Job CXXXVIII

Job 12:1-6, “Then Job answered and said: ‘No doubt you are the people, and wisdom will die with you! But I have understanding as well as you; I am not inferior to you. Indeed, who does not know such things as these? I am one mocked by his friends, who called on God, and He answered him, the just and blameless who is ridiculed. A lamp is despised in the thought of one who is at ease; it is made ready for those whose feet slip. The tents of robbers prosper, and those who provoke God are secure – in what God provides by His hand.” 

As was expected from the previous two interactions with his friends, it was Job’s turn to respond and mount a defense, or in the least show Zophar that not everything is so black and white, cut and dry, and without nuance or distinction. 

By his opening salvo, Job, too, was running out of patience if he hadn’t done so already, and there was no olive branch extended to Zophar, but rather the first words to come from his mouth were tinged with sarcasm so thick as to make due as an entire snack. Although he was responding to Zophar’s accusations, Job included all three of his friends in his acidic response, insisting that when they three went the way of all flesh, wisdom itself would die alongside them. Tongue in cheek as his response was, it likely stung all three of the men who were waiting for him to break and confess the sin they were certain he was guilty of.

I’ve heard what you had to say, but you forget that I, too, am privy to the things you’ve enumerated. I have understanding as well as you, and I am not inferior to you. This wasn’t an overreaction because Job had an inferiority complex, but given his friends’ words, it’s undeniable that they believed themselves intellectually superior and more knowledgeable about the things of God than him.

Perhaps they’d always harbored these feelings and kept them well hidden, but now the time had come, and each one was attempting to teach Job something they thought to be illuminating and earth shattering, while Job’s response to them was, who does not know such things as these?

What you deemed superior intellect is basic on its best day, and there’s nothing you’ve said that I don’t already know. If Job’s plan had been to hit them where it hurts, then he was over the target and connecting with each turn of phrase.

He’d been condescended to, talked down to, demeaned, and falsely accused while carrying the burden of watching his flesh being covered in worms and painful boils, and whether he tried to hold his tongue or not, we will never know, but what is clear is that he’d had enough. Yes, you can push a decent, soft-spoken, calm and collected person too far, and when you do, you’d better strap in because you’re about to get it in spades.

It is said it’s the quiet ones you have to look out for, and generally speaking, barring a handful of exceptions, it’s true. When someone who is mild-mannered, quiet, and not given to bouts of contention can no longer hold his tongue, you know you’ve gone too far.

Few things in life are more offputting than hearing someone you call a friend talk down to you, condescend, and belittle you for something you didn’t do. If a stranger were to say the same thing it would be a small matter, because they’re strangers, and they don’t know you as your friends should, but this was someone whom Job knew, and who in turn knew Job, and as he pointed out they were aware of his relationship with God, and that when he’d called out, God had answered.

There is no person, situation, or circumstance the enemy won’t use to try and get the upper hand. Nothing is beneath him, and there’s no shame in his plots and schemes, because as has become customary in our day and age, especially among those of political leanings, the ends justify the means, and if we achieved our end nothing we did in order to achieve it can be considered too slimy, or out of pocket.

It’s all about applying pressure and finding the precise point where pressure can be applied. Job had nothing left but his integrity, his steadfastness, and faithfulness to the God he served, and that was the target the enemy focused on with glee and abandon.

We’re all quite good at evaluating our strengths, and even overestimating and foolishly magnifying them at times, but not so when it comes to our weaknesses. Sometimes, we even like to talk ourselves into believing that a weakness is a strength, even though we know deep down that it’s not. When it comes to resisting vegetables, my self-control is impeccable. No crown of broccoli has tempted me to the point of surrender! The same can’t be said for warm peach cobbler with a scoop of vanilla ice cream, though. We like to pretend that we’re all strength, no weakness, and there’s nothing that can happen or anything anyone can say that will get to us or raise our hackles and make us react in the moment.

I am a rock; I am an island; I am what Stonewall Jackson wished he had been, and there’s nothing that will scar me. We can talk ourselves into believing it until the fateful moment when it’s proven a lie. We all have something that’s more likely to get a rise out of us than anything else, whether it’s a stutter, our hairline, crow’s feet, or a few extra pounds. For Job, that one thing was being accused of sin he knew himself not to have committed.

