Job CCCLVI

 Job 42:12-17, “Now the Lord blessed the latter days of Job more than his beginning; for he had fourteen thousand sheep, six thousand camels, one thousand yoke of oxen, and one thousand female donkeys. He also had seven sons and three daughters. And he called the name of the first Jemimah, the name of the second Keziah, and the name of the third Keren-Happuch. In all the land were found no women so beautiful as the daughters of Job; and their father gave them an inheritance among their brothers. After this Job lived one hundred and forty years, and saw his children and grandchildren for four generations. So Job died, old and full of days.”

Job had endured; he had persevered; he had clung to his faith, resisted the whispers to curse God and die, rejected the ideas of his friends when they insisted he’d committed wickedness, and pressed on. As the adage goes, when you’re in it, the only way out of it is through it, and one way or another, Job knew there was a terminus to his pain, grief, struggle, and hardship. He could neither know nor control how that end would manifest, but he trusted the God he served. He would have liked an explanation; he would have liked to know why, and even how it would end, but to make demands of God is to place oneself on equal footing, and that Job would not do.  

It’s one thing to ask, petition, and request something of God; it’s quite another to demand it. When we ask or request, we submit to His will in that particular matter. When we demand, we insinuate that our will supersedes His, and He must do as we demand.

We get so caught up in the nonsense, so enamored with the idea that we can decree a thing, no matter what it is, and regardless of God’s will on the matter, that we forget even Jesus formulated His prayer in such a way wherein the will of the Father superseded His, and the final decision would be left to God alone.

Matthew 26:39, “He went a little farther and fell on His face, and prayed, saying, ‘O My Father, if it is possible, let this cup pass from Me; nevertheless, not as I will, but as You will.”’

This was not some trivial matter Jesus was praying about. It was a matter of life and death, yet Jesus acquiesced to the will of the Father, insisting that though He would prefer that this cup pass from Him, if it were possible, the Father’s will is all that mattered.

Some of us want what we want and will not let something as tertiary as God’s will interfere with it or change our minds on the matter. This is what I have decided; this is what I have decreed; this is how I see my life in five years, ten years, and it matters not if it’s in harmony with God’s will or if God desires for me what I desire for myself. When men adopt such a mindset, every step is drudgery, because rather than walking with God, they pull against Him, dragging their feet, stopping in the middle of their journey, deciding things they have no authority to decide because, in the moment, to their intellect, it seems the better way than what God has set before them.

What ought to have taken forty days for the people of Israel ended up taking forty years. Oftentimes, the trial, testing, and hardship we must overcome and endure take much longer than they ought to because of our unwillingness to submit to the plan and purpose of God.

He will have His way, eventually. His will is supreme, and He does as He wills, and the fastest way to get through it is to pray for strength and endurance, faith and resilience, rather than constantly insisting we’re being treated unfairly, asking to know how it ends, or attempting to get God to change His mind on the matter.

For Job, death had become a foregone conclusion. Never in his wildest imaginings did he consider the possibility that everything he’d lost would be restored to him, and doubly so. He felt death so near for so long that it had become a constant companion, and the best he hoped for was an end to the misery, but God had other plans.

Whatever it is in your life that seems impossible, never allow yourself to consider the lie that God can’t fix it, restore it, heal it, or make it whole. “God can’t do that” should never pass the lips of any one of His sons or daughters, because they would be speaking a lie. God can do anything as long as it is in His will to do it, not because He is miserly or His powers get depleted, but because what you believe will be the remedy would make it that much worse, and He knows it.

Job asked to die, but God didn’t let him. It wasn’t because He was cruel and wanted to see him suffer just a little more, but because His plan for Job was to restore him, bless him beyond what he had been, and give him another hundred and forty years of life where he saw his children and grandchildren for four generations grow and flourish.

To think you were at death’s door only to be given another hundred and forty years on this earth is no small thing. To have been the greatest of the people of the East, lost it all, having nothing save for a potsherd with which to scratch yourself, and a pile of ashes upon which to rest, only to be given double what you lost, is not an insignificant matter.

Trust God. Even when things look grim, and your logical mind can’t see a way to remedy the situation you find yourself in, trust God! He sees a way even if you don’t, and He will make a way even if none is visible at the outset.

With love in Christ,

Michael Boldea, Jr.