Job CXXVI

 Imagine laying in the dust, covered in worms, bleeding from open wounds, and seeing your life seeping away, yet having the insight to acknowledge that the hands of God made and fashioned you. What Job was seeing went beyond his mournful state, beyond his current circumstance, something that could not be perceived with the eyes of flesh.

Whether prince or pauper, we are all fearfully and wonderfully made. Your station in life does not determine the value God sees in you as one of His creations. God is neither interested in a financial commitment nor a recurring monthly gift. His only desire is that you humble yourself, surrender yourself, and give Him your heart that He may wash it clean and dwell therein. Job saw beyond the reality of his current circumstance and acknowledged God’s fashioning of him even as he picked worms off his rotting flesh.

It was not an issue of self-esteem or visualization with Job. Even if he’d tried, he couldn’t talk himself into seeing the best version of himself in the state he was in. Less open sores? Less worms? Perhaps a nice hot bath? That was the extent of what he could imagine for himself, yet he understood that bedraggled as he was, he remained one of God’s creations.

Your inherent worth is not based on how well you dress or what kind of car you drive but upon the price paid on your behalf on the cross by the sinless Son of God. Although Christ’s sacrifice extended throughout time and generations so that whosoever believes in Him should not perish but have everlasting life, it’s also personal and intimate. A life for a life. He died with you and me in mind. He sacrificed Himself so we might know freedom and have life in Him, knowing that there is no life outside of Him.

We can never minimize what Jesus did for us, nor can we ever cease making it personal. He died for me. The perfect Son of God died for me so that I might, in turn, have life and have it more abundantly. He paid the debt I did not own; I own the debt I could not pay, and for this, my life is His to do with as He wills. That is our baseline. Not looking in the mirror and seeing something that isn’t there or talking ourselves into believing our duplicity, lukewarmness, and half-hearted commitment to Him will have to do, or worse still, that it’s all He is entitled to. But knowing that He loved us enough to die for us, individually and personally.

There are certain terms we use so often that they’ve lost their meaning. Being saved is one such term wherein we’ve lost sight of what it means both implicitly and explicitly. For someone to be saved, they need to be in a situation where they need saving. If you walk up to someone lounging in a hammock on a sun-dappled beach and insist you’re there to save them, you’ll likely get strange looks, if not an outright tongue-lashing.

Jesus didn’t come to save you from poverty, crooked teeth, or a negative self-image. He came to save you from hell, from eternal separation from God, and the outer darkness where there is weeping and gnashing of teeth. He came to save us because we needed saving, and once we are saved and have been redeemed, we owe a life debt. He bought us at a price. Having been purchased, we no longer belong to ourselves but to Him. This is what it means to be a bondservant: a willing slave who serves out of love and gratitude for the Master’s kindness and mercy.

If you’ve ever wondered how some are able to withstand persecution, privation, or martyrdom, it’s because they understood the reality of what Jesus did and that they are now bondservants whose duty is to obey their Master. It’s not because they’re made of tougher stuff or have greater pain thresholds than you or I. It’s because they understand the true meaning of salvation and what they were saved from.         

Until the calamity visited upon him turned his world upside down, Job seems to have shared the same straightforward, if overly simplistic, view of life: God favors the righteous and punishes the wicked. Good things happen to good people, bad things happen to bad people, and never the twain shall meet. That is the essence of what Job’s friends had concluded, after all, wherein the reason for his current lot was some hidden, as yet unconfessed sin. Whether Eliphaz, Bildad, or Zophar, the underlying premise of their conclusions was that sin was somehow involved, and Job had displeased God in such an egregious fashion as to find himself wishing for death.

It was the implicit contradiction Job was having difficulty wrapping his mind around, wherein the selfsame God who made and fashioned him now sought to destroy him. It didn’t make sense, no matter how many times he returned to this paradox, and with each iteration of allowing his mind to ponder this discrepancy, Job’s desperation becomes ever more evident. It was a conundrum without resolution, and it naturally gave way to indignation.

Having the entire structure of what you believed turned on its ear in an instant and being able to withstand it is no easy feat. We see this play out often enough when some elevated figure that seemed beyond reproach turns out to be less than, and those who followed the individual rather than the Christ have to contend with the reality that all was not as it seemed, and they’d placed their trust in someone who ultimately betrayed it.

Trusting a man will lead to heartache, disappointment, bitterness, and resentment. Trusting God will never lead to any of these things because God is not like man, fickle and faithless, but ever faithful and true from age to age.

Our faith must be cemented in Christ and Christ alone. Not in a given denomination, doctrine, or individual, but in Christ. When we are anchored in Jesus, and the Word of God is the plumbline and filter through which we process spiritual matters, we become unshakeable in our resolve and know that come what may, He will be an ever-present help.

We would spare ourselves so much grief, heartache, and heartbreak if we took the Word of God to heart and followed it rather than the ramblings and machinations of men whose words stand in stark opposition to what Scripture has declared. Unfortunately, there will always be a market for fool’s gold, and it’s usually acquired by fools who only see the depth of their folly when they try to cash it in and discover it to be worthless.

Men make empty promises; God doesn’t. When God makes a promise, He keeps it, and the only time we run the risk of being demoralized and disillusioned is when we talk ourselves into believing that men’s promises are interchangeable with God’s or that God is bound to keep the promises men made in His name.

God will have the last word. He always has and always will, no matter what men might say or what conclusions they may come to regarding your station, situation, circumstance, or trial. As such, it is incumbent upon us to be more concerned about how God views us than how men view us, what He has to say about us, than what men do. His opinion is the only one that matters.

With love in Christ, 

Michael Boldea, Jr.