Job CCXCIII

 Job held himself to a high standard, knowing it was nothing less than what God expected. Becoming a son or daughter of God in truth, being born again and sanctified, comes with a wide array of privileges to be sure, top among them the honor of calling Him Father, and He, in turn, knowing you as one of His own, but it also comes with a code of conduct and responsibilities for which we are accountable and to which we must adhere. Chief among these is to deny ourselves, pick up our crosses, and follow after Him who hung on the cross that we might be reconciled to God.

We are duty-bound to walk circumspectly, to search our hearts regularly, ensuring that Jesus sits upon their throne, and resist the devil that he might flee. God can’t resist the devil on our behalf, nor, for that matter, can your pastor, elder, bishop, cousin, or next-door neighbor. He can put guardrails and limitations on what the enemy can do to a specific individual, but the active resistance of his devices is on us.

We’ve all heard some variation of the worst advice one human can give to another, which is to follow your heart. Job understood that the heart is influenced by what the eyes see, and what the ears hear, and declares that if ever his heart had walked after his eyes, may others eat what he had sown. Unless a heart is regenerated, made new, and imbued with Christ, it is flesh and as such will lead you to what the flesh desires.

Every great country song and human tragedy is the direct result of following one’s heart, based on what the eyes saw and what the ears heard. True biblical counsel isn’t to follow your heart, but to follow Jesus. Even if your heart resists, even if it tries to tell you that you’ve got plenty of time to right the ship and find your way to His loving embrace, it isn’t doing it for the benefit of your spiritual man but for the benefit of your flesh. Follow Jesus even if your heart protests and your flesh bristles, because the flesh does not want to die yet knows it must for Christ to live in you.   

Because he feared the Lord, Job knew himself to be a man of clean hands, one who shunned evil, and whose step had not turned from the way. There was no fakery in his worship, devotion, or service to God, and all that he did he did from a pure heart rather than the thought of what others would say or how they would view him.

A relationship, by definition, cannot be performative. I love my wife. I don’t pretend to love her, or simply speak the words once in a while; I genuinely, truly love her, and my actions day in and day out prove that reality. Many men have said they love God, but their actions proved otherwise. Many have said they serve Him, only to be proven that they served no one beyond themselves. Job knew God, and God knew Job, and from the onset God validated Job’s uprightness, judging him to be blameless.

When men only pretend to love God, it shows in their conduct, their choices, and how they spend the time they’ve been given. Some men have even convinced themselves that they love God. Yet, if they took a breath to employ pattern recognition and assess whether they spend more time watching sports than reading the Word, or if they’d rather go fishing than spend time in prayer, they would soon come to realize that their words have no follow-through. Their declarations of love were empty and baseless.

We must know that we love God with the same certainty that we know God loves us. There is no doubt or shadow of turning in our resolute certainty that God loves us. There is no ambiguity there; we don’t have to guess at whether God loves us or not, or wonder if His love is genuine. He proved it two thousand years ago to such an extent that it is undeniable.

John 3:16-17, “For God so loved the world that He gave His only begotten Son, that whoever believes in Him should not perish but have everlasting life. For God did not send His Son into the world to condemn the world, but that the world through Him might be saved.”        

God’s love for Job was not unrequited. Job prioritized God above all else because he, in turn, loved God. There was a reciprocity of affection, but even so, Job did not attempt to exploit it or think himself above others because of it. He understood that God was God, and he was a man, Creator and creation, and one must submit to the authority, will, and purpose of the other in all things.

Because of this foundational relationship with God, Job knew what wickedness and iniquity were, and guarded himself against them with the tenacity of a man keeping a pack of wolves at bay. He understood the implicit and explicit dangers of sin, knew that if he allowed it to worm its way into his heart, it would dampen his relationship with the Almighty, and made it a priority to keep his hands clean and his heart pure before Him.

Job did not sin, hoping his relationship with God would keep him from judgment, banking on the idea that God loved him too much to punish him were he to stray or turn from the way. He knew himself to be a man of integrity who rightly acknowledged that had he committed wickedness, had he done iniquity, it would be deserving of judgment regardless of how intimate he had been with God.

Closeness with God is not a license to sin without consequence or repercussion, as some insist. The closer we draw to God, the more we are refined and purified, as the fire of His holiness burns away the dross, the excess, the worthless, and the temporal.

