Prophecy I

 Men presume; God declares. Men assume; God proclaims. Generations come and go, forgotten to time; God abides and remains the same yesterday, today, and forevermore. Men insist upon a thing, hoping God bends to their will, or think to themselves that if they are loud enough, belligerent enough, insistent enough, they will somehow convince Him to see it the way they perceive it.

Few topics today are more divisive than that of prophecy. From those who have a nuanced take on it, to those who insist it’s no longer for today, to those who believe everything they do, from brushing their teeth to what deodorant they wear, is prophetic, there is no end to opinions, often at odds with each other, and the arguments on every side oftentimes get heated and straddle the line between discourse, reasoning together, and all-out war.

In the heat of the moment, few have the wherewithal and presence of mind to take a pause and go to the Word of God to see what it has to say, because that would mean giving up their position, or acknowledging that they may have gotten it wrong, not because of diligent study of Scripture, but because they believed something someone once said and took it as gospel truth.

Rather than being one body united in purpose, the household of faith has become tribal, carving itself into ever smaller pieces, warring against itself, divided and fractured, staking its position and making certain everyone knows where it stands.

Far too many define themselves by the position they take on a given topic rather than by serving and following Christ, being saved and sanctified, and declaring Jesus Lord and Savior. Their identity is not Christ, but some tertiary issue they’ve chosen as the hill to die on, and wear it as a badge of honor, believing it makes them spiritually superior.

Those who profit from such division are eager to foment it, positioning themselves as intermediaries between God and man, and feeling entitled to the praise and glory rightly due God. Those with no interest other than humbly walking with Jesus, and pointing the way to Him, see the danger a divided body poses, understand that a divided house cannot stand, and that due to the infighting the entire body makes for easier prey.

We elevate men to the point that we deem them equal in authority to Scripture, then wonder why there is so much confusion, division, and no clear path forward toward the end goal of being a soldier of the faith, fully equipped and ready for every good work.  

To take a hard line and insist that God will not, cannot, or must not do something when God Himself did not declare it as such is to speak on behalf of God, assume that you know His thoughts more clearly than He knows His own, and demand that He fall in line with your way of thinking rather than submit to His.

To insist that God can no longer do something He has done since He first spoke to Adam in the garden of Eden is to appropriate His authority and place myself above it as the final arbiter of what He is allowed to do. In essence, it is saying I do not permit God to do as He wills, but demand that He submit to my musings on the matter and act according to my dictates.

If an earthly king with power limited to his kingdom were to declare a thing, and one of his subjects were to request an audience, then insist that the king cannot do as he purposed because the subject deems it so, how do you think the king would react? How much more when the King in question is limitless in His power and authority, when His will is sovereign, and He does as He wills?

No man living or dead, of this age or past ages, has ever had the authority to place limitations on God, or insist He can no longer do something just because they have declared it so. Hubris is a powerful drug, but it is also dangerous when we convince ourselves that we can dictate terms to the Almighty, and that He must abide by what we have declared for no other reason than that we have declared it.

What we must ultimately determine isn’t what men have to say about prophecy, or the prophetic in general, but what God has to say about it. How we do this is simple enough: first, we lay aside all presuppositions, preconceived notions, the things we’ve heard others say regarding the topic, and turn to the Word of God itself, and allow it to be a lamp unto our feet, to guide our way to wisdom and understanding, wherever that may lead.

We all have biases, one way or another, but if we are to rightly divide the Word, we must resolve that, if Scripture challenges them, we will humble ourselves before the Lord and submit to its authority.

If we are unwilling to bend, if our minds are already made up and we will disregard Scripture as a whole in favor of our interpretation of one verse taken out of context, around which we form an entire doctrine, then there is no point in proceeding beyond this juncture. We are all held to account for the things we know, and once we know them, we can no longer plead ignorance of the matter.  

With love in Christ,

Michael Boldea, Jr. 

Introduction

 This is less a book I wanted to write than a book that needed to be written. I’ve waited patiently for someone else to take up the mantle, to put pen to paper and expound on these most controversial of topics, hoping someone would. It’s not because I don’t feel up to the task. My English is passable, I enjoy research, and I’ve been around prophecy and intimately aware of the prophetic since before I could read or write.

In hindsight, my reasoning is selfish: I was cognizant of the slings and arrows such a deep dive into prophecy, prophets, modern-day carneys, and everything in between would elicit, and my life has been such that I’ve had my fair share already, have the scars and bruises to show for it, and if I could avoid it and let another carry the burden, I would gladly do so.