Throughout his ordeal, through all the pain and grief and loss, Job had clung to his integrity; he’d remained steadfast in His worship of God, and here were his friends insisting it was not so. You may think it, you may even believe it, but we know better, and you just need to admit that we do.

It seems as though it’s not just Job’s friends who’d decided to give him a piece of their mind, but Job also decided it was time to point out their inconsistencies and perceived wisdom that wasn’t so much wisdom as common knowledge.

It’s easy to pontificate and wax poetic when you’re not the one sitting in the dirt covered in worms having just buried your ten children. When it’s light out, what need have you for a lamp? Therefore, you despise it, but not so when the darkness comes, and you pray for a flicker, hoping it will light your way.

With love in Christ,

Michael Boldea, Jr. 

Job CXXXVII

 People hear what they want to hear. God hears the cry of your heart. He does not filter your words through some bias or interpret them to mean something they were not intended to. He will not nitpick at you or belittle you for using the past tense when a present tense participle would have been the proper way of phrasing it, nor will He reject you for your lack of eloquence when crying out to Him.

If one of my children is crying out for help, I would not fail to answer because they did not address me in Old World English or because their tone was a bit too shrieky. They cry, and I run to their aid because they are in need of my help, protection, or comfort. The words they use, the volume thereof, or the cadence they appropriate is irrelevant in such situations. Yes, dear, I see you fell and scraped your knee, but you did not address me as sire; therefore, I did not respond to your cries. Knowest though better for next time? Verily, I hope you’ve learned your lesson. 

The only rule that applies when we’re crying out to God is that we do so with a sincere heart. Every other pet peeve men have thought up is just that, a man-made preference, and not a Biblical dictate or mandate. Leave others to their dead gods, to pray in a specific direction at specific times with specific wording and genuflection. Let them ring bells, light incense, or roll their eyes into the back of their skulls until only the whites show. You approach God in spirit and in truth, cry out to Him with a sincere heart, and know that He hears you.   

Men read into things, situations, circumstances, the specific wording we use, and the inflection with which we use them, but God sees the situation for what it is and knows our hearts better than we ourselves know them. A loving father would not turn away his children because they cry too much or too little, because their posture is not rigid enough, or because their tone isn’t appropriately sorrowful. God is a loving father. Therefore, He will not turn you away due to irrelevant things men deem worthy of rejection.

Stand before Him as you are, without pretense or the attempt to put on a façade, and pour your heart out to Him. Acknowledge your frailty, your weakness, your battles, your wounds, your scars, your setbacks, and your inconsistency. Be honest with Him. He already knows it all anyway.

When we attempt to stand before God clothed in our righteousness, we make fools of ourselves. When we stand before God clothed in Christ, understanding that His sacrifice and not our abilities have reconciled us with Him, humility will be an ever-present companion.

Luke 18:9-14, “Also He spoke this parable to some who trusted in themselves that they were righteous, and despised others: ‘Two men went up to the temple to pray, one a Pharisee and the other a tax collector. The Pharisee stood and prayed thus with himself, ‘God, I thank You that I am not like other men – extortioners, unjust, adulterers, or even as this tax collector. I fast twice a week; I give tithes of all that I possess.’ And the tax collector, standing afar off, would not so much as raise his eyes to heaven, but beat his breast saying, ‘God, be merciful to me a sinner!’ I tell you, this man went down to his house justified rather than the other; for everyone who exalts himself will be humbled, and he who humbles himself will be exalted.”’

When we humble ourselves in the sight of the Lord, it is He who lifts us up. It’s not something we do on our own or something we talk ourselves into manifesting. There are situations where no amount of pulling ourselves up by our bootstraps will suffice, and the only remedy is to reach out, take His hand, and allow Him to do what He does, as He wills, when He wills. When you’re drowning and someone throws you a life preserver, you don’t complain that it’s the wrong color or that it doesn’t match your swimsuit. You grab it, cling to it, and show gratitude for having had your life saved from an untimely death.

Zophar heard what he wanted to hear in Job’s words. “You say my doctrine is pure, and I am clean in your eyes”, Zophar reminded Job, even though Job had never said those words. Zophar needed to make his point; he needed to defend his position, and if he had to twist the truth in order to fit his presuppositions, to him, it was a small price to pay if it meant being right.

