Job CXV

 Job 9:1-13, “Then Job answered and said: ‘Truly I know it is so, but how can a man be righteous before God? If one wishes to contend with Him, He could not answer Him one time out of a thousand. God is wise in heart and mighty in strength. Who has hardened himself against Him and prospered? He removes the mountains, and they do not know when He overturns them in His anger; He shakes the earth out of its place, and its pillars tremble; He commands the sun, and it does not rise; He seals off the stars; He alone spreads out the heavens, and treads on the waves of the sea; He made the Bear, Orion, and the Pleiades, and the chambers of the south; He does great things past finding out, yes, wonders without number. If He goes by me, I do not see Him; If He moves past, I do not perceive Him; If He takes away, who can hinder Him? Who can say to Him, ‘What are You doing?’ God will not withdraw His anger; the allies of the proud lie prostrate beneath Him.”

Few Scripture passages describe, define, and present God in a more succinct, concentrated, and complete way than Job’s response to Bildad. The sovereignty of God shines through from small things to great, from dealing with individuals to shaking the earth out of its place. The awesomeness, majesty, omnipotence, and grandeur of the God we serve are described in vivid detail in the words Job speaks with such clarity as to humble even the most brittle of souls.

Even after all he’d been through, Job was still in awe of the God he served, understanding his own frailty and insignificance in light of His all-consuming presence. Among the many things lacking in the modern-day church, reverence for God and awe at His majesty rank in the top ten because it’s easy to dismiss, disobey, or otherwise ignore God once these things are stripped away from the individual consciousness. If I hold no reverence, awe, and yes, even godly fear for God, then being in open rebellion toward Him will not seem like such a big thing.

Try as the wolves might to convince the masses that we are on equal footing with God, and therefore, by definition, being little gods in our own right, the Word will always stand firm against such foolishness. Whether the words of Job, the writings of David, Solomon, Jeremiah, Paul, or dozens of others within scripture who understood the majesty of the God they served and were able to verbalize it, we come to understand that there is none like Him. As David once wrote, the Lord is the great God and the great King above all gods. No powers, principalities, kings, princes, or other gods are equal to Him in power, never mind we, who are but frail creations, imputed value, and worth by the presence of the risen Christ in us.

But God so loved the world that He sent His only begotten Son. Indeed, He did. The motivation was love for His creation and a desire to reconcile mankind unto Himself, not any inherent value man possessed in and of himself. What gives man value is the soul, which God Himself placed within, not the outer flesh that is corruptible and goes back to the dust of the earth. Everything we are is because of who He is and what He’s done, and Job understood this better than most.

His first words, in response to Bildad, were an acknowledgment that only a fool could stand before God and insist upon his own righteousness. How can a man be righteous before God? Short answer, he can’t unless the righteousness of God is imputed upon him.

Job never claimed righteousness. He never stood on a soapbox, beat his chest, and demanded the world behold him in all his blamelessness. He feared the Lord and shunned evil. It is God who deemed him blameless and upright. It is God who singled him out as a man apart, unique in his generation.

When we deem ourselves righteous, not only are the chances high that we aren’t, but pride in our own righteousness becomes a reality and begins to take root and grow in the heart as if out of nowhere. When our singular focus is to be pleasing to the Lord and walk circumspectly with Him rather than project an air of righteousness, we do not possess, what others say about us becomes irrelevant. We are unconcerned about how others view us, see us, or what pompous title they will or won’t attribute to us. It is God and God alone who can look upon us and deem us upright. He holds us to His standard and not our own. It’s not about what I say I am; it’s all about what He says I am.

Men love titles; they always have. Given that everyone wants to feel special in some way or stand out in a crowd, there has been an explosion of people appropriating titles they have no realistic claim to, to the point that everyone and their grandmother is either a prophet, an apostle, a bishop, a deacon, or some offshoot or derivative that screams ‘look at me; I’m more special than those other people.’

At some point, Jesus gets lost in the shuffle, and it becomes all about the person, their ego, their reach, their influence, and their authority. The focus shifts from the kingdom of God to the fiefdoms of men, with everyone sharpening their knives in anticipation of having to protect their piece of the pie.

Among the many reasons the church has become so ineffectual of late, the need for getting the credit, getting the glory, and getting the praise rather than just doing the work and giving all glory to God is running neck and neck with the diluting and watering down of the gospel. I need people to know I did the thing. I need my name on a marquee; I need to name the ministry after myself, and I need to build a brand because it’s what the world tells me I need to do to be successful. The world may, but it’s not the world you should be listening to. What does God say? What does Scripture say about how we should approach ministry and do the work to which we have been called? Our purpose was never to be well pleasing in the sight of the world but to be well pleasing in the sight of the Lord.