Full disclosure, cards on the table, I believe in the prophetic. I believe God still engages with His people, communicates to His people, warns His people, chastens His people, and operates among His people supernaturally, as He always has; I believe He speaks to His own, and I believe He chooses vessels through which He does so.

Believing something, however, is not enough. A multitude of people believe a multitude of conflicting, contradictory things, and they can’t all be right, so the mission we will be undertaking during the time we have together is not to highlight what I personally believe and insist that by the sheer fact that I believe it, it must be thus, but to ensure that there is Biblical confirmation to support it. In layman’s terms, if what I believe and what the Bible says I must believe conflict, then the Bible has final authority on the matter.

The Bible provides no foundation for the idea that, at some point in human history, God chose to go radio silent. Ever since Adam and Eve walked in the garden, God has communicated with His creation, has been fully engaged, and is not, as some insist, an absentee landlord.   

What I do not believe is that God establishes new doctrine through the prophetic, since the canon of Scripture has been established, and we have all we need for a full, vibrant, complete, and victorious spiritual life. This is doubly true when someone claiming to be sent of the Lord speaks things contrary to what the Word of the Lord has already established, causing confusion, division, and turmoil within the household of faith.

Prophecy cannot offer you liberties otherwise not specifically granted in Scripture, nor can it place upon you burdens, whether practices, rituals, or ceremonies not contained therein.

After considerable deliberation, this study will be divided into three parts: First, what prophecy is, what it isn’t, its purpose, and its origins. The second part will focus on prophets, their roles, their authority, and how they operated in the time before the outpouring of the Holy Spirit versus how the gift of prophecy operates today. The third part will focus on the jesters and fools of our day, men and women who go without being sent and prophesy in the name of a Lord they’ve never known.

The rampant abuse of prophecy today is undeniable. Equally undeniable is that it is neither accidental nor coincidental. It is one of the telltale signs of the last days, as obvious and certain as the wars and rumors of wars, earthquakes in various places, pestilences, and general turning away from the truth we were warned would be evident. We were warned that such individuals would rise up and deceive many, but where the false exists, so must true prophecy; hence the need for discernment and the application of Scriptural litmus tests in order to separate one from the other.    

Anecdotal evidence and personal experience aside, this study will be tethered to Scripture, for we are bound by the Word in all things. Is prophecy still relevant? Is it still for today? What does the Bible have to say about it? These are the questions we will tackle and flesh out Biblically, not through the prism of a denomination or personal opinion, but via Scripture itself. Because, in the end, it’s the only opinion that matters.

This study is bound to ruffle some feathers on both sides of the aisle, whether among continuationists and cessationists, but that can’t be helped. As long as the Word is our plumb line, we must abide by what it says, even if it contradicts previously held opinions we believed to be true.     

With love in Christ,

Michael Boldea, Jr. 

Housekeeping

 Every journey has a beginning and an end. Going through the book of Job and gleaning the wisdom therein has been quite the journey, taking longer than I thought it would, but necessarily so; yet here we are, at the end of the road, ready to endeavor upon a new journey shortly.

I will be taking a few days to recharge, refocus, and get Job out of my system, then on to the new project we go, which is loosely titled “Prophecy, Prophets, Jesters and Fools: The good, the bad, and the ridiculous of modern-day prophecy!”

If you've never done a deep dive into a topic, or a book of the Bible, you may not understand the need for a few days of quiet, but it’s like having a friend stay with you for close to two years, then suddenly packing up and moving away. You feel the separation, you feel the absence, and to tackle this next topic well, I need a few breaths between projects. That’s how I process, and ever since I started writing, it's been the case with each new journey.

To those who stuck with our study of Job to the end, thank you. I hope and pray you got something out of it, that you gained some insight or understanding, whether regarding the duty of man, the nature of God, or the reality that none is spared their valleys, no matter how righteous.

See you soon.   

With love in Christ,

Michael Boldea, Jr. 

Job CCCLVIII

 God doesn’t deal in hypotheticals. He’s not some sleazy investment guru on the internet who has to preface his pitch by saying he is not giving you investment advice, wink, wink, but all that he’s about to say is for entertainment and educational purposes. God doesn’t make empty promises; he doesn’t inflate His numbers; He doesn’t promise you the moon and the stars only to leave you with an empty wallet, wallowing in bitterness, wondering to yourself how you could have ponied up a whole hundred dollars for a course that promised to make you a millionaire only to be told you’re not getting a refund because you didn’t follow all the steps and didn’t have the initial half million seed money to grow your wealth.