Men see what they want to see. They hear what they want to hear, but God knows the truth of it since nothing is hidden from His eyes. There are even those who go out of their way looking for something they can object to, some twitch of the eye, or wave of a hand, or an out-of-place word that they can then magnify and point to as something legitimate rather than the ruminations of their contentious minds. If the same judgmental eye were to be turned on them, they would wilt and wither under its glare and demand that it stop, lest they crumble under its weight altogether.

No, I didn’t rub my eye because I’m Illuminati. I rubbed my eye because it was itching. I have allergies, and there’s pollen in the air. When we demand perfection of everyone around us but fail to apply the same standard to ourselves, all we are is pharisaical hypocrites who see ourselves in an undeserved light.

Some people have taken to calling themselves full-time heresy hunters, using it as an excuse for why they haven’t been looking in the mirror of the Word and dealing with the issues in their own lives. It’s far more rewarding to one’s ego to endlessly point out the shortcomings in others, whether real or perceived, than it is to deal with our own, but our primary duty is to ensure that we are working out our own salvation with fear and trembling before we dare to sit in judgment of everyone else, whether living or dead.

Matthew 7:2, “For with what judgment you judge, you will be judged; and with the measure you use, it will be measured back to you.” 

With love in Christ,

Michael Boldea, Jr. 

Job CXXXVI

 Zophar was fully convinced that he would succeed where his two other friends had failed. He was, after all, the rationalist of the group, and while the other two may have fallen short of making their case, surely, his ironclad logic would prevail. You must have done something; now you just have to figure out what it was, and if you can’t, it’s because you don’t want to. God would not bring you so low for an oversight or something you’d readily forget doing. There’s no way you could have overlooked it, so you’re choosing not to confess it.

Job had no one but himself to stand in his defense. Throughout this protracted trial, God had been silent, and while two of the three could rest and gather their thoughts while one spoke, Job had no such help. It was akin to a one-sided tag team wrestling bout, three against one, with Satan putting his finger on the scale whenever he could.

Understanding both the context and the length of this drama is likely to make us more sympathetic toward Job and impressed with his resilience than we otherwise would be. We see moments of teeth-gnashing desperation pouring forth from his lips, and had we not been privy to the backstory of all he’d had to endure and how long he’d been enduring it, we would likely conclude, as Zophar did, that he was being a tad overly dramatic.

Unless you’ve been present in an individual’s life from the genesis of their trial, you cannot know everything they’ve gone through to bring them to their current state. It’s easier to judge a situation in situ than it is to take the time and hear the story, gather some context, and be balanced in your approach toward someone who is hurting. Understanding is the key to true compassion.

Nobody wakes up homeless, living on the street, with all their worldly possessions hanging in a plastic bag off a shopping cart. It’s a gradual descent, one thing leading to another, one bad decision having an exponential impact on the next, and if you take the time to hear their story, you’ll likely gain a greater understanding of their hardship and how much they had to endure to get to the place they’re in.

The unwritten rule of reciprocity of empathy, sympathy, and compassion is a real thing. No, I’m not talking about something as juvenile as karma; rather, if you fail to show compassion or sympathy for anyone, why would you live with the expectation of everyone showing you compassion when you’re in a position that requires it?

Matthew 7:12, “Therefore, whatever you want men to do to you, do also to them, for this is the Law of the Prophets.”

Be the kind of friend you’d like to have if you were the one going through a fiery trial. Be the kind of brother and sister in Christ you would desire to have holding up your weary hands when it seems like the hosts of hell are arrayed against you.

Some of the most heartbreaking stories I hear are from individuals who, after faithfully giving to their church for decades, fell on hard times, and now, with nowhere else to turn, ask for help for funeral expenses or some other tragedy and get denied outright. It’s usually by elder boards who oversee multi-million dollar budgets, with overflowing coffers, and pay packages for the leadership that would make a multi-national blush, but cutting a check for a couple of grand so someone could bury their loved one is one bridge too far in their book.

Whatever you want men to do to you, do also to them. It is a simple enough principle, and one that would have us living in a wholly different kind of world if those who claim to be believers would apply it consistently.

If Job’s friends had applied this principle, their words toward him would likely not have been as caustic or accusatory. They didn’t take the time to consider how they would react if what had happened to Job would happen to them, and from high atop their self-righteous perches, they heaped sorrow upon a man who was already heavy-laden with it.

