Job CXXIX

 The reason Picasso or Rembrandt, even their lesser known works, or just some charcoal sketch are valued at such exorbitant prices is because the artists not only created the art but signed their names to it. Although there are plenty of others who attempted to imitate their artistry, whether brush strokes, color palate, or configuration, and some even came close, they could not claim to be the artist in question, just a copycat.

A work of art must be authenticated, as must the signature, for it to qualify as a true creation of the artist, and although counterfeits have been floating around for decades, a trained eye who has studied the originals to no end can spot a forgery in an instant. Likewise, we are authenticated as belonging to God by having the presence of Jesus in our hearts and being clothed in His righteousness. God knows the real from the fake. He knows those who have the indwelling of His Holy Spirit within them and radiate the image of His Son and those who pretend to.

Men may fool men, but they’ll never fool God. No matter how close they may come to mimicking the presence of Christ, God will spot the forgery.

Psalm 37:3-5, “Trust in the Lord, and do good; dwell in the land, and feed on His faithfulness. Delight yourself also in the Lord, and He shall give you the desires of your heart. Commit your way to the Lord, trust also in Him, and He shall bring it to pass.”

What those who misappropriate this passage fail to acknowledge is that if we trust in the Lord, feed on His faithfulness, and delight ourselves in Him, the desires of our hearts, which He promises to give us, will not be some vain, base, or worthless bauble, but more of Him. A regenerate heart, a heart that has been spiritually reborn and transformed by God, does not desire the things of this earth but the things that are exclusively theirs by right of sonship.

The things of this earth, whatever that may entail, grow strangely dim in the light of His glory and grace. If the focus of an individual and the desire of their heart is focused on earthly pursuits, then by definition, their heart has not been regenerated or renewed.

Job 10:18-22, “Why then have You brought me out of the womb? Oh, that I had perished and no eye had seen me! I would have been as though I had not been. I would have been carried from the womb to the grave. Are not my days few? Cease! Leave me alone, that I may take a little comfort, before I go to the place from which I shall not return, to the land of darkness and the shadow of death, a land as dark as darkness itself, as the shadow of death, without any order, where even the light is like darkness.”

Life is not the destination, but rather the journey toward eternity. It’s fleeting and swift and full of molding, pruning, trimming, heartaches, heartbreaks, victories, defeats, betrayals, disappointments, simple joys, profound gratitude, and epiphanies, whether realizing we were stronger than we thought or weaker than we feared, faith building, faith walking, learning to trust God’s sovereignty, learning to deny ourselves, understanding that His yoke is not heavy, and the reward for those who endure to the end is great indeed, and that’s just an average weekday.

When we conclude that God is an existential need, that without Him we can do nothing, His presence in our lives becomes both the goal and the purpose of our existence. Once that occurs, we gladly forfeit all else for the excellency of the knowledge of Him, looking upon the things we’ve surrendered not as something we had to sacrifice but as something we were freed from.

Once in a while, I’ll happen upon a video where someone has been sober for a year, ten years, or fifteen years. None of these individuals look back on their addiction and conclude that they sacrificed alcohol, but rather that they were freed, and unburdened from it, because they realized it was slowly killing them, destroying their relationships, and making a living hell out of their lives.

 That’s what sin does. It’s killing you ever so slowly, so when God commands us to repent and turn our backs on the desires of the flesh and the shackles to which we were fastened, it’s because He wants you to live, not because He doesn’t want you to have fun. I’ve heard the argument often enough from professing Christians that just a little sin is negligible as long as you can keep a handle on it, control it, and manage it. That’s like saying a little bit of poison is good for you. It’s not, and the one demonstrable absolute is that sin is never static. What satisfied the flesh today will not satisfy it tomorrow, so the depravity of the ‘little sin’ you thought you could manage grows incrementally day by day.

No one ever started out drinking a fifth of Jim Beam upon waking. A beer turned into two, two turned into five, then the flesh wanted something stronger, more potent, and those unwilling to see themselves as they truly were found ways of rationalizing their descent into oblivion. Playing with sin, any sin, is like playing with fire while being covered in gasoline. You never know when what you thought was a release or a way of smoothing out the edges becomes an albatross around your neck, dragging you further into the deep.

We cannot fail to differentiate between someone who trips over a tree root, gets up, wipes off the dust, and keeps going and someone who cannonballs into the pig pen, rolls in the mud, slaps away the hand of anyone reaching to pull them out, and feels at home among the swine. We all fall short, whether that flash of anger when someone cuts us off in traffic or the acidic remark on the tip of our tongue when we deem someone has it coming, but that is very different from willful, protracted, and habitual sin.  

Rebellion and disobedience will bring us to a direr state than any testing will, because while during a time of sifting and testing the presence of God is felt, during seasons of rebellion we remove ourselves from fellowship with Him, and are alone in the dark, groping about, refusing to acknowledge the extent of our own blindness.

With love in Christ,

Michael Boldea, Jr.  

