Job LXXXVIII

 Job 5:12-16, “He frustrates the devices of the crafty, so that their hands cannot carry out their plans. He catches the wise in their own craftiness, and the counsel of the cunning comes quickly upon them. They meet with darkness in the daytime, and grope at noontime as in the night. But He saves the needy from the sword, from the mouth of the mighty, and from their hand. So the poor have hope, and injustice shuts her mouth.”

None of what Eliphaz testifies is wrong or wayward. God does frustrate the devices of the crafty; He does catch the wise in their own craftiness; He does save the needy from the sword and from the mouth of the mighty, but He does so as He wills, when He wills, for His purpose and glory. Whether wittingly or unwittingly, Eliphaz omitted that last part as though it wasn’t relevant or was not the fulcrum upon which his entire thesis rested.

In any given situation God can intervene, God may intervene, but whether or not He will is solely incumbent upon Him and His purposes. God does as He wills. He is sovereign. You can’t be praying “Your will be done” every morning, then throw a hissy fit when He does His will. His will being done on earth as it is in heaven is not dependent upon whether or not it’s in concert with your will or mine. That would mean my will supersedes His will, and I become some sort of defacto god looking for a wish granter who does my bidding, asks no questions, and requires nothing in return. It’s easier said than done, but we must receive the blessing as well as the testing from the hand of God with equal aplomb.

Some of us are so desirous to bring comfort to another that we take it upon ourselves to speak for God and insist that He will remedy the situation. Unless God has spoken that to you directly, and you heard His words clearly and know them to have originated from Him, telling someone God will do something He never said He would may give them temporary comfort, but the end will be worse than the beginning for they will surely give way to bitterness and resentment when what you said God said He would do never materializes.

We approach the entire realm of the prophetic or revelatory insight far too flippantly nowadays, thinking that there will be no consequence for speaking when God has not spoken, not realizing that He’s already laid out the punishment for such transgression in His word. God never said He would give someone a pass if the word they spoke in haste, that did not originate from Him was done with good intentions. A lie is still a lie, even if it was intended as a comfort.

Jeremiah 23:25-27, “I have heard what the prophets have said who prophesy lies in My name, saying, ‘I have dreamed, I have dreamed!’ How long will this be in the heart of the prophets who prophesy lies? Indeed they are prophets of the deceit of their own heart, who try to make My people forget My name by their dreams which everyone tells their neighbor, as their fathers forgot My name for Baal.”

Jeremiah 23:30-32, “Therefore behold, I am against the prophets,” says the Lord, “who steal My words every one from his neighbor. Behold, I am against the prophets,” says the Lord, “who use their tongues and say, He says. Behold, I am against those who prophesy false dreams,” says the Lord, “and tell them, and cause My people to err by their lies and by their recklessness. Yet I did not send them or command them; therefore they shall not profit this people at all,” says the Lord.”

These verses should be on the front page of every school of prophecy workbook in big, bold letters because it is a fearful thing to fall into the hands of the living God. They’re not, though, for fear that it will tamper the enthusiasm of the folks who forked over a grand or five to be taught how to prophesy and walk in their anointing. Prophecy is not guesswork, a gut feeling, or a personal opinion repackaged to make it seem like it came from God. We’ve seen the aftermath of the lies and recklessness far too often to ignore it, but we’re still beating the same drum and offering the same courses on tapping into your prophetic gifting regardless of how many souls are shipwrecked and how many hearts are shattered because of words they received that never came to pass because they never originated from God.

It’s not that the reckoning is coming; it’s already here. We’re seeing it in real-time, and it will only intensify because God will not be mocked, no matter how many individuals think otherwise.

By all means, be a comfort, a shoulder to cry on, a caring friend, and an empathetic brother or sister in Christ, but don’t presume to know the mind of God or give words you know full well did not come from Him.

Your first duty is to delineate between feelings, emotions, what you think the individual wants to hear or needs to hear, and a true word from the Lord. Don’t conflate the two or insist a word is from the Lord when it’s not, even if it makes you seem less spiritual than you might like to be viewed. Being deemed spiritual by others is not worth God’s wrath, and this is yet another lesson the modern-day soothsayers have failed to learn to their detriment.

Intent may hold weight when it comes to other things we do in this life but is wholly irrelevant when it comes to speaking in the name of God when He has not spoken and insisting He will do something He never promised He would do. That you wanted to be a comfort, a healing balm, a source of hope, or some other trope one might use to justify such actions, they will be dismissed offhand because, in your presumption, you appropriated the omniscience of God and spoke in His name.

Mark 4:22, “For there is nothing hidden which will not be revealed, nor has anything been kept secret but that it should come to light.” 

With love in Christ,

Michael Boldea, Jr. 