It’s one thing to point to the gospel, and remind those who are hurting of what it promises, it’s quite another to superimpose personal opinion on their situation, and insist that they react to their trial in a manner we imagine we would have reacted to it ourselves, if in a similar circumstance. Oddly enough, we never see ourselves as giving in to despair or grief. We always seem to think that our reaction will be optimal, that we will weather the storm without fear of shipwreck, and that if, perchance, we were to walk in their shoes, and suffer the same hardships, we would show the world what it meant to remain steadfast in the face of adversity.

I hope it is so; I pray it is so, but you never really know until you’re going through it. More often than not, the theory of a thing seems simple on paper until you attempt to apply it practically. Cartwheels seem simple enough. I see my girls doing them all the time. You get a running start, raise your hands in the air, then flip your body forward, use your hands as a fulcrum, and land gracefully on your feet. Easy enough in theory, but if I tried to do a cartwheel, I’d likely end up in urgent care with a broken wrist or a fractured arm. There are plenty of YouTube videos attesting to the fact that cartwheels aren’t as straightforward as they seem, from people landing on their heads or face-planting into the dirt, but the theory itself is uncomplicated, to say the least.

You never know until you know. How I think I would react to a situation, and how I will react to it once it becomes a reality may be worlds apart, and this is the reason we must lean on His strength rather than our own, so that even when all seems lost, we trust that He will make a way.

With love in Christ,

Michael Boldea, Jr. 

Job CXXXV

 You approach someone differently when presuming innocence on their part than when you’re presuming guilt. If the presumption has already established itself that the individual you are addressing is guilty, but you just haven’t figured out what they’re guilty of, you’re likely to be more aggressive, confrontational, and lacking in empathy.

Once they’ve made up their mind about an individual or a situation, most people cling to their presupposition with a death grip because admitting they were wrong is a nonsequitur and something they are unwilling to allow the possibility of. They would rather continue to wrongly accuse someone of the most heinous of failures than admit they misjudged the situation or that their conclusions had no basis in truth.

I know what I know even though what I know is wholly based on mental gymnastics of the most basic intellectual tier, but I’m so sure about it that I will not hear the words you speak in your defense or allow my knowledge of your character to deter me from my course.

Save for God clarifying the situation and bringing light to it, there was nothing Job could say at this point that would compel his friends to change their minds. The presumption of guilt was well and fully established in their hearts and minds, and each one took a different route to the same destination. Job is guilty! No doubt about it, he did something to displease God, because the proof is in the pudding, and if he hadn’t, then he wouldn’t be suffering the torments he was currently undergoing.

Whenever we attempt to take a complicated situation that we only have a partial understanding of and wrap it up in a nice little bow, chances are, whatever conclusion we’ve come to is nowhere near the truth. We all want to believe the world is black and white; there are good guys and bad guys, sinners and saints, and while the sinner gets judged, the saint gets blessed. No mess, no complications, just straightforward arithmetic.

This worldview of causation brought Job’s friends to the conclusion that he must have done something to displease God. He had sinned. Therefore, he was enduring the consequences of his actions.

It is wisdom itself to resist the urge to pontificate when someone is going through a trial, when they are suffering, when they’ve lost a loved one, or when they are going through something you couldn’t possibly understand. In those moments, your presence is what is required rather than your sermonizing because they’re already at their lowest, and pushing their face into the dust even more will benefit no one.

Matthew 25:34-36, “Then the King will say to those on His right hand, ‘Come you blessed of My Father, inherit the kingdom prepared for you from the foundation of the world: for I was hungry and you gave Me food; I was thirsty and you gave Me drink; I was a stranger and you took Me in; I was naked and you clothed me; I was sick and you visited Me; I was in prison and you came to Me.’”

When we reach out to someone who is hurting, our purpose isn’t to add to their burden but to help carry it for the little while we are with them. Everything Jesus lists as having been done by those who are blessed of His father were actions. Whether feeding the hungry, giving a drink to the thirsty, taking in a stranger, clothing someone without, visiting the sick, or going to someone in prison, none of them were accusations or judgments but actions confirming a tender heart who understands that when someone is in pain or in need the one thing we should focus on is being a comfort, and meeting the need.

We’ve grown callous through the years. We’ve each identified the hill we’re willing to die on, and rather than being the kind of people Jesus can look upon and say, “Inasmuch as you did these things to one of the least of these My brethren, you did it unto Me”, we huddle in our cliques and tribes weary of everyone else, quick to declare Ichabod on anyone who disagrees with us even on the most tertiary of issues.