God doesn’t need me enough to overlook wickedness or iniquity in my life. He does not make exemptions or concessions when it comes to one’s obedience to His word and will. If nothing wicked or defiled will enter the kingdom of heaven, what makes anyone think that God will overlook wickedness in the lives of those who claim to be not only His servants, but also His ambassadors and representatives?

Yes, there is room for grace. We’ve all fallen short, but one cannot willfully continue in a pattern of sin, abusing grace, and thinking themselves immune from God’s righteous judgment. Job wasn’t asking for special treatment, nor did he attempt to leverage his relationship with God, hoping He would overlook wickedness in his life. He was asking to be weighed on honest scales, that God might know his integrity.    

With love in Christ,

Michael Boldea, Jr. 

Job CCXCII

This chapter could adequately be described as Job’s innocence checklist. He begins with the covenant he made with his eyes, but does not stop there, and by the time he reaches the end of it, Job concludes that not only is he innocent of sensual sin, but also of abusing his power, trusting in his wealth, and even of not caring for his enemies. He didn’t focus on the one thing he didn’t do while minimizing the ones he did, but went through the list, proving his innocence to anyone who would hear.

He wasn’t, as has become customary in our age, attempting to highlight his own righteousness by pointing to what everyone else was doing that he wasn’t, but searching his heart to see if there was any sin or practice displeasing to the Lord that he had yet to identify and root out. He wasn’t being a Pharisee about his inward searching. He wasn’t attempting to look his nose down on those around him while simultaneously elevating himself by highlighting his virtues. This was not a contest between himself and his contemporaries, but an honest assessment of his life, the choices he’d made, and the way he’d lived in light of his understanding that God saw his ways and counted all his steps.

When we search our hearts, or ask God to search us and see if there is any wicked way in us, it’s not to prove ourselves more virtuous than others, or to boast of our righteousness to any who would hear, but to walk in obedience and faithfulness seeking to bring glory to His name.

Everyone who asks is secretly hoping that God will say there is nothing in need of remedy, nothing they need to repent of or turn away from, but such individuals are so rare as to have entire books of the Bible with their names on them. I’m not in that category, and neither are you, no matter how much we’d like to think otherwise. We’ve all fallen short, whether in attitude, consistency, priorities, or managing emotional reactions to something someone said or did that got under our skin.

In reality, the closer we draw to God, the more intimate we become with His holiness, the more we acknowledge that our righteousness is as filthy rags, and there is always something in need of pruning. Whether it’s the quick temper when seeing bad drivers on the road, or judging someone for buying ‘I can’t believe it’s not meat’ instead of a piece of chicken at the grocery store, we constantly find ourselves keeping the flesh in check and bridling it so as not to give it the opportunity to get a foothold.

One of the many profound lessons we learn from the life of Job is that we must understand the danger sin poses in the life of the believer, as well as be purposeful in our actions when guarding against temptation, whatever form that temptation might take.

Job 31:5-12, “If I have walked with falsehood, or if my foot has hastened to deceit, let me be weighed on honest scales, that God may know my integrity. If my step has turned from the way, or my heart walked after my eyes, or if any spot adheres to my hands, then let me sow, and another eat; yes, let my harvest be rooted out. If my heart has been enticed by a woman, or if I have lurked at my neighbor’s door, then let my wife grind for another, and let others bow down over her. For that would be wickedness; yes, it would be iniquity deserving of judgment. For that would be a fire that consumes to destruction, and would root out all my increase.”

In order to grasp the profundity of Job’s statement, one must take into account his knowledge of God, both as a righteous judge and as sovereign over His creation, as well as his omniscience, understanding, fundamentally so that God knew his life in its entirety and there was nothing hidden from His sight. In light of this, Job had the wherewithal to declare after his self-assessment that if he had walked with falsehood, or if his foot had hastened to deceit, he was open and accepting of being weighed on honest scales, and judged that God may know his integrity.

This was neither an empty boast nor a feigned attempt at projecting righteousness. Job wasn’t hoping God had been too busy to see his life, weigh his deeds, and overlook his absence of integrity. As Paul pointed out to the church of Corinth, if we were to judge ourselves, we would not be judged, but few among us take that admonition to heart and search ourselves as Job searched himself.