With love in Christ,

Michael Boldea, Jr.  

Job CXIV

 When they’re between a rock and a hard place, people make all manner of promises to God that they never intend to keep. Let me pass this test, and I will serve you the rest of my days! Once the test is passed, they quickly forget the promise they made until the next time they need an intervention or some supernatural remedy to their situation. That’s not surrender, obedience, or the pursuit of righteousness; that’s usury, and what’s worse is that many think God naïve enough to fall for it.

I’ve never been in a foxhole, so I could not attest to the veracity of the claim, but it sounds right, nevertheless. There are no atheists in a foxhole. When the bullets start whizzing by, and you see people crumble to the left and the right of you, the much-vaunted agnosticism or atheism so many proclaimed goes out the window. It may not be that one has a change of heart and runs into the arms of Jesus, but their narrow view of existence suddenly expands, allowing for the possibility, even the hope, that there is something more beyond living a handful of years and then rotting beneath a few feet of dirt.

God isn’t some out-of-the-way trading post where you make an offer, and He counters. We’ve become so arrogant as to assume that we can barter with God and insist that our intermittent, halfhearted, situational commitment is worth far more than anything we would ask of Him, so it would be in His best interest to acquiesce to every want and desire we might have in exchange for occasionally referencing Him.

When an entire generation amplifies its own self-importance while simultaneously diminishing what Jesus did on the cross, you have multitudes of people fully convinced that they’re doing God a favor by humbling themselves and pursuing Him. In all honesty, even the notion of humbling oneself has gone the way of the buggy whip because there are enough wolves insisting that you need do nothing more than raise your hand or nod your head in order to receive what Jesus bled and died for to facilitate.

If we were to fully understand what it means to be saved and crystalize in our hearts and minds what we were saved from and that we needed a savior, we would prostrate ourselves before His lovingkindness and mercy with humble and obedient hearts in perpetuity. No man can save himself. It doesn’t matter how good, noble, charitable, or kind one might be; those things do not save. Only Christ can, and only by denying ourselves, picking up our crosses, and following after Him can we attain salvation.

The sad reality is that Jesus is still reaching out, offering to pull souls out of the quicksand of sin, and more often than not, they are slapping His hand away because they do not acknowledge the danger and the terminal condition they find themselves in. Without shaking off the filthy rags of our own righteousness and clothing ourselves in His, our chances of survival are zero. It’s not a fifty-fifty probability that if one dies in their sins, they will be eternally removed from the presence of God; it’s not even a ninety-ten split, but a 100% certainty, one hundred percent of the time.

It takes a certain kind of hubris to acknowledge that only Christ can save our souls from eternal damnation and then ask for more. Heaven is all well and good, but where is my overflow of legal tender? Granted, it will be amazing to be present for the marriage supper of the Lamb, but I’ve had my eye on this new Beemer for the longest time. Can you make that happen, too?

Back before the girls were born when I used to travel extensively, I’d catch episodes of a television show called Antiques Roadshow. I don’t know if it’s still on the air, but the show's premise was quite interesting. A group of experts in various fields having to do with antiques traveled the country appraising the value of items people brought to them, whether from having been passed down or having been acquired at a sale or a store.

The funny thing was that more often than not, the items people brought that they were certain would retire them and allow them to live comfortably evermore turned out to be of little value. Conversely, some things people held out no hope of being valuable beyond a family heirloom turned out to be worth tens and hundreds of thousands of dollars.

 When we come to understand what God values, the entire paradigm of our priorities inevitably shifts. If I come before God in my own righteousness, asking what it’s worth, the answer will be nothing. If I come before Him clothed in Christ and standing in His righteousness, asking what it’s worth, He will answer everything. Between obedience and sacrifice, God prizes obedience, knowing that if I walk in obedience when called upon to sacrifice, it will be no great thing. Between seeking glory for myself or seeking to bring glory to His name, He will look upon the latter with joy while dismissing the former offhand.

God places no value on the flesh, for it is dust. There is no inherent value in it beyond what we do with the handful of years we are given to walk the earth. The soul of man, however, is priceless indeed, and its value is commensurate with the sacrifice made on its behalf so that it may be reconciled to Him.