It seems as though we can no longer see the forest for the trees, and rather than focus on being more like Jesus, we are defined by our theological positions, allowing them to become de facto objects of worship. Yes, there are baseline salvific issues to which we must adhere to be counted among the family of God, but beyond that, much of the arguing and debate regarding tertiary matters will be settled on their own by time.

We can’t be more concerned about being right about something than we are about being present and ready to be deployed to wherever God has need of us. Some people will look back on their lives and realize they spent more time arguing over issues that had no bearing on salvation, rather than being about the Father’s business, and doing the work of the Kingdom as they were mandated to do.

As an aside, admitting that you don’t know something is neither a sin nor an acknowledgement of general ignorance but an acceptance of reality that for now, we see in a mirror, dimly, and the best of us know only in part. If Paul was humble enough to acknowledge this truth, it should be no great feat for us to do likewise.   

When we stop seeing the body of Christ as a whole and deem it to be a discombobulated basket of parts, we are no longer eager to bear one another’s burdens as the Word instructs but are constantly vying for supremacy or authority.

Zophar did his best to browbeat Job into confessing to sin he had not committed, even going so far as to insist that the punishment was light and not at all equal with the perceived crime. Be grateful this is all you’re having to suffer because it’s less than your iniquity deserves. Those are words everyone being crushed by their situation wants to hear, I’m sure. 

With love in Christ,

Michael Boldea, Jr. 

Job CXXXIV

 Job 11:13-20, “If you would prepare your heart, and stretch out your hands toward Him; If iniquity were in your hand, and you put it far away, and would not let wickedness dwell in your tents; then surely you could lift up your face without spot; yes, you could be steadfast, and not fear; because you would forget your misery, and remember it as waters that have passed away, and your life would be brighter than noonday. Though you were dark, you would be like the morning. And you would be secure because there is hope; yes, you would dig around you, and take rest in your safety; You would also lie down, and no one would make you afraid; yes, many would court your favor. But the eyes of the wicked will fail, and they shall not escape, and their hope – loss of life!”

When someone insists on telling you what you should have done in a given situation without having full knowledge of what you already did, their counsel, even if well intentioned, will always fall short.

If your car won’t start, and someone insist you should press on the brake pedal to get your engine to turn, it’s sound advice for anyone who’s never started a car, but you’ve been doing just that for the past five years, did the same thing that morning, and not even a whimper from your powerful four cylinder Kia.

When you inform the person offering advice that you are not a dullard, and this isn’t your first time behind the wheel, those with a modicum of self-awareness will shrug their shoulders and give up, admitting they don’t have a clue, but others will insist that you’re not pressing the brake pedal hard enough, and that’s why your engine won’t turn. They don’t even bother to ask if any of the lights come on or if you hear the melodic ding when you put your key into the ignition because, to them, the reason is already a foregone conclusion.

It’s not that the battery is dead; it’s that you did it wrong, and if you did it the way they told you to, as if by some medieval alchemy, your car would start.

This was Zophar’s approach on the matter, layering assumption upon assumption regarding what Job had done and what he had failed to do, even though Job had repeatedly insisted that he had searched his heart and that he had cried out to God to show him if there was error in him. Whether Zophar didn’t believe Job outright or assumed that he hadn’t dug deep enough into his own past to see where he had erred remains unclear, but either way, his conclusion is still the same.

If you’d done it differently, perhaps you would have the wherewithal to lift up your face without spot and be steadfast and not fear. If you’d do as I instruct, you’d forget your misery, Zophar insisted, even though it’s nigh impossible to forget something as ever present as being caked with worms and open sores throughout your body.

I think it’s the lack of compassion and empathy from Job’s friends that rubs most people the wrong way. Even strangers would likely show more empathy toward someone lying in the dust of the earth, watching their strength wane and their condition worsen, but not so with his friends.

Their primary concern wasn’t for their friend or his welfare but trying to find an explanation for why he was suffering so, and the only thing that all three of them could agree on was that he had sinned. Some of their remarks were more forceful than others, with Zophar taking top prize for callousness, but all three had come to the same conclusion, likely feeding off each other’s assumptions and working themselves up into a lather.