Job LXXXVII

 When we are unaware of the possibility, perhaps even the probability of having our faith tested, of being sifted, of going through the valleys of life that make us cling to God all the more, while all seems pleasant and uncomplicated, while we are not being buffeted and the safety nets we’ve built for ourselves still hold ignorance may truly seem like bliss. It’s like the folks who don’t file taxes for years on end, thinking they’ve gotten one over on the rest of us, that they’ve found a loophole, or have discovered a heretofore unknown cheat code, only to get a knock on their door from a serious looking individual informing them that their wages have been garnered, and they own back taxes to the tune of six figures. I’m sure it was fun while it lasted, but the music eventually stops, and the reckoning commences.

For those living in the land of fantasy where the peaches are always perfectly ripe, the sun is always shining, and no ill or trial can ever be visited upon them, it’s all sunshine and lollipops until it’s not. Don’t get me wrong, if it wasn’t such dangerously faulty logic, it would be fun to entertain.

Once in a great while, we’ll show up for church, call money down from heaven, get a pat on the back for showing up, and go on about our lives unencumbered by the constraints of righteousness or holiness unto God. Building up our most holy faith sounds like too much work, so we’ll pay the fifty bucks per month to get an AI chatbot to spend time with God on our behalf, and that way, we won’t have to miss our tee time.

I’m still waiting for the sin eaters to make a comeback, but given the trajectory the modern-day church is headed in, it’s only a matter of time.

If one is not aware that trials, testing, and hardships are part of the Christian walk, when they make their presence felt, they will either retreat or be frozen to the spot, not knowing what to do and fearful that any course of action may only exacerbate the situation.

There is a reason we are repeatedly warned via Scripture that we have an enemy, that he seeks our destruction, and that he is ruthless and single-minded in his desire to keep us from finishing well. Anyone not aware of this hasn’t been reading their Bible or has been taught that it’s within their purview to ignore the parts of it they don’t like.

Once in a while, you hear stories of starry-eyed tourists who travel to dangerous corners of the world trying to prove the warnings wrong and unfounded only to end up dead in a ditch, butchered like so much cattle, because ignoring reality doesn’t change the fundamental nature of it, and pretending as though something does not exist doesn’t make it so. This isn’t the Matrix; you can’t just tell yourself there’s no devil and make that your reality.

It’s not as though some of the words Eliphaz spoke weren’t beautiful, true, and even poetic, words that resonate to this day in their delivery, but not all true and beautiful words apply to a given situation. You can have an entire tool bag full of tools, but if you don’t have the right tool for the job, you still lack what is necessary for the current situation. It goes without saying that Eliphaz was a wordsmith. It’s also undeniable that he was an intelligent man who was a deep thinker and pondered the deeper truths of his existence, but in the current situation, watching his friend Job suffer both physically and emotionally, he did not possess the right tools to remedy the situation. It’s no slight on him; sometimes, the only one who can heal a broken heart and give hope is God, and no matter who it is standing before us, either trying to comfort or rebuke us, they fall short.

If you’ve ever been in a situation where you’ve tried your best to lend a hand, be a support, bring comfort, or give wise counsel and knew yourself to have fallen short of the mark, it wasn’t you, or your inability to be a good friend in due season, it was the fact that only God could have put back together the pieces that were shattered.

It’s one thing to give good counsel, and it goes unheeded; it’s another when the counsel you give falls short in some way. You can’t help but feel responsible in some capacity, and although I’ve gotten better about beating myself up over being unable to be of help in certain situations, it still gets to me. It used to wreck me utterly. Although I was not personally responsible for the situation the individual found themselves in, being unable to do anything to fix it made me feel like a failure.

The worst by far is wayward children and broken marriages. You sit down with the individual and go through the Biblical steps required for healing; they go through them, and though they prayed, wept, and showered their progeny with love, their hearts are still hard, and the spouse still refuses to reconcile. What more can I do? They would ask pleadingly, and all I could offer was to repeat the steps because you can’t change someone’s heart; only God can.

I had to humble myself enough to come to terms with the reality that my abilities were limited, that I’d done all I could, and must now surrender it to God and allow Him to have His way in the matter. Not every story has a happy ending. Not every prodigal finds their way back home; not every marriage can be put back together, and I discovered that my trying to make it so by sheer will alone was a folly of the worst kind. There is a difference between God can and God will, and we cannot conflate the two.

As Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego stood before the raging flames of the furnace, their answer to the king wasn’t that God would surely deliver them from the burning fiery furnace but that He was able to. Whether He did or not was solely up to Him. One thing was certain, and three young men said as much; one way or another, they would be delivered from the king’s hand that day.

We cannot presume that our deliverance will come by being spared the flames. In many an instance, our deliverance comes by standing in the fire.  