When we prioritize the earthen vessel over what it contains within, when we focus on making the flesh as comfortable and at ease as possible, we are diminishing the worth and value of what was placed within. Don’t focus on the box, but the treasure the box comes in. The box will go the way of all things, but the treasure contained therein is eternal and of eternal import. 

2 Corinthians 4:7, “But we have this treasure in earthen vessels, that the excellence of the power may be of God and not of us.”

Even though Bildad came out and accused Job of forgetting God, we would be remiss if we did not point out that every word that came out of Job’s mouth thus far was regarding God, His authority, power, sovereignty, but also mysterious ways which man cannot plumb the depths of.

It’s as though Bildad dismissed every word Job spoke and, in the pride of his own ignorance, insisted that the root cause of Job’s travails was that he’d forgotten God. It doesn’t matter what you say; I know what I know, and the experiences of all those who came before us support my thesis. Therefore, you’ve forgotten God because all these things came upon you.

With love in Christ,

Michael Boldea, Jr. 

Job CXIII

Job 8:18-22, “Behold, this is the joy of His way, and out of the earth others will grow. Behold, God will not cast away the blameless, nor will He uphold the evildoers. He will yet fill your mouth with laughing, and your lips with rejoicing. Those who hate you will be clothed with shame, and the dwelling place of the wicked will come to nothing.”

If we were to follow Bildad’s train of thought to its rightful conclusion, one unanswered question remains: why was Job still alive, given that Job’s sons perished because they had transgressed? It’s a question to which Bildad had no answer, although he likely could have concluded that Job’s sin had not been as pronounced as his children. If Job had not prayed for death, considering it a relief over his current lot, then perhaps there would have been some weight to this supposition.

We’ve all had occasion to run across a Bildad or two in our lives, the kind of person that has no qualms about appropriating the judgment seat and handing out judgments as though someone had appointed them to the office. Usually, one of the less appealing characteristics of those with a Bildad mindset is the utter callousness with which they approach any given situation, wherein there is not an ounce of empathy or compassion to be wrung out of them.

Your sons are dead, spilled milk and all that, but hey, you’re still alive, and if you repent, you may yet live. I know you insist you haven’t done anything, but we both know that’s not the way things work, so just fess up to it already.

If the torture is intense enough, men will often confess to things they’ve never done just to end the pain. If, in his state, Job could have thought of anything he’d done, surely he would have confessed it before God and his friends because, as far as human suffering was concerned, he’d exceeded the recommended dose months prior.

There are segments of Bildad’s oratory that are undeniably true, such as God not casting away the blameless or upholding evildoers, but it wasn’t meant as an encouragement for Job, but rather an inference that because by all accounts he was being cast away, he must be in the camp of the former rather than the latter.

Sometimes, we can draw the right conclusions but go about it the wrong way. It occurs most often when we only possess partial information about a certain situation, just as Bildad did. Job’s three friends were just as in the dark about what had gone on between God and Satan as Job was. They all operated with partial understanding yet felt it within their right to draw conclusions from the limited knowledge they possessed.

Bad things don’t happen to good people, so if something bad happens to you, you must not be a good person. That was the extent of Bildad’s judgment, and the absence of any nuance is staggering and deflating. I’ve been guilty of generalizing more than most, but not when it comes to individual situations or individual struggles. Generally speaking, the modern-day church is lukewarm, self-centered, overflowing with cowardice, and duplicitous to a fault. That’s not to say solid believers no longer exist or that those committed to Christ in word and deed are no more, but as far as percentages go, it’s indisputable.

You can’t broad brush and generalize an individual’s situation because each one has their own struggles, setbacks, hardships, and travails. We are the body of Christ, yet we are still individual members. We are not monolithic in our situations, emotions, or circumstances. We have varying thresholds for pain, some dealing with physical pain far better than emotional, and as such, what works for me might not work for you insofar as trying to find answers to pressing questions. You treat a hangnail differently than you would a head wound. If you attempt to apply the same treatment to both, you’re likely to do more harm than good, even though your intentions might be noble.

What no one yet understood, including Job himself, was that his suffering was for the glory of God and that His name be glorified. Yes, it flies in the face of modern doctrine. Yes, it makes the flesh feel uneasy merely to consider that one would suffer such as Job, not because he had sinned but because by his suffering well, glory would be brought to God’s name.

One of the many reasons the Book of Job is so difficult to parse through is because it challenges many long-held beliefs much of the modern-day church shares and throws everything into a limbo of sorts where everything isn’t cut and dry as Bildad supposed. Unknown and unseen forces were at work, and a greater purpose was in play beyond what even learned men could glean.