One of the greatest dangers of having a friend, a spouse, a family member, or an acquaintance whispering doubt and discouragement in your ear while you're going through a trial is that your faith runs the risk of decreasing in strength just as your physical body is. Faith is both a shield and an impenetrable wall to the spiritual man, and if it becomes weakened or grows dull due to repeated attacks, it becomes easier for the enemy to sow doubt and bitterness in one’s heart.

It matters not what my outer man is experiencing, as long as my inner man is cocooned in faith, because while the outer man suffers for a season, it is during that season that the spiritual man grows and expands in his faith and trust in God.

The entire purpose of the enemy’s attacks isn’t to make you feel bloated, feel pain, or in extreme cases, such as Job’s, become a worm-covered human husk that knows only pain and torment in perpetuity. The purpose of physical attacks is to weaken the spiritual man, to chip away at one’s faith, and untether him from the source of life, which is God. That’s the end game. That’s the goal, and the prize isn’t your physical discomfort, as far as the enemy sees it, but the abdication of your once strong and immovable faith in God.

Satan understands the futility of the flesh. He knows that sooner or later, it will return to the dust from whence it came. His goal and purpose are to use the flesh in order to blindside the spiritual man, and if the spiritual man is not watchful or fully reliant upon God, cause him to rebel or sin against God somehow.

It may sound counterintuitive, but when you are going through physical suffering of any kind, your focus should be on keeping up the strength of your spiritual man. Rather than bemoan your frailty or hardship, it’s in the midst of physical suffering that you should endeavor to spend more time in God’s presence, in His word, and draw ever closer to Him.

Having the benefit of the aggregate experiences of those who came before us, we can more readily defend against the enemy’s devices, thereby keeping strong in the faith and enduring joyfully. It’s one thing to be able to look back on Job's life and understand the purpose of his suffering, and it’s another to be Job himself, wherein he was in complete darkness regarding the reason he was suffering the things he was. It’s one thing to cut your way through a forest; it’s another to walk a path others have tread before you. Out of sheer stubbornness, some refuse to walk the well-trodden path and set out to cut their own through the brush and the thistle, only to discover that it’s not as easy as they thought it would be, and at best, it’s wasted effort.

Be humble enough to acknowledge that simple as they may seem, the tried and true ways of remaining steadfast in God during trials work. Pray, fast, seek His face, and read His word, receiving His strength in your weakness and growing in the knowledge of Him. Simple, straightforward, and effective. Uncomplicated to the utmost, but for some, it’s deemed too easy to produce the same kinds of results it produced in others. 

With love in Christ,

Michael Boldea, Jr.  

Job CXXXIII

 There is an undeniable escalation in both insinuation and outright accusation with each of Job’s friends, culminating with Zophar, who could not bear to hear of anything as impossible as Job’s doctrine being pure without calling it out. Given Job’s current state, that notion could not be true, at least as far as Zophar was concerned. He could not reconcile a pure doctrine and uprightness with what Job had been reduced to, and the only viable conclusion in his eyes was that Job had so rebelled against the God he’d served all his life to the point that he was getting less than he deserved.

There’s what men think about you, and there’s what God knows about you. This pendulum tends to swing both ways, wherein individuals who are seen by their contemporaries as pillars of morality and uprightness turn out to be the vilest of hedonists, while men who are walking humbly with their Lord, working out their salvation with fear and trembling, are deemed forsaken and lost. God knows the truth of it all, and it is before His throne that we will stand to face judgment, and not before men.

Our duty is to be pleasing in the sight of the Lord, not fit into some mold men fashion out of whole cloth, then insist we adhere to on pain of eternal damnation. If you don’t adhere to this doctrine, if you don’t practice this thing or that, if you pray with your eyes open, if you don’t belong to this denomination, then you’re not going to heaven, buddy, no matter what the Bible says. I, sister Karen of the church of self-importance and overreaction, have deemed it as such, so you’d better get with the program.

Whenever some newfangled, heretofore unheard of doctrine makes its way to the fore, the first and most important question we must ask is whether God said to do the thing these men demand of us and whether it is confirmed by Scripture. That’s the acid test that every teaching must pass in order to be appropriated, absorbed, and adhered to. If it fails, then it’s a no-go, regardless of who came up with it or how many influential leaders give it their tacit approval.