If we are more permissive toward our own pet vices, sins, failures, and shortcomings, justifying them to ourselves, while we demand perfection from everyone around us, all it does is make us hypocrites, one who refuses to acknowledge the plank in our own eye, while looking at the speck in our brother’s eye.

My first duty is not to work out your salvation with fear and trembling, but to work out my own salvation with fear and trembling. All will be held to account, and there is nothing that God missed, failed to see, or failed to consider.

It is because man’s view of who God is has been diminished and whittled down that some have talked themselves into playing games with Him, thinking nothing castigatory or punitive will ever come of it. They figure they got away with it once, perhaps twice, perhaps even ten times, and if there was no voice from heaven, no thunderbolts, or quaking earth, then God must have been too busy to notice. Willful sin reveals one’s true heart and the opinion they hold of God. Though they might say it with their lips, willful sin reveals that they do not believe Him to be holy, righteous, omniscient, omnipotent, and just. Were it not so, they would tremble before Him. Were it not so, true repentance would be forthcoming and quickly so.

Anyone who has to get caught and exposed before they give a tepid apology for the sake of damage control does not possess the fear of the Lord, know the God of the Bible, nor was there any reverence for His holiness in them. They may have feigned it well enough when the bright lights and the stage demanded they perform their role, but as far as true devotion, surrender, and obedience, it was now wholly absent if ever it existed.

With love in Christ,

Michael Boldea, Jr.  

Job CCXCI

 Job 31:1-4, “I have made a covenant with my eyes; why then should I look upon a young woman? For what is the allotment of God from above, and the inheritance of the Almighty from on high? Is it not destruction for the wicked, and disaster for the workers of iniquity? Does He not see my ways and count all my steps?”

One of the most dangerous environments for one’s spiritual man is passive indifference. Tragically, it’s what’s being taught from many pulpits, throughout a large swath of denominations, because those who look at the numbers and see the incoming and outgoing have determined that the lower you set the bar, the more likely it is that someone will throw a few bucks in the collection plate. In the end, that’s what it’s about. Not about souls, but about legal tender, and since the customer is always right, and the customer wants neither accountability nor conviction to be preached from the pulpit, that’s what the customer will get. Just because something sounds cynical, it doesn’t mean it isn’t true.

The direct correlation between the diluting and watering down of Scripture and burgeoning coffers is undeniable, and if what this life was about was fancy cars and expense accounts, then by those metrics alone, the church of today is prospering like none other in the history of mankind. Blessed coming and going, pressed down and shaken together, what could be better?

It’s nothing new; the Laodicean church believed itself to be prospering, rich, and in need of nothing, until Christ Himself dispelled them of that misnomer, revealing them to be wretched, miserable, poor, blind, and naked. There’s what man can see and how he judges a situation through the prism of his carnal intellect, and what God sees and how He judges, and the two are often very different, substantively speaking.

Due to the constant need to pander to men’s baser instincts, and the fear that were they to preach the whole counsel of God, unadulterated and unredacted, they would likely lose the support they’re banking on, few preachers nowadays get up the courage to speak on man’s duty to guard his heart, but not just.

By the time it gets to the heart, whatever the enemy is attempting to sow has already gotten by at least one of three other sentinels that ought to always be standing at the ready, and rebuffing his offensive. A wise man guards his eyes, his tongue, and his ears first, understanding that if they are well guarded, then nothing can make its way to the heart except for what’s supposed to be there, which is the presence of God.

If you guard your eyes, your ears, and your tongue well, the things you will have to contend with, prune, and pluck, will be far easier to be done away with because they did not take root in the heart, and had not established themselves therein.

If the heart is likened to a garden that must be constantly tended to, then the eyes, the ears, and the tongue determine what is being planted in said garden. If you plant good seed, it will grow into a good tree that will produce good fruit. If you plant bad seed, no matter how much one might want the outcome to be otherwise, it will grow bad trees that will produce bad fruit. If you plant crab apple seeds, you’ll get crab apple trees that will produce crab apples, no matter how much you might wish them to produce Honeycrisp apples.   

