which he was planning to apply to Job before and was sure that Job would fold, throw up his hands, and curse God when everything in his life turned to rubble.

We’ve all seen it play out often enough: When someone’s circumstances change, so does their attitude toward God. Although they may not have verbalized it, there was a part of their heart that felt entitled to creature comforts and the things of this earth because they worshipped God, and when those went away, they felt shortchanged and taken advantage of.

This is why purity of purpose matters when it comes to serving God. We don’t serve God to get stuff from Him or to make this present life more comfortable. We serve God because He is God because He sent Jesus to give His life so that we might have life and be reconciled to Him. We love Him because He first loved us with a perfect love, and nothing beyond that should factor into whether or not we remain faithful.

That sort of commitment and mindset is as rare today as it was during the days of Job. The unscrupulous among us realized how few people they’d be able to draw with that message, and they took it upon themselves to add to the Gospel and shift the focus from the things above to the things of this earth. Prosperity has become the focus of many congregations rather than humility, repentance, and obedience, and they’ve seen their numbers catapult into the stratosphere overnight. What happens when all the promises of thousandfold returns and a mountain of money don’t materialize, though? What happens when what drew people to their sanctuaries, the selling point that made them become members in good standing, turns out to be man-made fables without root or foundation in the Word of God? Those peddling such things don’t care about the fallout. They’re getting theirs, and they’re quick to brag about it. It’s the callousness of such men that’s most disturbing, knowing that sooner or later, those who’ve bought into the promise of wealth beyond measure will be disillusioned and disenchanted to the point of bitterness.

Job had wealth, and Satan wrongly assumed that this was his Achilles heel. He concluded that if he could strip Job of his possessions, it would only be a matter of time before he’d turn on God. Satan never figured that rare as they are, Job was indeed a man who feared God and shunned evil because knowing God more fully every day was his ultimate pursuit. 

With love in Christ,

Michael Boldea, Jr.     

Job XII

 If the enemy were allowed to do as he wills when he wills, not one of us would be alive to tell the tale. It’s hard to fathom that type of hatred. It’s hard to come to terms with the reality that your destruction is the singular thing that brings Satan joy. It may sound extreme, but there’s no getting around the truth of it. There is no mercy, empathy, kindness, or charity in Satan’s heart. He roams about like a roaring lion, seeking whom he may devour.

He has one mission, one purpose, and one goal: the utter destruction of God’s children. It’s not a part-time job for him, a hobby, or something he does on the weekends. He does not seek your destruction out of boredom or because he couldn’t get a tee time at the local golf course. He hates you in the purest definition of the word hate and knows that with each win, with each deception that got through, with each capitulation he was able to enable, with each temptation that someone gave into, it hurts the Father’s heart. The destruction of God’s creation to Satan is a means to an end. The end he seeks is wounding God; you and I are the way he can go about it.

We must look at our enemy in these terms lest we let down our guard or come to believe that the battle isn’t as intense as it is. The quickest way to lose a battle you should have won is to underestimate one’s enemy, whether his determination, ability, commitment, or intent. We’ve seen this scenario play out countless times, wherein someone who should have known better, who’s had enough experience with battling the darkness, somehow falls into the enemy’s snare. It’s because they stopped being watchful, on guard, and ready to defend against his attacks that they ended up shipwrecked, and not because the enemy became stronger. While you and I can grow from strength to strength and faith to faith, the enemy’s power is static. He doesn’t grow in strength but learns from his mistakes and streamlines his attacks whenever necessary.

Satan is always looking for an opportunity. Don’t give him one. He is always looking for a chink in your armor or a moment of distraction he can exploit to the utmost, and it is your duty to make sure that you’re always prayed up, read up, and armored up, no matter the time of day, or the circumstances you’re currently facing.

Have you ever wondered why attacks come in waves or why bad things happen in batches? It’s because the enemy is hoping that one situation will keep you distracted enough to make you not notice or outright ignore what he’s doing on the other front. It’s not as though one attack comes, and then the enemy lets you recover before he commences the next. He presses his advantage whenever he thinks he has one, and the pattern is so obvious that I’ve learned to be ever more vigilant after the first attack, knowing that a second is soon in coming. It is inevitable because although his schemes vary, and his attacks differ, Satan’s instinct to try again once he’s failed the first time is so ingrained in his nature that he can’t help himself.

