Job CLVIII

Job 14:18-22, “Bu as a mountain falls and crumbles away, and as a rock is moved from its place; as water wears away stones, and as torrents wash away the soil of the earth; so You destroy the hope of man. You prevail forever against him, and he passes on; You change his countenance and send him away. His sons come to honor, and he does not know it; they are brought low, and he does not perceive it. But his flesh will be in pain over it, and his soul will mourn over it.”

Nothing in this world has permanence. Everything is fleeting. Continents shift and reform, mountains fall and crumble away, torrents wash away the soil of the earth, generations come and go, and kingdoms rise and fall, but through it all, God abides. That men would cling so hardily to temporal things and dismiss eternity as though it was not worth their time only goes to put the ignorance of man on full display.

There is no structure, no nation, no system of government, or man-made thing that is guaranteed to remain here, in the same iteration, ten thousand years from now. Even the feats men deemed the greatest of any generation are but vague echoes of what once was, whispered about by pockets of studious men, imagined in the glory they once possessed. Long gone is the tower of Babel, not one stone remaining upon another, the edifice everyone of that generation was convinced would reach God Himself.

There is evidence of past civilizations that were so thoroughly expunged as to leave behind a handful of stones and nothing more. As is the case with this generation, they likely thought themselves the pinnacle of wisdom, the crowning jewel of human accomplishment, and the one empire that would be the exception to the rule and continue in perpetuity.

In his hubris, man develops a form of tunnel vision wherein he refuses to consider the overwhelming evidence that try as he might, it’s likely that he will not leave an indelible mark on the history of mankind, and a handful of generations after he returns to the dust of the earth, he will be forgotten as countless others have.

Our goal isn’t to be remembered or forgotten by our contemporaries or future generations but to serve God. As long as we are remembered by Him, whether the next generation remembers our name or not matters little. Conversely, if the world knows your name a hundred years from now, but God does not know you, then it’s all for naught.

It’s easy to get caught up in the rat race, trying to chase the spotlight and attempt to elevate our status in the eyes of our contemporaries, especially when everyone else is doing it. More often than not, men will even try to justify their desire for glory by insisting the underlying reason has more to do with being selfless and trying to help others than feeding their ravenous ego.

What usually curbs the desire for the spotlight is the realization that every notable servant of God, every man or woman whose names are remembered, not for a decade or a century, but millennia after they’ve gone on to their reward, had the singular desire to serve and obey the call of God on their lives, not bothering to consider whether or not they would be remembered, thought well of, or known, or weighing their options as to which course would garner them a greater footprint or bigger following.

Do your duty. Be faithful in the things God has called you to do, put your hand to the plow, don’t look back, and let the chips fall where they may. It’s the obedience and faithfulness that God sees and rewards, not our egotistical desire to become a household name or rise above the sea of souls clamoring for the spotlight.

When something other than obedience becomes the driving force of your labor, the tendency to compromise for the sake of what’s driving you becomes nearly overwhelming. Everything gets filtered through the prism of whether the word we were commanded to speak will offend the sensibilities of the majority or whether we will lose support, and the message becomes diluted, ineffectual, and a shadow of the truth it once was in its original form.

The notion that the gospel or the message of the cross was meant to be inoffensive is a modern invention spurned by the desire for acceptance. Jesus Himself said that He did not come to bring peace but a sword. He warned that a man’s enemies will be those of his own household, for when the light of truth ignites in a soul, those still in darkness will naturally be averse to it.

We can seek to please men, or we can strive to please God. We can’t do both. We either commit our ways to the Lord and follow after Him or give in to the pressure of the world and those around us who insist that we are too rigid, unmalleable, and unwilling to compromise for the sake of unity.

If unity is achieved at the expense of truth and the gospel, it’s not unity but rebellion. We are seeing the effects of this in numerous denominations, which have strayed so far from scripture as to make them unrecognizable from the world, and the only thing they have to show for it is the validation and celebration of sin.

Job knew where he stood. Although all three of his friends tried their best to convince him otherwise, he knew he had not sinned before God and approached Him with the boldness only such knowledge can foster in one’s heart.       

With love in Christ,

Michael Boldea, Jr.