Job CCIX

 Not one of the major themes that Job hits upon in the last eight verses of this chapter could have been intuited by human reason or logic. Whether speaking of a future time when He shall stand at last on the earth, or the resurrection of the dead, wherein Job declares that in his flesh he would see God, or that in the end there is a judgment, all of these were divinely inspired utterances meant to resonate through time, left for the generations that would follow as a testament, and a testimony.

What may seem obvious to us today, given that we have the canon of Scripture, and that the birth, life, death, burial, and resurrection of the Christ have already taken place, wasn’t so obvious to the people of Job’s time. It was pure revelation, and although God did not intervene in Satan’s sifting of Job, these divine insights helped to sustain him through the trial he was enduring.

If you’ve walked with God for any length of time, you can look back and identify the moments when, at your lowest, He spoke encouragement to you, when, at your most desperate, you’ve felt the touch of His hand. It wasn’t your high IQ mind coming up with the perfect balm for your pain; it wasn’t your resilience or ability to pull yourself up by the bootstraps that gave you that extra burst of peace, joy, or comfort; it was God, His presence, and His love that saw you needed it.

We tend to take credit for what God does in our lives. I’ve heard some variation of I worked on myself, or I healed myself, more times than I could count, and what so few realize is that none of us possess the tools to fix ourselves. None of us possesses the knowledge or ability to heal ourselves.

It’s one thing to try to fix something that broke if you knew what it was supposed to look like when it was whole. The problem is that absent God, man was never whole. Man was never fixed. Man was never right. The best any man can do without the aid, presence, and restoration of Christ’s blood washing them and making them clean is a less broken version of themselves, but never really whole. A less sickly version of themselves, but never truly healed.

There are programs, centers, and clinics aplenty trying to circumvent the need for Jesus. Even when we acknowledge our frailty, we refuse to recognize it fully. We still think we can patch a bullet hole with a Band-Aid and be right as rain. I don’t need to surrender my life to Christ, I don’t need to repent and humble myself; all I need is thirty days in rehab, says the man whom the staff knows on a first-name basis because of all the times he’s been a guest.

If you break your finger, taking aspirin will not heal it; it will just numb the pain, and even that is only temporary.

God doesn’t deal in pain management; He deals in healing. He restores, transforms, and makes new, not partially, but fully. He cauterizes the open wounds of betrayal, disappointment, self-loathing, doubt, fear, inadequacy, trauma, and hurt with His love, and once the wounds are closed, He doesn’t just paint over the scars but makes the entire heart new.

A new heart does not possess the old desires. A new heart does not possess the old yearnings. A new heart receives a new purpose, and the things that once brought it joy and pleasure are as dross and rubbish.

My wife is an interior designer by trade. She is phenomenal at her job. Sometimes, people mistake her for a decorator. They just want some new curtains, or some sconces, perhaps a fresh coat of paint, or some crown molding, just to spruce up the place, but not really change anything beyond the superficial. She then has to inform the individuals that it’s not what she does.

Her job is to take an existing structure and remodel it completely. Tear down walls, move pipes, gut the place down to the timbers, and rebuild it differently, all of which require time and labor, because while you can hang some new curtains over lunch, it takes weeks if not months to demo an entire home, frame new walls, install new floors, and bring in new appliances.

If you’re looking for a decorator, God’s not what you’re looking for. There are life coaches, therapists, and specialists aplenty for those things. If you’re looking to make the existing you less hideous to the eye while remaining the same in your heart, there are beauticians, nail salons, fashion gurus, and a glut of makeup companies eager to take your hard-earned money with little to show for it at the end of the day.

Superficial change does not require divine intervention. Transformation, however, requires not only God’s active presence but your voluntary consent to be transformed and made new. God will do the work, but you must allow Him to do it.

In conversation with my wife, she’s made it crystal clear that the most tedious clients are the ones who constantly second-guess everything and question every decision. Why can’t we just do away with this wall entirely? Because it’s a load-bearing wall, and if we remove it, you’ll be wearing your roof for a hat. Why can’t we just extend this part of the house by a couple of feet? Because it would end up on our neighbor’s land, and he will likely sue you into homelessness.

If you’ve submitted yourself to God, trust that God knows what He is doing. Yes, everything He removes, prunes, or otherwise demands that you must repent of is necessary. You need a new roof because the old one is leaking. You need new siding because your home has termites. You need a new heart because your old one is riddled with sin, and it cannot carry the presence of God in its current state.

God is not a decorator. He is a designer, demo crew, and expert builder all in one. He knows what He is doing, and if you neither despise the chastening of the Lord nor detest His correction, but submit to His will, you will be in awe of the finished product.            

With love in Christ,

Michael Boldea, Jr.