Job CLXVII

 Those who do not believe that, given enough pressure for a long enough time, innocent people will confess to things they haven’t done just to make the pain stop, have never been tortured, or suffered privation in the true sense of the word. In the words of a former bone breaker from the old country, “my job was to get a confession; their guilt or innocence never entered the equation.” This man was referring to Christians he’d abused on orders during the Communist regime that spread across the whole of Romania like a blanket.

That Job had gone through all he’d gone through thus far with his integrity intact says more about his character, determination, faith, integrity, and steadfastness than an encyclopedic tome ever could. He’d buried ten children, lost his substantial earthly possessions, fallen ill, was encouraged by his wife to curse God and die, and now the three friends who had come to comfort him were each taking turns berating him, insisting that not only had he sinned, but had done it so egregiously as to deserve everything that had, and was happening to him.

They took turns, each seemingly trying to outdo the other in their accusations, and though they attempted to couch it in the idea that they were just speaking the truth or passing on wisdom they’d learned from their fathers, there was no encouragement or comfort in their words but an endless onslaught whose primary purpose was to compel Job to relent, give up, and abandon his faith in the God he’d served all these years.

This was an engineered attack, and it was not Job’s friends who’d come up with the plan. They were just the vehicle by which the plan was being implemented. We know God uses people, but so does the enemy. While God uses men and women to further His kingdom and shine the light of truth in a world of darkness, to feed the hungry, clothe the naked, and care for the widow and orphan, the enemy uses individuals to destroy all that is noble, decent, and good. He uses anyone he can to dispirit those seeking to follow after God, to sow doubt in their hearts, and convince them to abandon hope.

Satan had tried using Job’s wife, and that hadn’t worked. Bildad had taken a swing and missed as had Zophar, and now the enemy’s hope rested on Eliphaz to bring it home and convince Job that he had sinned before God.

Job 15:23-26, “He wanders about for bread, saying, ‘Where is it?’ He knows that a day of darkness is ready at his hand. Trouble and anguish make him afraid; they overpower him, like a king ready for battle. For he stretches out his hand against God, and acts defiantly against the Almighty, running stubbornly against Him with his strong, embossed shield.”

Couple the length of Eliphaz’s pontification with the average attention span, and one would be remiss in not asking who he was referring to and who exactly these descriptions are about. Eliphaz was describing a wicked man, checking off one box after another, and since to him correlation and causation were interchangeable, with each new trait he outlined, he was that much more certain of Job’s guilt and culpability.

It’s no less than hubristic to look at a man’s current lot in life and conclude what has brought him to that place, insisting that the journey to get to where he is can’t be anything other than what you’ve decided. Doubly so if that man happened to be your friend, someone whose character and faithfulness you were aware of, and not a passing stranger or a beggar hoping for alms.

Every life has a story to tell, every life holds surprises, and if you make up your mind about someone before you’ve had a chance to get to know them, to hear their story, to understand their life, more times than not, you will be wrong.

When our first daughter was born, I was understandably stressed. She was, after all, our first, my wife was of a certain age, the epidural didn’t take, not once but twice, the delivery doctor looked stressed when she finally arrived, and the worst of it by far was those few seconds of silence when everyone told me I was supposed to hear the wailing of a baby but didn’t. She finally started crying after the longest ten seconds of my life. I breathed a sigh of relief, held my wife’s hand, but even after the baby was taken away and my wife fell asleep, I couldn’t find stillness. It wasn’t something I could shake, even though I’d tried praying, then reading by my wife’s bedside, so I decided to go for a walk on the hospital floor, my wife’s room was in. It was late, the sun had set, and as I walked in what amounted to a rectangle, I kept passing by a janitor pushing his cart full of cleaning supplies, stopping once in a while to peer in.

On the third go-round, I nodded in the universal gesture of greeting, and when he met my eyes and returned the nod, I asked how he was that evening. “All is quiet”, he answered in a heavy accent, “quiet is good.”

The accent intrigued me, so I asked him where he was from, and he told me he was originally from Croatia. As any immigrant is wont to do, I had follow-up questions: how long he’d been in America, whether he liked it here, whether he missed home, and all the other things only those who share the kinship of having been displaced share.

He told me his name was Lovro, he’d been in America for seven years, and that he’d been a surgeon back in the home country, but his accreditation was no good here. He had a wife and two grown sons, the wife having immigrated with him, the sons having stayed behind in the old country. Had I not engaged in conversation with the man, I would never have known the details of his life that made him different, unique, and more than the janitor I would have assumed he was. Not that there’s anything wrong with being a janitor; rather, there was more to Lovro than met the eye.

Eliphaz saw a man he would likely not recognize as Job in his current condition, and went no further than to assume Job had sinned. That’s what happens to the wicked, buddy; therefore, you must have done wickedness.

With love in Christ,

Michael Boldea, Jr.