When the glory of God is revealed in and through our suffering, the purpose thereof is likewise revealed. Without absolute trust in the goodness and sovereignty of God, our faith is likely to be shaken given testing the size and scope of Job, and for many, far less than what he had to endure.

There are also occasions when pain within the body is used as a corrective measure. There’s nothing like being bedridden or suffering some sort of malady to focus you and compel you to prioritize your life in accordance with Scripture.

When Jesus ran across the man at the pool of Bethesda, he had been ill for thirty-eight years. After Jesus healed him, and he took up his bed and walked, He sought him in the temple and said to him, “see, you have been made well. Sin no more, lest a worse thing come upon you.”

This encounter was different than the time Jesus saw the man who’d been blind from birth when, upon being asked who had sinned, the man or his parents that he had been born blind, Christ’s answer was, “Neither this man nor his parents sinned, but that the works of God should be revealed in him.”

Different people, different approaches, different causes, different conclusions. Both were infirm in their own way; both were healed, but while one was told to go and sin no more lest a worst thing come upon him, the other had no sin, nor did his parents.

The man at the pool did not deny his sin, nor did he insist upon his innocence as Job had repeatedly. Why? Because he knew himself to have sinned, understood that the grace and mercy of God had restored him, and was warned by Jesus Himself that if he returned to the sin which had brought his condition upon him, a worse thing would come upon him.

With love in Christ,

Michael Boldea, Jr.  

Job CXII

 In hindsight, the worst of times can turn out to be the best of times, depending upon the prism through which we view them and the growth we experience as a direct result. It’s not exclusive to physical pain or the loss of something, or even everything, but in every area of life where we feel buffeted, harangued, put out, dismissed, rejected, refined, tested, tried, or persecuted. Whether we use the visual example of a threshing floor or a wine press, the one commonality between the two is that the existing iteration of the wheat or the grape must be crushed in order for the dross and impurities to be sifted out that what remains may be pure and useful.

My daughters love butterflies. Since the local museum has a butterfly garden or vivarium for the nerdier folks among us, and we made so many trips just to stand there and hope a butterfly would land on us, I even got a yearly membership. They are beautiful. Colorful, eccentric, large and small, lazily flying around and from time to time choosing to land on an outstretched hand or a shoulder.

It’s easy to get lost in their beauty and fail to realize that they all started as caterpillars. Yep, those fuzzy, wormy things that crawl on the ground and aren’t much to look at, usually given a wide berth and ignored because they are so offputting. For the caterpillar to become a butterfly, a metamorphosis must occur. This metamorphosis can be seen as a spiritual transformation, whereby, after spending ten days of pupation in its chrysalis, it emerges as an adult butterfly. Similarly, in our spiritual journey, we all start off as ‘caterpillars,’ but through faith and perseverance, we can undergo a transformation and emerge as ‘butterflies’ in the eyes of God, something He delights in because He sees the image of His Son in us.

It’s not an instant transformation, and it doesn’t happen overnight. It takes time for it to become what it was intended to be, and although most wouldn’t have given the caterpillar a second look once the transformation is complete, they stand and stare in wonder at its delicate beauty.

Not all butterflies are the same, having different sizes and colors, but they’re all butterflies. Their basic nature and what they have become is that of a butterfly with certain noticeable variations.

As believers, we must all strive to be Christlike, walking in obedience to God’s Word and fully committed to His way. That is our DNA, the commonality we all share, but this doesn’t mean we’re a monolith or that we’re all supposed to be identical in appearance in order to be deemed a child of God.

In any given church, you’ll find people in suits, in jeans, wearing t-shirts or button-down shirts, with beards, freshly shaven, with make-up or au natural, wearing floral prints, or monotone colors, unless you happen to be Amish, of slimmer or sturdier built, but they’re all children of God if they’ve been reborn, just as all the butterflies in the vivarium are butterflies regardless of their color or size.

Our primary concern should not be whether we look like everyone else but that we resemble Christ. Even a toddler is able to spot the difference between a bat and a butterfly. You can’t mistake the two or replace one with the other. The biggest issue the modern-day church must contend with currently is that we’ve allowed men to dictate what passes for a butterfly and shut down anyone who insists that it’s a lizard with wings we’re all staring at. There are clear and verifiable markers that define what a butterfly is, and if we ignore those, then what you have is a wilderness, not a sanctuary.