With love in Christ,

Michael Boldea, Jr. 

Job LXXXVI

 Given the historical context of the time, Eliphaz was likely the eldest of Job’s three friends, as great value was placed on the wisdom of age in those days. It used to be that the younger deferred to the older among them, whatever the situation might be. It’s easy enough to trace back the decline of society and correlate it to a growing disrespect for authority, one’s elders, one’s parents, and those who’ve been where you are and may have a thing or two to teach you about it.

Just because you know how to change the background screen on Google doesn’t make you omniscient, and although you can watch YouTube videos on how to hammer in a nail, that first time you crack your thumb with the business end of a claw hammer, you’ll come to appreciate the many times your dad told you to always be aware of where your thumbs are placed. There are some things only experience can teach. Either that or find someone with experience and ask them to teach you. It is a wiser course by far since you’ll be circumventing the pain of failure on your way to learning whatever the individual might have to impart.

It’s telling that Eliphaz was the first of Job’s three friends to speak up and that the other two deferred to him and did not attempt to interject or add their own ideas to what he was saying. Their turn will come in short order, but for now, it was Eliphaz who took up the reins.

Job 5:8-11, “But as for me, I would seek God, and to God, I would commit my cause – who does great things, and unsearchable, marvelous things without number. He gives rain on the earth, and sends waters on the fields. He sets on high those who are lowly, and those who mourn are lifted to safety.”

If you’d read the entire chapter through from start to finish, it is here that you begin to wonder if the same individual is speaking. Up until this point, he was disparaging both Job’s faith and his integrity, questioning the power of the God he served, and suddenly, he reverses course and begins to wax poetic about the power of God and the marvelous things He does without number.

But wait; weren’t you the guy insisting that no one was there to answer and wondering which of the holy ones Job would turn to next? Weren’t you the one doing your utmost to vex Job’s spirit and crush him even deeper into the dust if that were at all possible?

Any reasoned dive into this chapter would lead to the conclusion that two people were speaking. The first person through the seventh verse and the second person from the eighth verse onward. Whether it was Eliphaz coming to his senses or resisting the enemy’s whispers, we cannot know, but what is evident and beyond doubt is that the entire tone of his discourse shifts, and he begins to list the attributes of God, who is worthy of being sought, and to whom one’s cause is worth committing to.

The view from an ash heap and a high horse are markedly different. You get a different perspective, one looking up, the other looking down, and Eliphaz decided that after having rebuked Job, it was an opportune moment to highlight his virtues and insist that were he to be brought low and be in Job’s position, he would seek God and commit his cause to Him, as though Job had done any different.

It’s easy to pontificate when you’re not the one struggling. It’s easy to sit in judgment of another when you don’t know the details of the hardship they’re going through or the effort it’s taking for them to hang on by the skin of their teeth. When someone is beaten into the dirt, surprised at themselves for not having given up already, the last thing they want to hear is how someone else would have done it differently. In theory, they might have, but in practice, they may have been more of a blubbering mess than the individual they’re trying to illuminate as to where they went wrong.

What happened to Job wasn’t bad decisions, bad investments, gambling addiction, unwise relationships, faithlessness, duplicity, or lack of reverence for God. There was nothing he could have done to mitigate the disaster that consumed him because the devil had been given leave to do as he willed with Job’s family, possessions, and health.

Some trials cannot be hedged for, planned for, mitigated, or avoided. The best we can hope is that we suffer well through them and that our faith is so rooted and well-established that we will weather the trial and come out stronger for it.

When Jesus had his heart to heart with Peter, informing him that Satan had asked for him that he may be sifted as wheat, the only consolation he received was that Jesus had prayed for him that his faith should not fail. It wasn’t that he be spared the sifting, it wasn’t that he be sheltered from the trial, it was that his faith would be strong enough in the face of it that it would endure the pressure of the testing.

If you believe yourself to be spiritually superior to Peter or somehow more highly favored than he was or more blameless and upright than Job, that’s one thing. If you don’t, rather than assume you will never be tested or sifted, your time would be better spent building up your most holy faith that when your season of sifting comes, it should not fail.

Because the spiritual understanding of many contemporary Christians is superficial at best, they fail to differentiate between God’s protection, provision, and providence in their walk of faith and those seasons where we are allowed to be tested and sifted. The two are not mutually exclusive because God chastens those He loves, and our faith is strengthened, refined, and proven in the flame of the trials He allows in our lives.  

With love in Christ,

Michael Boldea, Jr. 