Do what God says, live as He commands, even if it means putting you in a contrarian position with your contemporaries, because it’s not them that you will one day have to answer to, but to Him. God’s will, above all, should be our baseline mindset, and when this becomes a reality, the way forward becomes clear, and moments of indecision or second-guessing ourselves will well and truly disappear.

Job 11:7-12, “Can you search out the deep things of God? Can you find out the limits of the Almighty? They are higher than heaven – what can you do? Deeper than Sheol – what can you know? Their measure is longer than the earth and broader than the sea. If He passes by, imprisons, and gathers to judgment, then who can hinder Him? For He knows deceitful men; He sees wickedness also. Will He not then consider it? For an empty-headed man will be wise, when a wild donkey’s colt is born a man.”

Some sayings and idioms stand the test of time, others not so much. While we still say it’s raining cats and dogs, I have yet to hear anyone insisting that an empty-headed man will be wise when a wild donkey’s colt is born a man. It doesn’t roll off the tongue, and maybe that’s the problem, but what Zophar was insinuating is that Job was too ignorant to understand the gravity of his sin.

If you can’t see it the way I see it, that just makes you empty-headed, and an empty-headed man being wise is as likely as a wild donkey’s colt being born a man. Not only have you sinned, and gravely so, to the point that your suffering is less than you deserve, but you’re too obtuse to see the sin you committed.

This is usually the last stand of anyone losing an argument or realizing their conclusion is flawed. Well, you just don’t see it the way I see it because you’re too ignorant. This approach usually doesn’t work if it’s one-on-one, the debate coming to a stalemate after each participant gives their point and counterpoint, but it is effective when there is a chorus of voices against one individual.

The reason we often see one individual being isolated and then being piled on by everyone is because it works. It takes a steel spine, will, and determination to be the one person in the crowd going against the grain and standing on principle rather than acquiescing to the mob.

It’s easy enough to get carried away by the rushing waters of compromise and feigned loyalty that has become common practice among many today. In doing so, you’ll always be in the majority, feeling as though you belong, but the purpose of we who are as strangers in a strange land isn’t to fit in, assimilate, and conform, but to be more like Jesus every day. If that means becoming outcasts, so be it. If that means standing out like a sore thumb and suffering the ridicule and ire of the masses, so be it.

The temptation of conformity is an ever-present siren song for those whose desire for prominence, influence, or climbing some ladder, social or otherwise, is in direct competition with the mandate to obey God and walk in His ways. It’s the lure of fitting in, of not standing out, of avoiding conflict, even if it means compromising on our faith and values.

It’s not a one-and-done prospect, either. Every day, we are confronted with the choice of holding onto integrity and speaking the truth in love, even if those we are speaking it to will see it as hate, or making compromises, holding back and omitting necessary truths, because of some implied benefit to our current station if we were to do so. It is a conscious choice, and based upon the choice we make, we reveal our true heart, whether that is doing the will of God or desiring the honorifics of men.

By this point, Job must have realized that trying to placate his friends wouldn’t work. They’d made up their mind as to why he was suffering his torments, and no matter how much of a defense he attempted to mount, it would have fallen on deaf ears.  

With love in Christ,

Michael Boldea, Jr. 

Job CXXXII

 If Job had remained silent, his friends would have likely come to the same conclusion. The only thing that would have been different is Zophar saying should a man who remains silent be vindicated, rather than should a man full of talk be so.

There are situations and instances when no matter what you do, whether you speak up for yourself or let people judge you at will without mounting a defense, their conclusions are already reached, their mindset cemented, and no matter what you say or don’t say, they will not be swayed.

It’s a slimy sort of approach reminiscent of politicians. It’s like the old trope where one man asks another if he still beats his wife, and he demands a yes or no answer. Whenever he attempts to mount a defense and insist that he’d never lay a hand on the mother of his children, he is quickly cut off and reminded that all that is required of him is a yes or a no. Well, the presupposition that the man beat his wife is already established in the minds of his accusers. If he says yes, then it’s a continuation of it; if he says no, it means that he used to but has recently stopped.

Some people have already made up their minds about you, and there’s nothing you can do to change them. They will see you as you once were, not as you are, unable to reconcile transformation and rebirth with the individual that used to run from God as fast as their feet could take them. No matter how much you insist you are no longer the individual they once knew, no matter how much evidence there is to substantiate your assertion, they’re too set in their ways to allow for the reality that God can transform an individual to the point that their entire nature becomes unrecognizable from what it once was.