As far as Bildad is concerned, his one misstep was assuming that God must adhere to his presuppositions, not allowing for exceptions to the rule or a different course of action than what the fathers had experienced. Since it had always been the case that those who forgot God were cut off, then this, too, must be a similar situation. When men assume there is something God can or cannot do, they not only appropriate His authority but demand that God bow to their will or understanding.

I’ve heard the ‘God doesn’t do that anymore’ tome countless times, and my reply has always been the same: says who? You? Unless God spoke it, or it is evident in His Word, not by twisting the gospel into a pretzel or omitting the texts that do not adhere to your belief, but by rightly dividing Scripture and allowing it to reveal the truth, then all you have is personal opinion.

It’s not just foolhardy but outright dangerous when we place ourselves or our opinions above the sovereignty of God and insist that it is He who must bend to our will rather than we who must submit to His. God doesn’t have to do what you want Him to do. He doesn’t have to solve a problem the way you would like Him to. He is God, Creator of all, and we are creations whose purpose on this earth is to serve and worship Him in spirit and in truth.

Job did not fit the mold of Bildad’s presuppositions, but Bildad insisted that he must. Because he was so ingrained in his belief, he couldn’t even allow for the possibility that what was happening to Job may be beyond his understanding or ability to perceive and process.

When I used to get frequent gout attacks, everyone had an opinion. Either I was drinking too much water or not enough, I was consuming too many vegetables, or I should cut out vegetables altogether, I should ingest copious amounts of apple cider vinegar, cherry extract, or cayenne, and that would surely make it go away instantly, and various other ideas. Did any of the people offering opinions suffer from gout? No, they didn’t but they had plenty of opinions nonetheless. Were some of them valid? Perhaps, but they assumed I hadn’t tried everything already or that I was being stubborn in not adopting their dietary protocol. Some even went so far as to insist I deserved the pain because I hadn’t bowed to their wisdom and done as they’d instructed.

Eventually, I figured it out and dialed my diet in to the point that it’s been years since I’ve had a gout attack, and unsurprisingly, it wasn’t due to any of the things people insisted I should do.

Bildad assumed he knew the cause of Job’s suffering, and he would not be swayed from his thesis. Even having full assurance that he was right and he’d unraveled a great mystery, Bildad, along with his other two friends, turned out to be wrong. More often than not, we are left with egg on our faces when we assume things we have no understanding of. Never assume. Always take the time to confirm, and make sure that when you open your mouth to speak, it’s not out of ignorance. It’s a good rule of thumb for young and old alike.

With love in Christ,

Michael Boldea, Jr.  

Job CXI

 There is a realm beyond the physical that is just as real. A realm with principalities and powers, where the war between light and darkness rages, where good and evil are well defined and delineated, and the human soul is both the prize and the object of contention. From time to time, some of us are given a glimpse beyond the veil of the physical into the spiritual realm, and we quickly realize that the picture in our minds of chubby cherubs playing harps on puffy clouds couldn’t be further from reality.

One need only read the account of Daniel and that it took twenty-one days for the messenger to make his way to him, having had to battle the prince of the kingdom of Persia and be aided by Michael, one of the chief princes, to understand how preposterous some of the fables being spun by so-called modern-day prophets are.

You’re telling me a messenger had to fight his way to Daniel for twenty-one days, yet you’re getting teleported to heaven via a porta-potty every other day? You’re telling me that every time someone is graced with seeing an angel or a messenger of the Lord, they are undone and see the frailty of their current existence, yet you claim to have sat on God’s lap, braided His beard, and even played a spirited game of pinochle, being so flippant about it as to infer it was just another Tuesday?

We sit enraptured listening to individuals who should likely be institutionalized regale us with stories of pet dinosaurs and body part rooms in heaven, not realizing we are surrounded by spiritual hosts and war is being waged on our behalf. We’ve infantilized the spiritual realm to such an extent that we are wholly ignorant of its reality. No, you cannot obtain victory without battle. No, the enemy will not flee from you if you do not resist him.

We have become as children playing at being adults. We have become as couch potatoes playing at being soldiers. Walking circumspectly with our God and being sober-minded in all things is too boring for our taste. We would rather have aliens and blue beams than Christ and the cross. We would rather play some deranged version of Where’s Waldo trying to spot the antichrist than prepare our hearts and minds for the eventuality of suffering for His name’s sake.