My zero-tolerance policy when it comes to sin among those who deem themselves the shepherds of God’s people has been seen by some as being unloving. More often than not, a snippet from Paul’s first letter to the Corinthians is included in the body text, reminding me that he who thinks he stands should take heed lest he fall, which is good counsel indeed, but contextually inapplicable within the topic of conversation, namely that the individual in question did not take heed, did not guard their eyes, their ears, their tongues, or their hearts, and didn’t so much fall into sin as cannonball into it.

You can’t tell me you never intended to go for a swim in the ocean if you drove a thousand miles to get there for the explicit purpose of going for a swim. You didn’t just make one conscious choice to go to the beach; there were multiple choices, strung together that brought you from the middle of Kansas to the shores of the Pacific or Atlantic.

You called in sick to work, gassed up the Pinto, packed your swim trunks, stopped to get some SPF 50 sunscreen, pointed the car in the direction you wanted to go, and floored it. But that was never your intention, though? You never thought in a million years that if you kept driving toward the ocean, you’d reach the ocean, and once you reached the ocean, you’d dip your toe in? Then once you dipped your toe in, well, you were already wearing your trunks; it would be a shame to waste the opportunity, wouldn’t it?

Once temptation worms its way into a heart, once it makes it past the eyes that ought to be the sentinels and guardsmen of the temple, the rationalization is inevitable and begins in earnest. Well, they invited me to this place I know I shouldn’t go to, but it would be rude of me to brush them off. We all have to make an effort to fit in; God knows my heart, I’ll go, but I won’t enjoy it. Okay, I’ll enjoy it a little bit, but not too much. I find myself enjoying it more than I should, but I’ll repent of it later.

I know what’s on the screen isn’t appropriate, nor beneficial to my spiritual man, but I’m halfway through the movie already, and it would be a shame not to know how it ends. Maybe I’ll just close one eye until the inappropriateness passes.

I know she knows I’m married; she sees the ring on my finger. Why is she in my personal space, laughing so much harder than my joke about chickens wearing sombreros warrants? I wouldn’t want to give offense; I’ll just play along.

All the denunciations, the halfhearted apologies, the excuses, the justifications, the shame brought upon the household of faith, and the inevitable broken families and ruined testimony could have been avoided had the individual in question guarded their eyes, made a covenant with them as Job did, and resisted the proffered temptation before it became their downfall.

What such individuals seem to forget is what Job so clearly declares: God sees their ways and counts all their steps. For good or ill, toward glory or shame, God sees our ways and counts all our steps.

With love in Christ,

Michael Boldea, Jr. 

Job CCXC

 Job 30:24-31, “Surely He would not stretch out His hand against a heap of ruins, if they cry out when He destroys it. Have I not wept for him who was in trouble? Has not my soul grieved for the poor? But when I looked for good, evil came to me; and when I waited for light, then came darkness. My heart is in turmoil and cannot rest; days of affliction confront me. I go about mourning, but not in the sun; I stand in the assembly and cry out for help. I am a brother of jackals, and a companion of ostriches. My skin grows black and falls from me; my bones burn with fever. My harp is turned to mourning, and my flute to the voice of those who weep.”

Transient comfort is a small price to pay for eternal glory. I realize it sounds simplistic, and there are likely a handful who read the previous sentence and immediately roll their eyes, thinking to themselves that I can’t possibly know what they’re going through and so I could not by all rights make the judgment that I did, and to that I say, I may not know your struggle, but I do know, if in broad outline, what eternal glory will be like, and that should suffice.

What do I mean by that? We know the worth of heaven is priceless and inestimable. We likewise know that, as the old hymn goes, when we all get to heaven, it will be a day of rejoicing. That day, however, will not be a day, but an eternity in His presence, beholding His glory. There, tears will be no more, pain will be no more, loss, separation, injustice, hatred, betrayal, mockery, and loneliness will cease to exist. When compared to the blink of an eye that is this existence, can anything we might endure while here outweigh what awaits us there?

We cannot allow the present to blur the reality of what awaits. We cannot allow the now to blind us to the reality that Jesus went to prepare a place for us, so that where He is, we might also be. This present life is transient, temporary, fleeting, and finite. As Job said, there is a house appointed for all the living, and there is nothing the living can do to avoid it. It’s what comes after that should concern us more than what is presently, because the after is for all eternity, while the present is for but a breath.