No, I didn’t fall for it, but I know people who have. I grew up around hustlers, and I understand that if something is too good to be true, it likely is, so anytime someone tries to charge me in order to impart their wisdom, I shut down and walk away without giving it a second thought.

Unlike men, God means what He says, does as He promises, and whenever we take a step of faith and trust Him, He never fails. Oftentimes it begins with one small act of faith, something that your logical mind insists is wasted effort, but once you commit and follow through and do as the Word of God prescribes, you see the promise fulfilled in real time and in ways you could have never foreseen. 

It starts with one. Whatever it is you endeavor to do, it always starts with one. One choice to walk past the donuts and not pick up a dozen out of habit, one choice to walk around your block rather than sit in front of the television. One conscious decision to lay aside the troubles of this present life and commune with God. One step, one decision, one moment of realization that the earth and everything in it is passing away, so putting our trust in anything in it is an exercise in futility at best.

Of all the things that had been restored to Job, his fellowship with God was the most prized thing of all. This is not a guess or an assumption, but a conclusion tethered to his own words when he declared that God’s absence, the absence of His presence, His voice, and His guiding hand, was what vexed him beyond any of his physical or emotional torments.

From his early years, Job had anchored his hope, trust, and faith in God, not in his possessions, not in what he had amassed, not even in his wife and children. The source of his utmost joy was communion with God, being in His presence, and knowing that He was there. It was when he cried out and God was silent that Job felt truly lost, and even then he would not abandon his faith in God.

If you committed to serve, then serve. If you committed to obey, then obey. If you committed to follow, then follow. Not only when the wind is at your back and the sky before you is clear, not only when the way forward is smooth, and there are no valleys before you, but in every circumstance, in every situation, even in the trials and the setbacks, keep your eyes fixed before you, and keep going, because by its very definition, the testing of your faith is no light, easy thing.

If we saw the end from the beginning as God does, there would be no need for faith. If we understood all the mysteries of the universe and could process all wisdom and knowledge fully and completely, there would be no warning in the Word to lean not on our own understanding.

If one such as Paul concluded that for now we see through a glass, darkly, and know in part, then odds are you and I are in the same boat, and boasting about seeing everything clearly is an empty boast meant to stroke our ego and inflate our pride.

There was much Job didn’t know as he went through his trials, but the handful of things he did know were enough to carry him, strengthen him, and give him the ability to endure. What Job knew mattered more than what he didn’t know. He didn’t know why he was suffering the way he was, why everything in his life had been turned to ash, why his body had betrayed him and was nothing more than a skin suit covered in boils, or why God was being silent. He would have liked to know, had even cried to the heavens for clarification, but no clarification came.

What mattered, however, was what he knew. He knew God was real. He knew God was sovereign. He knew God was omnipotent. He knew God was worthy of worship whether in the valley or on the mountaintop. He knew God was just. He knew God was loving. He knew that though he did not feel His presence in the moment, God was nevertheless omnipresent. Most of all, having spent his life serving Him, Job knew God. Not an idea of Him, not what he’d heard others say about Him, but personally and intimately.

Do you know God? The one true God? The God of the Bible, and not some fabrication or approximation of what others think God is, or how they believe He should be, but as He reveals Himself in His word to those who are diligent to search it out and discover the beauty of all that He is?

If you do, then press on, press in, follow and obey, for He will lead you into all truth, to green pastures, and still waters. If you don’t know Him, while you still have breath, you have the opportunity to do so, not on your terms, but on His terms. Not for your glory, but for His glory. Not for your purpose, but for His purpose. Truly knowing God matters more than anything else in this life. It is the difference between life and death, light and darkness, eternity in His presence, or being cast into the outer darkness, far from Him. Choose wisely!

With love in Christ,

Michael Boldea, Jr.  

Job CCCLVII

 I’m old enough to remember life before GPS and turn-by-turn instructions with real-time satellite imaging of congestion, traffic jams, and accidents. Having the world in the palm of your hand is convenient, to be sure, as is estimating your time of arrival within a five-minute window, but convenience comes at a cost, and one of the things we’ve lost along the way is the sense of adventure inherent in guessing which way you should turn, what highway you should take, and how exactly you ended up on the Polish border when you were expecting to cross into Austria.

I traveled a lot when I was younger, put on enough miles to rival an over-the-road, long-haul truck driver, and have enough stories to last me a lifetime. If the journey was more than a ten-hour drive, whenever the individual you were supposed to visit asked when you thought you were arriving, your best estimate was Tuesday rather than before six pm, but not after seven.