The world will do what God said it would do, and it will become what He warned it would become. How we meet that iteration of humanity wherein we will be hated by all because we belong to Him, betrayed by those closest to us, and finding no solace, safety, or security but in His embrace is something we are individually and wholly in control of. If you’re driving down the road and see a sign warning you that the bridge is out a mile ahead, if you gun it rather than turn around, it’s nobody’s fault but your own. It’s not as though the sign wasn’t big enough or that there weren’t multiple signs by the time you nosedived into the depths. You ignored the warnings and the signs because you either thought you knew better or that all the flashing lights were simply hyperbolic fearmongering.

Our duty is to count the cost and ensure we are willing to pay the full freight. Jesus didn’t mollycoddle his disciples or hold back when it came to telling them what their futures held should they choose to follow after Him. He didn’t promise them mansions of private jets, the approval or adoration of the masses, or any comfort while they walked this earth.

He made it clear that they would be persecuted, hated, put to death, mocked, belittled, spoken evil of, dismissed, rejected, and villainized. If you sign on, you’re not signing up for an all-expenses paid life at Club Med. You’re signing on for a lifetime of battle, service, trials, tribulations, and hardships galore, but the prize at the end of your race, the reward at the end of your journey, is well worth any hardship you may incur on your way to it.

Jesus wasn’t trying to sell a timeshare. He didn’t bury the lead or have a dozen pages of fine print that he insisted his disciples ignore because it was just for legal purposes and not really that important. He made it very clear what we as His servants should expect while in the world, and not telling the truth to those we would have embrace it, does nothing for them except give them false expectations of what they think their Christian walk will be.

Job knew that both blessing and adversity come from the hand of God. He knew that although he could despise his current existence and even wish that he would perish, he could charge God with no wrong because He is sovereign over all.

Job 8:11-18, “Can the papyrus grow without a marsh? Can the reeds flourish without water? While it is yet green and not cut down, it withers before any other plant. So are the paths of all who forget God; and the hope of the hypocrite shall perish, whose confidence shall be cut off, and whose trust is a spider’s web. He leans on his house, but it does not stand. He holds it fast, but it does not endure. He grows green in the sun, and his branches spread out in his garden. His roots wrap around the rock heap, and look for a place in the stones. If he is destroyed from this place, then it will deny him, saying, ‘I have not seen you.’”

In his attempt to undergird his conclusion and prove that he was right in his assessment, Bildad began to pontificate. He didn’t come right out and say that Job had forgotten God or that he was a hypocrite, but he alluded to it nonetheless because, in his understanding, he could not fathom that Job had not done something to displease God and bring upon himself the tragedy that had befallen him.

It’s okay to admit that you don’t know the reason or purpose around some event in your life or someone else’s life as long as you acknowledge and fully trust that God does. We were never meant to know everything. Even the best of us see in part and understand in part, but what we were meant to do is grow our faith and our trust in the God we serve to the point that come what may we rest in Him and are at peace.

With love in Christ,

Michael Boldea, Jr.  

Job CX

 Even when God is silent, He is present. Even when life is hard, God is there. Even when we are crushed and carrying on another day seems an impossible task, His mercies endure. The purpose of your trial may not be evident to you, but it is known to God, and you can take solace in the undeniable, unshakeable, unequivocal truth that good will come of it. It may be that you won’t get to see the good that your trial produced, yet know that it is assured.

I don’t have what some might label prized possessions. I don’t collect watches or tie clips, and the Salvation Army down the road would likely refuse to take half the stuff I own on principle because even the homeless have standards, but the one exception is a cardboard box filled to the brim with notebooks of stories I’ve collected over the years, first and secondhand accounts of people who were persecuted, tortured, and even martyred for the cause of Christ.

The box keeps getting moved from one closet to the other depending on how much room my daughters and their ever-expanding wardrobe of sparkly dresses require, and yesterday, I was informed that my box was in their way and I needed to move it. They said it nicely enough, but it seemed an urgent enough matter to them wherein I dutifully went and picked up my box and moved it.

It had been some time since I’d perused any of the notebooks, and since I had a few minutes, I picked a random one out of the box and began to leaf through it. I read through a couple of the stories contained in the notebook, but there is one in particular that came to mind as I was contemplating the notion that just as Moses was not given to enter the promised land, we may not be given the opportunity to see the good that our trials and hardships produce.

Vasile was not yet a teenager when the police showed up at their home, snatched his father, Toma, and spirited him away in the middle of the night. Toma was a preacher, the type of preacher who was not bashful about sharing his faith in Christ with any who would hear, and news of his dissidence had reached the county officials, who in turn delivered his name to the Securitate.