Revelation 21:1-4, “Now I saw a new heaven and a new earth, for the first heaven and the first earth had passed away. Also there was no more sea. Then, I, John, saw the holy city, New Jerusalem, coming down out of heaven from God, prepared as a bride adorned for her husband. And I heard a loud voice from heaven saying, ‘Behold, the tabernacle of God is with men, and He will dwell with them, and they shall be His people. God Himself will be with them and be their God. And God will wipe away every tear from their eyes; there shall be no more death, nor sorrow, nor crying. There shall be no more pain, for the former things have passed away.’”

Although Job had been millennia removed from the writing of the book of Revelation, he had unflinchingly declared that one day he would see His redeemer face to face. Amid the pain, the struggle, the loss, the mockery, the edges of that reality had begun to blur in Job’s mind. It had not disappeared, it had not abandoned him, but it was shimmering like some oasis in the desert, and no longer as vivid or crisp as it once was.

His resolve was being whittled away with each passing day. Incrementally, slowly, perhaps even imperceptibly to the naked eye, but by his own words, we see that Job’s hope was running on empty, and after days, which turned into weeks, that turned into months of him waiting for light and only seeing darkness, after looking for good only to be met with evil, he was a man hanging on by the merest of threads.

Even the strongest of men gets worn down over time. It’s one thing to be met with a trial or to suffer a tragedy, and then to go through the process of mourning, acceptance, and healing. It’s another to see oneself growing weaker with each passing day, wherein one’s heart is in turmoil and cannot rest, and time is but a weight pressing on one’s chest, keeping them from taking a full breath.

Not only did Job have to contend with God’s silence, but he also had to contend with the attitude of those around him, remembering that though he’d wept for him who was in trouble, and his soul grieved for the poor, now that he found himself in a similar situation, there was no one weeping and grieving for him.

That’s one of the hard lessons of life each of us must learn at some point: just because you show kindness, empathy, and respond to the plight of the downtrodden, it is folly to expect the same from others if ever you find yourself in need of comfort and encouragement. The only one we can depend on is God, for He is faithful, just, loving, and merciful. Even when He is silent, He is present. Even when He seems afar off, He is near. God knew of Job’s every pain, hurt, tear, disappointment, and distress. He was not ignorant of them, nor had He turned a blind eye to Job’s suffering. There would be a time when restoration and healing would come, but that time was not yet.

What we choose to focus on, what we choose to cling to, will determine whether we finish well and run our race to completion or give up along the way. If I focus on my present circumstances rather than the promises of God, on the things which are seen rather than those that are not, the exhaustion will become overwhelming to the point of inhibiting me from pressing onward. If my eyes are firmly set upon the author and finisher of my faith, if Jesus is all I see before me, then I will continue to press in, knowing that He will keep my feet from stumbling and my steps from slipping.

2 Corinthians 4:17-18, “For our light affliction, which is but for a moment, is working for us a far more exceeding and eternal weight of glory, while we do not look at the things which are seen, but at the things which are not seen. For the things which are seen are temporary, but the things which are not seen are eternal.”

With love in Christ,

Michael Boldea, Jr.  

Job CCLXXXIX

 Job 30:16-23, “And now my soul is poured out because of my plight; the days of affliction take hold of me. My bones are pierced in me at night, and my gnawing pains take no rest. By great force my garment is disfigured; it binds me about as the collar of my coat. He has cast me into the mire, and I have become like dust and ashes. I cry out to You, but You do not answer me; I stand up, and You regard me. But You have become cruel to me; with the strength of Your hand You oppose me. You lift me up to the wind and cause me to ride on it; You spoil my success. For I know that You will bring me to death and to the house appointed for all living.”

If Job had counted on his friends, neighbors, or acquaintances to be there for him rather than on God, his story would have ended far differently than it did. He was now a man who saw himself as discarded, written off, a cautionary tale for anyone who knew of him, of the prominence he’d once held, and the things he’d once possessed.

The world has changed, but man hasn’t. Deep down, we’re still petty, judgmental, and vindictive, just as those of Job’s day, and for many, dissecting and then reveling in the fall of once prominent men has become a hobby all on its own. I’m not referring so much to those once in spiritual authority who allowed sin to take root, then destroyed their lives, but whether it’s athletes, Wall Street tycoons, or once esteemed trailblazers of some sort that aren’t quite as popular, sought after, or well regarded as they once were, it’s astounding to see men relish their downfall as though their descent was the one thing keeping them from ascending to new heights.

