Job CLXXXIII

 Shortly after we were married and my wife and I moved to America, I got a job shoveling wet concrete for an outfit that paved driveways. It was honest work for an honest wage, and contrary to the notion that preachers and evangelists not only deserve but should expect to be nosediving into pools of greenbacks like Scrooge McDuck, we weren’t really flush with cash at the time. I needed the work, the pay was decent, and I wasn’t about to sell my soul and start preaching prosperity for a few extra shekels in my pocket. It’s not that I wouldn’t have if it were biblical, but it’s not, so I didn’t, still don’t, and never will. Why sell people on false hope when true hope exists? Why sell people on material possessions when you can point the way to the virtues, attributes, and gifts exclusively reserved for the children of God?

The first few days were brutal. Even with the work gloves, by the time the day was done, my hands were blistered and raw, and it was all I could do to unclench my fingers. The pain in my hands and fingers was so pronounced that I barely noticed the back spasms. Quitting was not an option. I had a wife to provide for, and rent to pay, so every morning I took to shoveling concrete with gusto.  

After the first week, I realized the pain was beginning to ebb. The blisters had calloused over, my skin was rougher, and my body was getting used to holding a shovel for eight hours per day. The temporary pain had made me stronger. Before my skin could toughen up, it had to first break down and bring on a feeling of discomfort and heretofore unexperienced pain. One cannot become physically stronger without going through the process of putting stress on a muscle, working it to failure, and breaking down the tissue so that when it rebuilds, it does so improved.

The same is true of our spiritual man. Trials are not purposeless. Hardships are not purposeless. Tribulations are not purposeless. They all serve to put stress on the spiritual man so that he might grow stronger through them. Hindsight is a powerful teacher when it comes to gauging spiritual progress. I know without equivocation that had I endured some of the more recent trials of life twenty or thirty years ago, it would have taken me much longer to recover, and I would have likely suffered far more scars and bruises to boot.

It’s not hyperbole or positive thinking that led Job to conclude that he who has clean hands will be stronger and stronger; it was a conclusion he reached based on observation and personal experience. He knew that his own strength had long since failed him. He couldn’t lie to himself about the condition he was in or pretend as though he wasn’t scratching at his oozing boils with a potsherd. He realized he was stronger than he ought to be, even in his current condition, and based his declaration that indeed, he who has clean hands will be stronger and stronger, on what he knew to be an irrefutable truth.

Job 17:10-16, “But please, come back again, all of you, for I shall not find one wise man among you. My days are past, my purposes are broken off, even the thoughts of my heart. They change the night into day; ‘The light is near,’ they say, in the face of darkness. If I wait for the grave as my house, if I make my bed in the darkness, if I say to corruption, ‘You are my father,’ and to the worm, ‘You are my mother and my sister,’ where then is my hope? As for my hope, who can see it? Will they go down to the gates of Sheol? Shall we have rest together in the dust?”

Groupthink and the madness of the crowd are not new inventions. It started long before the crowd cried for Barabbas rather than Jesus, and even before the people demanded that Aaron build them an idol to worship. The only difference is the size of the crowd. In our modern era, with the benefits of connectivity, you can get a sea of people agreeing on the most asinine of things, because the wider the net you cast, the more fish you're liable to catch.

I’ve even watched interviews during protests where individuals in the crowd had no idea what they were protesting on that day, simply being drawn by the group of screaming people and joining in because they seemed so passionate about it. Who’d have thought so many people were so passionate about the government providing free wood to woodchucks, because though they may not be human, free wood should be a human right. It’s the deforestation that caused a decrease in available wood, after all, and that led to the woodchuck’s inability to find the one thing that gives them purpose.

The same people protesting for the right to murder babies are all aflutter about saving the Sprague’s pipit, even if it means leaving millions of people without potable water. Sacrifices must be made! The Sprague’s pipit must survive; babies, not so much.

Job had weighed the words of his friends and found that they parroted each other. He understood they fed off each other’s ideas, drawing the same conclusion, and in an almost acerbic manner said, Take a breath, collect your thoughts, and come back with new arguments. Not in so many words, but that was the undertone. Even so, I shall not find one wise man among you because you are insisting that I surrender the one thing that keeps me alive, present, and engaged, which is hope.

I have nothing left but that one thing, and you, my friends, are insisting that I give up on it, abandon it, simply to validate your preconceptions about my life up until this point. Granted, Job’s friends had said some of the things Job himself had stated, but the intent with which they spoke the words was to tear down rather than build up, and to dispirit rather than encourage.

I find it telling that the only one of those who appear in the book of Job to have addressed God directly, to have prayed repeatedly, and cried out to the heavens consistently, was Job. Neither his three friends, his wife, nor the yet-to-be-revealed individuals in this book bothered to cry out to God or to pray for wisdom, understanding, or clarity in this situation. Only Job had, because unlike his friends, he understood that only He had the answers. God knew the truth of it. Everyone else was just guessing.

With love in Christ,

Michael Boldea, Jr.