One of the multitude of graces we take for granted today, when we consider the time Job lived in, is that we have turn-by-turn instructions, a roadmap laid out in the Word, that all we need do is adhere to in order to reach our destination. Even so, none of us can say with any degree of certainty when we will reach it.

Job thought he was days away from ending his journey, and given his condition, that was a reasonable assumption; yet he lived another hundred and forty years beyond what he thought would surely be his end. There is an end point for all of us. Whether in a year, ten, or fifty, we will all, at one point, shake off this mortal coil, see a sunset for the last time, hug our loved ones for the last time, enjoy fellowship for the last time, then eternity.

Some of us get so caught up with wondering when our exit is coming up that we fail to cherish the journey. We death-grip the steering wheel and become obsessed with when the off-ramp will be, living in a constant state of stress regarding something we have no control over. God’s got it. He always has. Follow the instructions, and enjoy the ride.

Yes, sometimes the road may get bumpy, at other times so winding that your stomach might start to protest, but as long as you’re headed in the right direction, toward God and not away from Him, keep going. My duty is not to entertain the thoughts of when it all might end, but to ensure that when it does, I’ve finished well.

The destination is the destination. There is no place between now and then that is a viable option to pitch our tents and proceed no further. Nor is turning back to revisit the past something healthy for our spiritual man. We press ever onward, not looking back, not being distracted by shiny things off in the distance, but faithfully following after the One who promised he was going to prepare a place for us.

God knows the plans He has for you. For most of us, He does not disclose those plans, so trying to gauge what we can accomplish in five years, ten years, or even five days is foolhardy at best. This moment is all we have, and our duty before God is to redeem this moment for His glory and honor.

Some who think they have decades left will never see another moon cycle, while others who believe that death is knocking at their door and will soon kick it in will live for years still. When is God’s territory, and it is within His purview to determine such things. When we try to control things we have no way of controlling while simultaneously ignoring and putting off the things we have agency over, things we can control and do, we are wasting the most precious resource we’ve been given, which is time.

You have agency over whether you read your Bible today or not. You have agency over whether you spend time in prayer today or not. You have agency over whether you buy a hot meal for someone who is hungry today or not. These are things that you and I can control. When you close your eyes for the last time is not something you can control, so why fret about it?

We all want to move mountains, but it begins with the first pebble. It begins with the first shovelful of dirt, the first wheelbarrow, and given enough time, given enough consistency, that pebble will turn into a mound, which will turn into a hill, which will turn into a mountain that has been moved. It would be nice to see it happen in a breath or the blink of an eye, and sometimes, in His grace, God does just that, wherein He remedies a situation that seemed insurmountable to human intellect, but more often than not it’s a matter of degrees and forward momentum, and being diligent in the doing of the work required.

Did you spend more time today in God’s presence than you did yesterday? If the answer is yes, that is forward momentum, and it is a good thing. Have you spent more time in prayer today than yesterday, and has your prayer life grown month to month and year to year? If the answer is yes, that is forward momentum, and it is a good thing.

You know yourself well enough to know if you’re making progress, if you’re growing, maturing, and building up your faith, or spinning your wheels going from one distraction to another, grasping at straws and fanciful fables. If you can be honest enough with yourself to acknowledge the lack of progress, and take steps to rectify it, all you need do is knock, and He will open. All you need do is ask, and He will give. Desire fellowship with God and you will have it. Desire understanding, and you will glean it, not by osmosis, but by diligently studying the word of God, and seeing His truth revealed to you.

Time is running out for all of us. The gray hair, the achy joints, attest to the reality that we are getting older, and even if we’ve squandered more time than we would like to admit up until this point, today is the day it can all change, turn around, and we can double our efforts in redeeming the time and growing in God.

I can’t tell you how much time you have left; I’m not God. All I know is that as long as you draw breath, you have the ability to deepen your relationship with Him, and growing in God is never wasted time, for it pays dividends now and into eternity.      

With love in Christ,

Michael Boldea, Jr. 

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.  

Job CCCLV

Once the dust settles, everyone comes out of the woodwork insisting they were by your side all along. When you’re in the midst of being battered and bruised, radio silence is the expectation du jour, with those only pretending to be your friends or fellow soldiers of the cross giving you a wide berth as though you were toxic, or your hardship was somehow contagious, but once you get through it, they reappear like mushrooms after a summer rain, as if out of nowhere.