While I was still living in California, back before the wife and the kids, I was pulling out of a parking lot when a young lady with more highlights than sense got tired of waiting for the light to turn green and attempted to whiz by on the right and pass the long line of cars. Unfortunately, my front bumper was in her way. I can’t say she was distracted by her cell phone since they hadn’t made their way onto the scene yet, but perhaps she was playing with the radio or checking her pager. For whatever reason, she didn’t even brake or try to turn but barreled into me hard enough to rip off my bumper and make my car inoperable.

Thankfully, I wasn’t one of those young men who thought his car was his life; otherwise, I would have reacted worse than I did. After the police report, the tow truck, and getting a ride back home, a friend came by to ask how I was doing, and my answer was, “I’m waiting for the other shoe to drop.” There’s a reason it’s a saying, as is the trope that problems always come in pairs.

The next day, my grandmother asked me to go to the Price Club up the road to get her some potatoes, and since I had no car, I walked. As I was walking through the parking lot, a twenty-pound bag of potatoes balanced on my shoulder, a little old lady pulled out of her spot without checking her mirrors and managed to run over my foot. It hurt, but thankfully, no bones were broken, and as I hobbled back home, I realized the other shoe had dropped.

If the devil does not relent in his attacks, neither should we in our defenses. If he doesn’t take a break from scheming and plotting, neither should we in being watchful for his plots and schemes. We must possess endurance because, more often than not, it is a war of attrition, with Satan hoping to wear you down and you tapping into reserves of strength you never knew you had because although it may feel like it at times, you are not alone in the fight. What you will come to realize is that those reserves are not your own but God’s help in your time of need.

The Bible tells us to resist the devil. It does not give us a time frame for how long we should do it; it is just that we should. War isn’t like boxing. There are no referees or three-minute rounds with breaks in between. It’s a given that the enemy will attack; resist him. It’s also a given that he will attack repeatedly; resist him every time.

Satan didn’t think much of Job’s faith or faithfulness. He did not believe they would weather a storm of any mentionable strength, so his opening gambit was that if God took everything he had away, Job would surely curse Him to His face. Satan believed what he was saying. He believed Job’s faithfulness was due to the blessings he’d received, something situational that would change the moment the comforts of life were stripped from him.

The only way for Job to remain faithful in the face of losing everything was if God was his everything, and that was something Satan couldn’t wrap his mind around. If God is your everything, then anything you lose in this life, any hardship, trial, travail, or valley, is weatherable as long as you still have Him, His presence, and His love.

With love in Christ,

Michael Boldea, Jr.  

Job XI

 Zebras can’t change their stripes, a leopard can’t change its spots, and the devil can’t change his nature. Whether he’d want to or not is another conversation altogether, but as far as his predisposition to try and cast a shadow on anything good, noble, and decent, it was par for the course, something so engrained in him that he could not resist it. In his insistence that even the one man God pointed to as being blameless and upright was so for ulterior motives, Satan was being true to his nature.

He couldn’t let God have the win. He couldn’t live with the idea that one man among all men desired God's presence in his life to the point of shunning evil and living blameless and upright. There had to be some other reason for Job’s faithfulness. There had to be a motive behind his being blameless and upright other than to be pleasing in the sight of the Lord. The pettiness in Satan’s character is both evident and offputting. It is who he is, who he’s always been, and anyone thinking the devil wants to be their friend is fooling themselves and ignorant of his true nature.

Although there were likely other rich men on the earth during the time of Job, he alone was blameless and upright before God. Job was one of one, a singularity, and it is his uprightness and blamelessness that God took note of rather than any material possessions he may have accumulated. What matters to God and what matters to men is often very different.