Job LXXXV

 Job 5:1-7, “Call out now; is there anyone who will answer you? And to which of the holy ones will you turn? For wrath kills a foolish man, and envy slays a simple one. I have seen the foolish take root, but suddenly I curse his dwelling place. His sons are far from safety, they are crushed in the gate, and there is no deliverer. Because the hungry eat up the harvest, taking it even from the thorns, and a snare snatches their substance. For affliction does not come from the dust, nor does trouble spring from the ground; yet man is born to trouble, as the sparks fly upward.”

The subtext and innuendo in Eliphaz’s discourse are staggering to behold. As we continue into the fifth chapter of Job, about halfway through, you can see the tonal shift once again, as if two different men were speaking. If we pay close attention, we can see where Satan’s influence ends and Eliphaz’s own thoughts begin.

You’re all alone, buddy, is what the subtext implies. Call out now. Is there anyone who will answer you? You trusted in God, you served Him, you feared Him, and He’s brought you to this low point in life. You’re crying out, and He’s remaining silent. Perhaps he wasn’t worthy of your veneration. Perhaps you misplaced your faith. Which of the holy ones will you turn to now? Given that this God has failed you, which god will you pursue now? The depth of evil in Satan’s implications is jarring. That he would use one of Job’s closest friends to deliver this message is cunning and unseemly.

Not to belabor the point, but oftentimes, you can tell when someone is speaking their words, sharing their heart, and when an external, nefarious force is using them to sow despair in your heart. Perhaps unintentionally, unwittingly, without his knowledge or consent, but it is evident that Satan was using Eliphaz to dispirit Job, to the point of questioning if he’d picked the right God to serve and obey.

This was not Eliphaz talking. It was his voice, his tongue, his cadence, but as far as words are concerned, these were not his words. It’s a terrifying prospect when you start to think about it. Here he was, having traveled a long way, having sat with his friend in silence for seven days just hoping to be a comfort, and now that he opened his mouth to speak, his words were anything but comforting or encouraging. On the contrary, up to this point in his monologue, his entire focus was on getting Job to doubt his resolve and make him question whether his service to God was worth it.

If the Word tells you to hold fast to your faith, to put on the whole armor of God, to resist the devil, and to persevere, and a friend, a family member, or even one you deem a spiritual authority comes along and tells you it would be better if you just gave up, packed it in, perhaps find another religion you should gravitate toward because the God you currently serve isn’t taking any calls, you should know without doubt that they are being used of the enemy to try and shake your faith.

The enemy is fully aware that faith to the spiritual man is like oxygen to the physical man. It is the stone thrown into a still pond, causing ripples in every area of life. Once you begin to understand faith, you cannot remain unchanged, unaffected, or unmoved. If you deprive the physical man of oxygen for any lack of time, then he will surely die. The same is true for the spiritual man, and the enemy’s goal for anyone who comes to faith in Christ is to diminish, weaken, or destroy the faith of the individual, knowing that it will separate him from the vine, wherein he will shrivel and begin to die because no life is flowing into him.

If the devil can use some circumstance, acquaintance, temptation, or sin to separate you from faith in Christ, he has ostensibly separated you from Christ Himself. True faith is an active reality that fuels our desire to grow deeper and stronger in God, leaving the world and the things of the world behind.

The entire argument within the household of faith regarding faith and works is utterly pointless because when you possess true faith, the fruit thereof will be evident for all to see. It is faith and hope in the life to come, the eternal reward, the saving power of Christ, and His sacrifice that gives us the wherewithal to endure and persevere. Don’t let the enemy shake your faith or separate you from it, for if he accomplishes this, then victory will forever be out of reach for you.

This was now the enemy’s new strategy: to use Job’s friends to weaken his resolve and shake his faith in the God he served. If at first you don’t succeed, try, and try again seems to be the devil’s motto when it comes to attacking God’s faithful, and this is a truth we would do well to remember. Far too often, we are busy celebrating a victory and don’t notice the next attack that’s more devious than the last. There will be time to celebrate, to rejoice, and to be exultant, but that’s when we’ve finished the race, crossed the finish line, and stand before God, hearing well done. Any celebration or chest-beating before that glorious day is a recipe for disaster, and a moment of inattentiveness can set our faith journey back months if not years.

The journey isn’t over until it’s over. Whether in a valley or on the mountaintop, whether you can’t wait to escape the season you’re in and be on to the next, or you want to remain in it because it’s comfortable, your duty is to look up and keep walking toward Jesus with the same enthusiasm, focus, and commitment. It’s the goal, the prize, the finish line that we must focus on regardless of current circumstances, and with faith that He is a rewarder of those who diligently seek Him, we press ever onward.

Romans 6:4, “Therefore we were buried with Him through baptism into death, that just as Christ was raised from the dead by the glory of the Father, even so we also should walk in newness of life.”

With love in Christ,

Michael Boldea, Jr.