Your contentment ought not to be based on the success or failure of another. Relishing someone’s downfall doesn’t make you the better person, or the bigger person; it just makes you petty and small, not realizing that any one of us, no matter how certain we are of future success, is one calamity away from being looked upon by our contemporaries as Job was by his.

No matter how intuitive, forward-thinking, or perceptive he might have been, he couldn’t have seen this coming, not in his wildest, most dreadful imaginings. It wasn’t just one thing, or two, that went sideways; it was everything.

Every single thing that could have gone wrong in Job’s life did so, and at an accelerated rate. From the outside looking in, we understand the devil had a hand in it and was the cause of Job’s demise, but it was not something Job ever imagined as being a possible future for himself.

This is why foundation matters. Whether your house is built upon shifting sand or the Rock becomes relevant, and all-important during the storm, not during fair weather. Whether you know God as Father, and He knows you as son or daughter, is the determining factor between whether you will stand or fall when the storms arrive. If you belong to Him, even if you are shattered into a million pieces, He will put you back together. If not, then one hairline crack will be enough to cause you to crumble into the dust because standing in our strength is no strength at all, and the slightest disturbance will send shockwaves through our well-sorted lives.        

By his own assessment, his soul had been poured out because of his plight, and the days of his affliction had taken their toll. This was not hyperbole or exaggeration on Job’s part, nor did he try to put on airs pretending to be stronger than he was.

We all have some version of a dream scenario when it comes to this present life, and rarely does the dream scenario play out. We can either put one foot in front of the other and press on, or sit in the dust and reminisce about what could have been, might have been, and in our moments of hubris, what we think should have been.

Job’s consternation wasn’t about what he could have done differently to avoid the situation he was in. His lament was that though he cried out to the God he served, He did not answer. He remained silent, and His silence was, to Job, the worst he had to contend with, even though he lay in the dust and ashes of his former life, scratching at his boils with a potsherd.

Job wasn’t lamenting the loss of his health or his wealth; he was acknowledging them. He wasn’t pretending that he wasn’t going through what he was going through, but what affected him more than any of those things was God’s silence. He missed the fellowship most of all, and though his bones pierced him in the night, and his gnawing pains knew no rest, God’s absence is what caused his consternation and unease.

When God speaks, it is with a purpose. When God is silent, it is likewise with a purpose. These things we know to be true, yet when we’re in the midst of the threshing, when we are being sifted, when the walls seem to be caving in, and there seems to be no way out of our current predicament, we sometimes lose sight of these realities.

Job had concluded that God had become cruel to him, and opposed him with the strength of His hand, not because he hadn’t known the goodness of God throughout his life, nor because he was unaware of His character, but because it’s hard to see the light when you’re at the bottom of a well, and Job had been at the bottom for some time now.

The self-righteous among us will be quick to declare that Job should have known better, that he shouldn’t have accused God of casting him into the mire, but neither you nor I were ever in Job’s position. We haven’t had to walk a mile in his shoes, nor can we come close to understanding all that he had endured up to this point. Blameless and upright he might have been, but Job was not perfect. None of us is. Throughout history, whether recorded or otherwise, there has been only one who was perfect: the Christ.

If anyone claims perfection, they’re either deceiving themselves or knowingly attempting to deceive others. Every one of us needs God’s grace. Every one of us needs God’s mercy, and as any good father would, when we lash out and say things we later regret, if we repent, He is faithful and just to forgive us.  

With love in Christ,

Michael Boldea, Jr. 

Job CCLXXXVIII

 Job 30:9-15, “And now I am their taunting song; yes, I am their byword. They abhor me, they keep far from me; they do not hesitate to spit in my face. Because He has loosed my bowstring and afflicted me, they have cast off restraint before me. At my right hand the rabble arises; they push away my feet, and they raise against me their ways of destruction. They break up my path, they promote my calamity; they have no helper. They come as broad breakers; under the ruinous storm they roll along. Terrors are turned upon me; they pursue my honor as the wind, and my prosperity has passed like a cloud.”