Even Satan had to acknowledge the blamelessness of Job. He didn’t say Job wasn’t blameless and upright; he inferred that he was so for an ulterior motive. The devil is a master of the pivot, so much so that one wonders if he learned it from politicians or if politicians learned it from him. If there were anything in Job’s life that could have been used against him, if there had been any hidden sin or practices uncharacteristic of one who is blameless, Satan would have been quick to point it out. Since there wasn’t, his next line of attack was Job’s motivation for being a blameless and upright man. The enemy doesn’t give up after one failed attack. He keeps finding new and inventive ways to bring a charge against the children of God, hoping that one will stick or have the desired effect.

It’s always shocking how many preachers, pastors, teachers, and evangelists give in to temptation and stop living the life they profess to live, and rather than being forthright about their moral failings and confessing their sin, they try to hide it, hoping no one will ever find out. Someone always does. The pattern is clear. Either the enemy has something to hold over your head, and you begin to water down and dilute the message at his behest, or he exposes you for all the world to see, causing undue mockery and ridicule to the household of faith.

Jesus said that nothing is covered that will not be revealed or hidden that will not be known. This was a declarative statement with no addendums, carveouts, or caveats, yet here we are, and every day, some new thing is brought to light that serves the church with another black eye.

There was nothing in Job’s life that Satan could point to and challenge God’s assertion that he was blameless and upright. If there had been, he would have ferreted it out and would have pointed to it with all the glee of a toddler discovering silly putty.

The reason the Word tells us we are to walk circumspectly and be above reproach as sons and daughters of God isn’t arbitrary. It’s not something God decided upon offhand or flippantly, but that the enemy would have no charge to bring against us and no means by which he could shipwreck our testimony. Each of us will give an account of himself to God. For some, this is a terrifying prospect; for others, it is a reason for joy, for once an account has been given, God will determine the reward for the faithfulness exhibited.

I’ve never been able to reconcile the notion of someone saying they believe the word of God when He says he is both omniscient and omnipotent, even going so far as teaching these truths, then turning around and practicing full-fledged rebellion. Either they never believed it to begin with, or they considered the momentary, fleeting pleasure of their sin to be more important than eternity in God’s presence.

When the enemy has no substantive charge to bring against you, he will resort to innuendo and attempted character assassination. With Job, it was trying to cast doubt on his motivation for fearing God and shunning evil, but that’s just one of many ad hominem attacks he levels against believers, and more often than not, he uses other believers to do it.

One of the most common criticisms leveled against me is that I am unloving because I refuse to water down the Gospel or insist it says something it clearly doesn’t. In my younger years, before the graying hair and arthritic knees, I used to take the bait more often than I do today, trying to defend myself and insisting that speaking the truth is not unloving but that we should prioritize truth over feelings because truth matters, and feelings don’t.

The explanations never seemed to matter. People had made up their minds; they’d fit me in a specific box, and however much I’d try to explain that it was loving to warn people that sin leads to death, it would fall on deaf ears. It took me a while to figure out the game, but once I did, I stopped playing. I realized it was the enemy trying to demoralize me. That was the game he was playing. His purpose is to prevent you from walking in your calling if he can. How he does it is irrelevant to him as long as he succeeds in some form or fashion.

Since he could find no fault or shortcomings in Job, Satan targeted his motivation, implying that the reason for Job’s faithfulness wasn’t something as noble or pure as true love for God but due to having the work of his hands blessed and increasing his possessions in the land.

With love in Christ,

Michael Boldea, Jr.  

Job X

 In His grace, God directed the author of Job to describe the majesty of God’s habitation in terms we could understand. He begins by telling us that there was a day when the sons of God came to present themselves before the Lord. Are there days in heaven? Is there time? Does God, who is eternal, without beginning or end, measure existence in days as we, who are temporal, do? I don’t believe this to be the case, but for the sake of our understanding, we are told that there was a day when the instigating incident that turned Job’s life on a dime took place.

As I said at the beginning of this study, this isn’t a book one breezes through or reads superficially. There are depths upon depths that require thought, and although there aren’t answers to every question that presents itself, the journey itself is spiritually profitable. How so? Most importantly, it’s humbling. If you ever thought that you’d attained or that you knew all the intricacies of the mysteries of the majesty of the spiritual realm, God, and His habitation, you’ll walk away from the first few verses of the Book of Job, realizing just how little you knew. Being humble is a noble virtue; it’s the alternative that’s corrosive to the soul of man.