Those who strive for honesty will proffer an apology of some sort, unwilling to meet your eyes for fear that the guilt they feel is too plainly written therein, while those who don’t will insist they were always there, holding your hand, but you were just too busy to notice.

The only one you need standing beside you to get through the fire and out the other side is God. If God stands with you, all is well, will end well, and there’s nothing the devil can do to change the course that God has established if you remain faithful to Him.

Where were all of Job’s brothers, sisters, and those who had been his acquaintances while he sat on an ash heap scratching at himself with a potsherd? Unhelpful as they had been in the final analysis, at least Eliphaz, Bildad, and Zophar had shown up. At least they’d traveled from afar to try and comfort their friend. Other than Job’s wife, nothing was mentioned of his surviving extended family or acquaintances until the last chapter of the book. Once they’d learned of his downfall, they were nowhere to be found, yet now that he had been restored, and doubly so, they were quick to make amends.

“Then all his brothers, all his sisters, and all those who had been acquaintances before, came to him and ate food with him in his house; and they consoled him and comforted him for all the adversity the Lord had brought upon him.”

There are always bound to be men highlighting their bravery after a battle is won, and more often than not the loudest ones were never on the front line. The boisterous, self-aggrandizing, and those insisting that without them the battle would have been lost usually never saw the whites of the enemy’s eyes, nor did they go toe-to-toe in a life-or-death struggle. Those that do are usually quiet, reserved, unwilling to revisit the horrors of battle, grateful to be alive, and looking forward to returning to their loved ones.

The household of faith is overflowing with what amounts to stolen valor, and it’s those who’ve never seen a day of spiritual warfare that are the loudest, insisting that they are the warriors Jeremiah, Isaiah, Moses, and Job wished they’d been.

The problem is that boasts and theatrics will only get you so far. At the end of the day, you will have to answer for pretending to be something you weren’t, not to men, but to God. You will be called to account for having pretended to be a warrior without possessing armor, or insisting you were on the battlefield without the scars to show for it, when all you were was a teller of fables, regurgitating the lives others have lived, pretending as though it was your own.

The real ones know that the victory was not of their own making, design, or due to their knowledge of battle stratagem. They understand that victory was had by the power of God residing in them, and they are but servants, soldiers, vessels who could do nothing if they remained empty and were not filled with His presence.

The funny thing is that some of the most powerfully used men of God that I have been honored to know throughout the years never boasted of themselves, never attempted to stand in the spotlight, or insisted they were spiritually superior to anyone else. To the last, they were humble men who humbled themselves, picked up their crosses, and followed after Jesus every day, like everyone else.

Beware the man who elevates himself above the station of servant, or thinks himself special in his own eyes. Beware the individual for whom being known by a particular title is more important than being known for their humility.

Yes, Job’s brothers, sisters, and acquaintances had wronged him, just as Joseph’s brothers would later wrong him, yet the reaction of both men is almost identical in that they did not resent, browbeat, or hold it over their heads, but forgave. Job did not turn them away, but ate food with them in his house, and even at this late hour, although Job understood God’s plan, his brothers and sisters did not.

They still assumed that the adversity that had come upon him was brought upon him by the Lord. They still viewed God as a cruel taskmaster who took joy in seeing his servants suffer, rather than understanding that although God had allowed Satan to sift Job, it was not God doing the sifting Himself.

This distinction matters because it shapes the lens through which we view God. Yes, God allowed Job’s testing, and the devil went as far as he could go in attempting to sway Job into abandoning his hope, but even then there were guardrails and limitations placed on the devil by which he had to abide. Understand that were Satan allowed to run loose and do as he willed, there would be nothing of this world but ash and ruin. There is no sympathy, empathy, kindness, gentleness, or mercy when it comes to the enemy of our souls. He takes delight in suffering; nothing makes him squeamish or think he’s gone too far, and any armistice the church thinks it has with him is no less than an illusion.

If God desired to crush Job, it would have been done on day one, so utterly and completely that though he had once been the greatest of all the people of the East, his name would have been a long-forgotten byword within a generation. God allowed Job’s testing, not his destruction. Job proved faithful, and now all that had been lost during his testing was restored, and doubly so.

Mark 10:29-30, “So Jesus answered and said, ‘Assuredly, I say to you, there is no one who has left house or brothers or sisters or father or mother or wife or children or lands, for My sake and the gospel’s, who shall not receive a hundredfold now in this time – houses and brothers and sisters and mothers and children and lands, with persecutions – and in the age to come, eternal life.”’

With love in Christ,

Michael Boldea, Jr.