Men will flatter you, defer to you, feign respect, and speak smooth words to your face for as long as they believe they have something to gain from doing so. Those who do so with a vested interest or an ulterior motive were never truly friends or brothers but opportunists who will turn on you, savage your reputation, and spit in your face the instant they can no longer profit from your position, largesse, influence, or authority.

It is a hard-learned lesson that many once influential people, whose influence has waned, have had to learn the hard way, because true friends, friends who are there through the ups and downs, the thick and thin, the feast and the famine, are hard to come by, more so today than ever before.

Everyone seems to have an angle of some sort, and they feign friendship not because they want to be your friend but because they think you are the means by which they might attain what they really want, whatever that thing might be.

I’ll be the first to admit I have very few friends. The older I get, the fewer friends I seem to have, but those I consider friends, I’ve known for years on end. It’s not because I’m unfriendly, but because there is truth in the adage, once bitten, twice shy.

I’ve lived a long life in a short time, and events of the past left their mark. I would be a fool not to have learned from past experiences, and I’ve come to the point in life where calling someone a friend means something, and isn’t a word I throw out willy-nilly. If I deem someone my friend, then they’re my friend, and they remain so for no other reason than that I value our friendship.

The men of Job’s day had concluded there was nothing more they could gain from showing him deference, respecting him, or seeing him as an equal, and they cast off restraint before him. In modern parlance, they revealed their true nature, told him how they really felt, and there was no kindness or empathy in their judgment of him.

One of my biggest pet peeves and something I cannot abide is when a supposed friend exploits another whom they likewise deem a friend. Every time I hear someone ask for a service, then follow up with, “Can I get the friend discount?” it doesn’t sit well with me because if someone’s my friend, my purpose shouldn’t be to try to shortchange them.

I would have needed the job done regardless, whether by him or another, so my asking for a discounted rate just because we are acquainted only goes to show how much value I place on the relationship.

Whether it's car repair or lawn maintenance, I do my best to give my business to people I know and deem as friends. Never once have I gone in for an oil change or had someone come and spray for weeds, only to turn around and demand a discounted rate because we’re friends. They have families to feed and roofs to keep over their heads, and if I am in a position to hire them for the job, I expect no special favors because of our friendship.

Some have even offered to cut me a deal, and I politely declined because our friendship meant more to me than the five bucks I would have saved had I accepted. By the same token, I expect the friends with whom I do business to be fair and not upcharge me just because of our friendship. I’ve had that happen a time or two, and the instant I discovered it, our friendship soured and was never the same again.  

One knows their true friends in times of hardship and adversity. When he was the greatest of all the people of the East, there was no shortage of men trying to ingratiate themselves with Job. Now that his prosperity had passed like a cloud and there was nothing they could gain from him, they abhorred him, kept far from him, and spat in his face.

Job’s character had been consistent throughout. Theirs had not. He had done nothing to warrant their animus or their taunting. He had not changed; they’d just revealed their true selves in the absence of any perceived gain from pretending to be his friends.

If you’ve ever had someone you deemed a friend turn their back on you, and wracked your brain as to what you may have done to cause such drastic change, it likely wasn’t you, and it was nothing you did. All that happened is that they concluded they could not gain what they’d planned on gaining from the feigned friendship, and as such, let the mask slip and revealed their true nature.

As children of God, it is our duty to employ wisdom in all things, and that includes choosing our friends. Choose your friend wisely because if you fail to do so, if the day ever comes when you will have to count on them, they’ll vanish like fog in the midday sun.

As my wife is fond of saying, a true friend isn’t someone who shows up for the feast, but someone who helps clean up after. When all the revelers have gone, full bellies and engaging conversation in tow, it’s the couple of people that stayed behind to help with the dishes and the trash and the disarray of it all that are true friends. If you don’t know someone like that, then be that someone, and if you’ve fallen short of being that someone, it’s never too late to start.  

With love in Christ,

Michael Boldea, Jr. 

Job CCLXXXVII

 Job 30:1-8, “But now they mock at me, men younger than I, whose fathers I disdained to put with the dogs of my flock. Indeed, what profit is the strength of their hands to me? Their vigor has perished. They are gaunt from want and famine, fleeing late to the wilderness, desolate and waste, who pluck mallow by the bushes, and broom tree roots for their food. They were driven out from among men, they shouted at them as at a thief. They had to live in the clefts of the valleys, in caves of the earth and the rocks. Among the bushes they brayed, under the nettles they nestled. They were sons of fools, yes, sons of vile men; they were scourged from the land.”