That night was the last time Vasile would see his father. “The last sermon I heard my father preach,” Vasile said, “was on Romans 8, and how all things work together for good. For the longest time, I couldn’t reconcile that scripture passage with what my mother and I had been going through after losing my dad, and even though my mother was a praying woman who insisted we memorize Scripture every night, I grew bitter in my heart. Not knowing what had happened to my father also weighed heavily on me; the only information we’d ever received came by way of an officer showing up three weeks after he’d been taken to inform us that he was deceased and handing over a certificate of death. They didn’t even bother to bring the body. We never got to have a proper funeral for him. Just a man in a uniform delivering the worst news I’d ever heard in cold, clipped tones.

Almost six years later, close to my eighteenth birthday, a man showed up to our apartment and asked if he could speak to me. By then, my bitterness had been on a slow simmer for years, and I planned to go to university and pursue a career in engineering. I still believed in God, but as far as a relationship with Him, I must admit, it was lacking.

The man introduced himself as Remus, and although he was wearing civilian clothing, I knew he was some type of government official, whether police or Securitate. You could always tell. It’s in their posture, mannerisms, and how they carry themselves. Not so much the haircuts but their bearing.

The man asked if he could come in, and knowing that if I refused, he’d likely come in anyway, I nodded and moved aside. My mother was in the kitchen plucking the feathers off a chicken, and after motioning for the man to sit, I asked how I could be of help.

He squirmed for a while, rubbing his hands together and unable to meet my gaze until, staring at the floor with all the intensity he could muster, he said, “I was there for the last few days of your father’s life. I didn’t have a hand in it, but I was witness to it, being a young officer at the time. Your dad changed my life. I’ve never met someone with more conviction and assurance that there was something beyond this life. He never despaired; no matter what they did to him, he never once despaired. I found Jesus because of what I saw in your father. I’ve been meaning to look you up for a couple of years now, and I felt this was the right time. I just wanted you to know some good came of his suffering.”

I had no words. I don’t think I could have found any even if I’d tried, but one thing did happen, which I remember clearly all these years later: all the pent-up bitterness, the anger, the resentment, the doubts I’d been harboring that I’d never shared with anyone disappeared in an instant. It was like flipping a switch and turning on a light, and what was once murky and in shadow became bright and illuminated.

That one conversation changed the course of my life, and I reminded Remus of this every time we met over another twelve years. Just as my father had changed his life, his visit had changed mine. I got to preach Remus’s funeral and shared this testimony as his friends and family gathered to say their final farewells.

I never went to university, I didn’t become an engineer, but I became a pastor, and now, thirty years later, with six children of my own, I can echo my father’s last sermon, not as an afterthought or something I feel compelled to say, but as a cornerstone of my faith: all things do work together for good to those who love God, to those who are called according to His purpose.”

Toma did not live long enough to see the fulfillment of this promise, but he died believing it to be true. We are predisposed to wanting to see, to feel, to touch, to taste, and to experience in the physical what can only be seen in the spiritual. Sometimes, we don’t get to see it or feel it; we don’t get to see the fulfillment of the promise with our eyes of flesh, but we know with an unshakeable faith that comes about by witnessing God’s repeated faithfulness that it will be so.

With love in Christ,

Michael Boldea, Jr.  

Job CIX

 Every conclusion Bildad came to was through the prism of the physical. Everything was filtered through human understanding, making no allowance for the possibility that something other, something more, or something different was going on. He lived in a world of black and white with no gray areas to be had, and everything had to have a logical explanation that he could decipher, given enough brain power.

Your sons must have sinned; ergo, God cast them away for their transgression. God has not awakened for you and prospered your rightful dwelling place; ergo, you are not pure and upright.

To Bildad, everything had a simple explanation, and the simplest, most appropriate explanation he came up with is that Job had some hidden sin he was unwilling to confess. This perspective is important in the context of suffering and faith, as it raises the question of whether suffering is always a result of personal sin. Job’s travails show us that it’s not, and we would be remiss if we did not consider the complexity of suffering in the context of faith.

What did you do? Nothing. Well, you must have done something. But I didn’t. Now you’re just lying and putting on an air of spiritual superiority, aren’t you? Job had months to go through every chapter of his life to pinpoint where he had erred, where he had displeased God, or sinned in some form or fashion. He was not above repenting had he discovered something heretofore overlooked, but there was nothing, and not knowing why this had befallen him was an added layer of constant grief.