Job CXXVIII

 Most of us don’t look in the mirror and see a masterpiece or a work of art. Especially as we grow older, the hairs on one’s head begin to migrate to parts unknown, and the battle scars of too much food and too little sleep become frighteningly evident, it becomes impossible to reconcile objectivity with the conclusion that we are a wonder to behold. We do our best, looking at ourselves from the side, sucking in our gut, combing over the patch of hair so it covers the entire scalp, but we know what we’re looking at, and it’s not Michelangelo’s David.

Conversely, there are also people who see what they want to see, and when such individuals are asked to rate their looks, they stare up from their mobility scooters, chins wagging and huffing as though they’d just sprinted a marathon, and with a straight face insist that they’re a solid 10. You’d think that if it weren’t for their swollen ankles and inability to find a swimsuit in their size, they’d be entering beauty pageants left and right.

To a certain extent, the self-delusion is admirable. I know I couldn’t pull it off with a straight face, and I harbor admiration for anyone who can do something I can’t. It’s why I hold people who deal with gore, blood, and death on a daily basis in such high regard. I know I could never be a nurse, a doctor, or a mortician because it would disturb me to no end.

At some point, however, objectivity must have a voice, and though grudgingly, we must admit, if only to ourselves, that given the opportunity, we wouldn’t lay down our lives to redeem one such as the individual staring at us from the mirror, yet Jesus did. He saw in you what you fail to see in yourself, which is the Father’s design and creation, and deemed you worthy of redemption, not because the flesh had some inherent value or because in and of yourself you were more special than your neighbor, but because He saw the work of His Father’s hand.

There is a difference between being deemed worthy of something by another, independent of your input or agency, and being deserving of it. Being worthy is showing some quality or ability that merits recognition and investment so that the full potential of the individual in question might be achieved.

Some people are born with raw talent. Whether in sports, mathematics, or a turn of phrase, all raw talent does is reveal the potential of an individual if they apply themselves and are diligent in pursuing the mastering of their natural abilities.

Being deserving, on the other hand, implies that something is owed to you, that by your own agency, you did something that merited Christ’s sacrifice, and so you feel entitled to it. It’s called unmerited favor for a reason. Neither you nor I were so indispensable in our unregenerate state as to compel Christ to walk up Calvary’s hill. Christ’s compulsions were love and obedience to the Father. He saw the potential of what we could become in Him and knew it was the only way to facilitate the becoming.

Jesus deemed mankind worthy of His sacrifice, not deserving. It may seem like splitting hairs, but it’s not, given that so many today feel they are within their rights to take it for granted, abuse it, and be indifferent toward such a grace as this. We approach God differently when we acknowledge that even the best of us are no more than withering husks here only by the grace and mercy of God than when we think ourselves so great and invaluable that Christ’s sacrifice should be his opening gambit and not His final offer. When we do not see ourselves as we truly are- wounded and broken and in need of healing and restoration, shackled and imprisoned in need of a savior who can and will unfetter us from darkness and death and bring us to life in Him- we’re always angling for something more.

Being set free from the depths of despair and renewed of mind and heart that we might glory in our Savior is all well and good, but can you sweeten the pot some? Perhaps a makeover, a new car, a few bucks in the bank, and the recognition of our contemporaries? That would be a good start, don’t you think? Men tend to view Jesus as a corporate head hunter making competing offers, hoping they switch sides, and not as who He is, the Lord of glory and the only one with the power and authority to set them free.         

My wife is beautiful. By any objective standard, she is gorgeous, and I know I lucked out when she said she would marry me. Even so, once in a while, I catch her looking at herself in the mirror with a look that tells me she is seeing something that displeases her. Even though she’s nearing fifty, she is supremely beautiful to me, whether upon waking first thing in the morning, replete with bedhead and bleary eyes, or during one of the rare days when she doesn’t have to go in to work and is wearing her favorite pair of pajamas all day, with her hair up in a bun. She is the love of my life and ever will be thus.

Does she look exactly as she did when I first saw her almost thirty years ago? Obviously not. We’ve had two daughters together and twenty-five years of marriage, with the ups and downs of life and a handful of curve balls thrown in for good measure. The prism through which I see her, however, is as that ever-young, ever-youthful seventeen-year-old I saw sitting on a park bench one random day in the summer of 1997.

God sees us through the prism of His Son, and it is ever thus once we deny ourselves, pick up our crosses, and follow after Him. We are born again to new life, and though we might see gray hair and wrinkles and fleshy bits that weren’t there a few years ago, what God sees is Jesus.

Job wasn’t holding a mirror up to himself, contemplating his appearance, and concluding that he was a masterpiece or the pinnacle of God’s creation in his state. He understood that beyond his present appearance, beyond what eyes of flesh could see, God had fashioned him, molded him like clay, clothed him with skin and flesh, knit him together with bones and sinews, and breathed life into him.

With love in Christ,

Michael Boldea, Jr.