God speaks to men on their level that man might perceive and understand. This does not mean God lowers Himself to man’s level, for while He speaks to us in terms that bring about understanding, His ways are still not our ways, and His thoughts are still not ours. Just because we can visualize the interaction between God and Satan and the sons of God coming to present themselves before the Lord, it does not mean we come anywhere to imagining the majesty of the heavenly realm.

2 Corinthians 12:1-4, “It is doubtless not profitable for me to boast. I will come to visions and revelations of the Lord: I know a man in Christ who fourteen years ago – whether in the body I do not know, or whether out of the body I do not know, God knows – such a one was caught up in the third heaven. And I know such a man – whether in the body or out of the body I do not know, God knows – how he was caught up into Paradise and heard inexpressible words, which it is not lawful for a man to utter.”

Juxtapose the utter awe and reverence with which Paul describes being caught up with the way some today so haphazardly speak of sitting on God’s lap, taking the throne for a spin, or braiding God’s beard to make Him look more a Norseman than a graying old man, and you get the sense something isn’t kosher. Their descriptions don’t pass the smell test when compared with the descriptions we find in the Bible.

Every time a biblical author wrote of heaven, the presence of God, or the heavenly habitation, it was with a sense of awe and wonder. They beheld something the human mind could not process or rightly retell and heard inexpressible words that were not lawful for a man to utter. You cannot be in the presence of God and not be in awe of Him. You cannot be in the presence of the divine and not fall on your face in worship at the unfathomable majesty and glory of the God we serve.

It’s because they speak of such things so flippantly that I know most of those who insist they’ve walked the halls of heaven are putting on airs and lying through their veneered teeth. I don’t have to dig any deeper than that. Their attitude tells me they’ve never had a genuine encounter with God, for if they had, their reverence for the glory of God would show.

Steer clear of people trying to impress you with their experiences rather than their obedience. Those walking in obedience will never try to impress you with either, but it seems the claims these individuals need to make in order to make others believe they have been sent, chosen, and equipped keep getting more and more fantastical. I’m waiting for one of these people to insist that God let them be Him for a day just to see what it’s like. You think I’m joking; give it time. It’s inevitable.

There once was a man named Moses who had found grace in God's sight and whom God knew by name. No small feat that, but when Moses asked God to show him His glory, his request was denied for one incontrovertible reason: no man shall see Him and live!

Exodus 33:20-23, “But He said, “You cannot see My face; for no man shall see Me, and live.” And the Lord said, “Here is a place by Me, and you shall stand on the rock. So it shall be, while My glory passes by, that I will put you in the cleft of the rock, and I will cover you with My hand while I pass by. Then I will take away My hand, and you shall see My back; but My face shall not be seen.’”

So what you’re telling me is that Moses, the Moses, didn’t get to see the face of God, but you’re claiming that He bounced you on His knee and let you play with His beard? Not angels, not messengers, not visions, dreams, or visitations, but literal translation into the holy of holies where you beheld God Himself! Just so we’re clear, that is what certain individuals are claiming, and the church, by and large, is so Scripturally illiterate that they shudder with excitement at the prospect that they, too, will one day sit on God’s lap and stare dreamily into His eyes.

Why do I keep harping on such individuals? Is it jealousy? Is it envy? Do I feel left out of the club because I can’t claim to have sat on God’s lap? No, it’s none of those things. The reason for my continued insistence that these individuals should not be believed is simple: Either they are lying, or God was when He said no man could see His glory and live. Pick one! Who do you suppose is the odds in favor of being proven a liar? God, or the spiky-haired loudmouths who base their entire so-called ministries and ability to generate legal tender on the insistence that they went to heaven?

Reverence and awe of God are implicit and inherent when someone still tethered to this mortal coil has an experience with the divine. When they are absent and fail to materialize as someone discusses the prospect of having seen God with their eyes of flesh, whether they are lying is a foregone conclusion. Because God said no man could see Him and live, whenever such claims are made, it is a lie ten times out of ten.

With love in Christ,

Michael Boldea, Jr.