Suffering due to something you know yourself to be guilty of and suffering while knowing you are innocent of what you’re being accused of doing have different mental impacts. As the kids like to say, it hits differently. I did the crime, now I’m doing the time, and that’s the way it is. You make your peace with the reality that, on some level, your punishment is deserved, and although you might have liked it otherwise, you understand why you find yourself in your current predicament. But if you’re in a cage waiting for someone to bring you a cup of water, knowing that you’ve done nothing to deserve your current lot, the injustice of it weighs as heavily on one’s countenance as the situation itself.

It is said that if you take five individuals, accuse them of the same crime, and put them all in a jail cell, the one who goes to sleep is the guilty party because he knows he’s been caught and might as well get some rest. The innocent, those not guilty of the crime they’ve been accused of, tend to pace back and forth, decry their guilt, insist upon their innocence, and plead with their jailors to hear them out. This concept of ‘the innocent’ is crucial in understanding the mental impacts of suffering, as it highlights the psychological turmoil of being falsely accused and the desperate plea for justice in the face of suffering.

Job 8:8-10, “For inquire, please, of the former age, and consider the things discovered by the fathers; For we were born yesterday, and know nothing, because our days on earth are a shadow. Will they not teach you and tell you, and utter words from their heart?”

If Bildad, who likely predated the Patriarchs, could say that Job should consider the things discovered by the fathers, how much more do we have to look back on and glean understanding from? There is no viable excuse for any believer in our day and age to be ignorant of God, His will, His purpose, and His nature. We could excuse it, perhaps, in those of Job’s generation, given the limited availability of historical data and the lack of proliferation of printed materials, but even Bildad pointed out that what they had thus far learned from the fathers was enough to shape and form some sort of understanding, partial though it was.

I would be remiss if, in discussing Joseph and his journey from the mountaintop to the valley, back to the mountaintop, then the valley, then the mountaintop again, I did not mention his father Jacob, whom God Himself declared He loved. No small thing to be loved by God, yet for eighteen years, Jacob lived with the belief that Joseph, his beloved son, was dead. He carried the burden of Joseph being torn apart by wild beasts for longer than Joseph had been alive when he thought he’d lost him, and never once did God whisper in Jacob’s ear, “Do not despair; he lives.”

Imagine the weight that would have been lifted from Jacob’s shoulders upon hearing that one sentence. Imagine the relief, the joy, the utter jubilation at knowing that his son was not lost, that he had not gone to the grave but that he lived. Yet Jacob was kept in the dark. God did not reveal the one thing that would have taken Jacob’s pain away but comforted him, molded him, and grew him in his pain. This is a testament to the potential for growth in suffering, a beacon of hope in the darkest of times.

It was only after Jacob shook off the lie that Joseph was dead that God spoke to him that very night, telling him to go to Egypt and see his son. Oftentimes, the prejudices we hold and the lies we believe are so deeply rooted in our hearts that they block out the voice of God, and were He to speak clearly, we would brush it off because it would contradict what we believe to be established facts.

During a conversation with a former cessationist, he said something that stuck with me for the longest time. Because of his conviction that the gifts had ceased with the early church Apostles, when God began speaking to him, for the longest time, he thought he was either losing his mind or hearing the enemy's voice. The more he prayed, however, the more he heard the voice of God until the experience forced him to go back to the Word and discover for himself that things were not as he believed or as he had been taught.    

1 Corinthians 4:5, “Therefore judge nothing before the time, until the Lord comes, who will both bring to light the hidden things of darkness and reveal the counsels of the heart. Then each one’s praise will come from God.”

Just because you think a situation is hopeless, it doesn’t mean God does. Just because you can’t see a way out of a predicament, it doesn’t mean God hasn’t already made a way. We must allow for the reality that God sees what we cannot and walk by faith rather than sight. Your sight will hinder you. It will disincline you to press onward, sap your energy and enthusiasm to continue on your journey, and bring to mind all the things that are wrong, that can go wrong, or that might go wrong, keeping you static and unmoving.

Faith sees beyond the present, beyond the now, beyond the current situation one might find themselves in, and propels us ever forward toward the prize, toward the goal, toward the reward He will bring upon His return to give to everyone according to his work. Eyes of faith allow you to see what will be based on the promises God has made in His word, giving us full assurance that our light affliction, our temporary suffering, our season of heartache or hurt is working for us a far more exceeding weight of glory.

With love in Christ,

Michael Boldea, Jr.