Job LVI

 Solomon once wrote that he who walks with wise men will be wise, but the companion of fools will be destroyed. You don’t get to pick your family but you can select your friends. If you find yourself surrounded by fools, it’s nobody’s fault but your own because you chose it, attracted it, and embraced it rather than seek out wise men who would have made you wiser instead.

I cannot boast of a panoply of friends, but the friends I do have, I’ve chosen purposefully. My intent was never to surround myself with yes men or those who would agree with me on every topic, but rather those who would challenge me and, as iron sharpens iron, seek to grow together and hold each other accountable.

One of the worst things a pastor or a preacher can do is surround themselves with sycophants who think they can do no wrong. No, you’re not the second coming of the Messiah, you don’t walk on water, you do have flaws, and it’s good to surround yourself with people who keep you humble.

Some of the biggest scandals within the church of late have come about because rather than love their soul enough to call them out on their sin, the governing body, the elders, deacons, and those with knowledge of the moral failures of their leader, swept it under the rug and pretended as though it never happened. They were more concerned about their paycheck than they were about the spiritual condition of the man in charge, so rather than deal with the festering wound, they set about protecting an image. When your friends, the elder board, or the governing body of any given work are more concerned about image and what exposing sin might mean for the revenue than they are about the truth, it’s a problem that won’t go away.

In hindsight, they all concur that it would have been better to rip off the band-aid and deal with the situation when it arose, but now, months, years, or decades down the line, it’s only gotten worse, deeper, more diseased, and the fallout will be all the greater.

Job was a wise man, and he surrounded himself with wise friends. Teman, the region Job’s friend Eliphaz was from, would later be associated with wisdom itself by none other than God when He queried through Jeremiah whether wisdom was no more in Teman. It had been centuries since the time of Job, and it seems there had been a decline in wisdom in Teman, but during his time, it was a valued and sought-after virtue.

In our modern era, Solomon’s words have been retooled and simplified, wherein the brilliant minds of our day have concluded that you are either the average of the five people you spend the most time with or the better-known adage, show me your friends, and I’ll show you your future, but the genesis of this logical deduction can be traced back to the Proverbs of old, which are included in the Book so many ignore and despise today.

The Bible is a wonderland of wisdom, and more often than not, every epiphany and every quip that resonates, for which men take credit as being the originators of, can be traced back to it in some form or fashion.

It’s no accident that the further a society draws away from Scripture, the less wisdom there is to be found in it. When you do away with the light, when you do away with the Word of God, only darkness and foolishness remain. We can see what society has become in real-time over the last few decades, and the core reason for all this is that we have strayed from God. There is no wisdom to be found in the world or its ways. Every wicked thing that is presented as being the new way to fulfillment and wholeness is discovered to be vapid and substanceless, and those who chased after it, thinking it would make them whole, found themselves more despondent, disjointed, and discombobulated than ever before.

Throughout history, we’ve seen that a renaissance of wisdom began with one man. It didn’t take a village to come together and decide they would pursue it; it took one man whose desire for wisdom was such that he let nothing stand in his way of acquiring it. That desire inspired others, and eventually, there was a movement, a groundswell of souls who were tired of wallowing in the ignorance they’d become accustomed to and hungered for something more. Any quest whose purpose is wisdom will eventually lead to the foot of the cross. It will lead to the Word of God because it is wisdom distilled. The Bible is the source of all wisdom and the only thing we need to be counted among the wise.

There are those who are wise and those who profess to be wise. There is a marked difference between the two, for while the truly wise have their wisdom tethered in truth, in the Word of God and His ways, those professing to be wise become fools trusting in their own wisdom.

Romans 1:22-23, “Professing to be wise, they became fools, and changed the glory of the incorruptible God into an image made like corruptible man – and birds and four-footed animals and creeping things.”

This is what your own wisdom gets you: foolishness. All the wretchedness, silliness, foolishness, confusion, and aberrant behavior we are seeing are merely symptoms of the underlying disease. The underlying disease is a departure from godly wisdom for the truth of God’s word and the light of Scripture. The resulting symptoms are readily visible in our modern culture, and until the disease is dealt with, the symptoms will morph, and new variants will appear, all worse than the previous iterations.

Spiritual problems require spiritual solutions. In order for the current problem to even begin to be rectified, we must distance ourselves from those professing to be wise when they are demonstrable fools and return to the wisdom of the Gospel, submitting to it and doing as it commands. We have the prescription, but simply having the prescription will do nothing to alleviate the disease. We must take the medicine that is the Word of God and allow it to purify us from within. Am I preaching to the choir? Perhaps, but I’ve seen far too many seemingly stable believers go off into the weeds, believing things the Bible never speaks of and finding their faith shipwrecked as a consequence.   

With love in Christ,

Michael Boldea, Jr.