When being mocked, ridiculed, or looked down upon, it matters who is doing the mocking and ridiculing. If it’s coming from someone you respect, someone you deem an equal, or someone you look up to, whatever they might say holds more weight than if it were someone you never knew, or someone who has, over time, proven themselves to be undeserving of your reaction to their mockery.

It’s not so much that hurt people hurt people; it’s someone looking for an axe to grind who will use every opportunity to do so, and Job’s current situation was the perfect opportunity for those who had felt slighted by him in any way throughout their existence to lash out and do their worst.

Job was fully aware of who was mocking him. He had identified them, knew them from his life before he’d lost everything, and there was no reason for him to feel hurt by what they said because they were neither men nor the sons of men he’d respected.

Some might look at Job’s words, a man whom God had deemed blameless and upright, and conclude that his words regarding how he viewed his mockers were a bit harsh, but we don’t know what was said about him, for how long, and how vociferously. Armchair quarterbacking might give someone an inflated sense of their own importance, but it’s rarely factual, true, or warranted.

The thing about mockers is that it’s never a one-and-done endeavor. It’s not as though they say one mean thing and then go on about their lives, especially if the person their barbs are aimed at doesn’t react the way they would like him to.

Job had enough on his plate where it is a logical conclusion that, though he’d heard their mockery, he had not reacted to it. That only emboldened them all the more, and they likely doubled down on their invectives toward him.

If you don’t respond to their attacks, it just makes them angrier and more rabid. If you do respond, it makes them louder and less logical. There’s no winning when it comes to mockers and their desire to put you in your place, at least as far as they see it, because they operate from a position of indignation and pour all the resentments of life, resentments you likely had no hand in causing, into their desire to bring you down a peg.

Sometimes they get so spun up that by the end of it, they see you as the cause of every calamity they’ve endured from the moment of their birth to the present, even if you’ve never met them in person or looked them in the face. You’re just a convenient target, and as far as Job was concerned, he was a target they did not think had enough strength left in him to put up a defense.      

Evidently, not only had their words reached his ears, but Job was able to identify who the words belonged to, and in a cutting retort, he reminds those within earshot that he used to disdain putting these selfsame individuals’ fathers with the dogs of his flock. These were not the offspring of men he’d respected, nor were they individuals pregnant with wisdom, for they were younger men than he, and he knew the stock from whence they came.

If the book of Job were set in the Wild West rather than in the desert four thousand years removed, a good comparison of what he said regarding those who mocked him would be “I knew your daddy when he begged to polish my boots, and even that he wasn’t good at.”

Know who it is that’s leveling accusations, mocking, and talking behind your back, and determine their motivation, as well as whether they’re worth the time to acknowledge their backbiting. Is it someone you respect enough to make their words cause you hurt, or is it someone who’s just trying to get attention by using you as the means to do so?

It’s a practice that has become commonplace of late, where someone no one’s ever heard of starts leveling attacks on people they’ve never met, hoping that their attacks will gain the traction they’re dreaming of and elevate them to some level of prominence.

If a teaching is unbiblical, by all means, prove it biblically, but there is a difference between ad hominem personal attacks regarding a personal preference that the Bible never weighs in on and false teaching or false doctrine.

We are called to defend the truth, we are called to stand for it, preach it, teach it, and obey it. We are not called to mock someone endlessly because they wear bolo ties instead of neckties, or because their preferred footwear is cowboy boots rather than Italian loafers.

Job assessed those who mocked him and concluded that they weren’t worth his time. They were gaunt from want and famine, and plucked broom tree roots for their food. They were driven out from among men, sons of fools and vile men who were scourged from the earth, so what did it matter what they thought of him? What did it matter what they said about him?

His own friends, men he respected, men who by their own words were proven to retain a modicum of wisdom, had done their best to dispirit Job, and it hadn’t worked, so why would the words of those who were driven out from among men and shouted at as at a thief have an effect on him?

The only opinion that mattered to Job was vertically focused, and not horizontally. What God thought meant everything. What men thought meant less than nothing. Value the opinion that matters, and the only opinion that matters is God’s.   

With love in Christ,

Michael Boldea, Jr.