You may have a past, but you’re no longer living in it. If someone insists that they must see you through the prism of your past rather than the new creation you’ve become, that’s on them, and God will deal with the injustice of it in due time. Are such individuals being used by the enemy? More often than not, yes. By their insistence that you are the same as you’ve always been and nothing has changed, the enemy is attempting to get you to see yourself as you once were rather than as you currently are.

It’s not so much that people change; it’s that God changes people. If it were not so, we wouldn’t have the testimonies of men who once exemplified cowardice becoming bold and outspoken even in the face of persecution. We would not have testimonies of men who were once slaves to sin, now pursuing righteousness with abandon.

It’s the easiest thing in the world to point to someone’s past and ignore their present iteration because it allows for men to feel spiritually superior and look down on others. You say you have been born again, you say your life has been transformed, but I remember when you used to do this thing or the other, so what about that? When this inevitably occurs, our instant reaction is to shy away from our past, from who we once were, while still in darkness, trying to play it down or dismiss it offhand.

When it comes to owning who we once were, I personally believe the best course of action is to take a page out of Paul’s book and acknowledge even the gloomiest of details regarding our past, knowing that we are no longer who we were but something wholly different.

Galatians 1:13-17, “For you have heard of my former conduct in Judaism, how I persecuted the church of God beyond measure and tried to destroy it. And I advanced in Judaism beyond many of my contemporaries in my own nation, being more exceeding zealous for the traditions of my fathers. But when it pleased God, who separated me from my mother’s womb and called me through His grace, to reveal His Son in me, that I might preach Him among the Gentiles, I did not immediately confer with flesh and blood, nor did I go up to Jerusalem to those who were apostles before me; but I went to Arabia and returned again to Damascus.”

You may have heard of my former conduct, and I cannot deny it, but what I can say is that I am no longer the man I once was. Yes, I persecuted the church, Paul confesses, beyond measure and tried to destroy it, but then something changed. God called me through His grace to reveal His Son to me, and I am a man forever transformed.

That’s what God does in the innermost parts of man, and Paul was self-aware enough to realize that you can’t change the past, no matter how hard you try, but by the same token, your past does not define who you are in the present.

True faith in Christ is not performative; it’s transformative. It’s not about putting on a shirt with a button-down collar or wearing freshly pressed khakis; it’s about being born again and becoming a new creation in Him. Much of what passes for Christianity today is performance art, and it’s not even good performance art. It’s more akin to community theater in Pookipsy than a Broadway show.

We’ve come to equate spirituality with how loud someone can yell or how boisterous their declarations are, rather than looking beyond the superficial and discerning whether someone has been born again or is feigning it for some ulterior motive or another. We get taken in by showmanship because a showman is there to entertain, not call men to repentance or preach the Gospel. That suits us just fine. We don’t want accountability, we don’t want to be convicted, we don’t like the feeling of the Gospel scouring the inner depths of our heart; it’s unpleasant and painful, so we’ll settle for superficial entertainment by some carnie sideshow with pink hair and no depth of understanding of who God is.

With love in Christ,

Michael Boldea, Jr.  

Job CXXXI

 Job 11:1-6, “Then Zophar the Naamathite answered and said: ‘Should not the multitude of words be answered? And should a man full of talk be vindicated? Should your empty talk make men hold their peace? And when you mock, should no one rebuke you? For you have said, ‘my doctrine is pure, and I am clean in your eyes.’ But oh, that God would speak, and open His lips against you, that He would show you the secrets of wisdom! For they would double your prudence. Know therefore that God exacts from you less than your iniquity deserves.”’

If his other two friends only made insinuations and hinted at the possibility that Job may have sinned and was thus being punished, it seems Zophar had no qualms about coming out and saying it, and in a less genteel manner than Eliphaz and Bildad combined. Zophar’s directness and lack of tact in his approach to Job’s suffering reflect a common theological belief of the time, that suffering is a direct result of sin. This belief is deeply ingrained in Zophar’s worldview and influences his judgment of Job, even though Job was his friend, and he knew Job’s character more than most. He dismissed all the history he had with Job and all the time they spent together based on a flawed belief structure.

Just because you talk a lot, it doesn’t make you innocent. Just because you insist you can think of nothing that you’ve done that would upset God and set him against you, it doesn’t mean you’re vindicated. We’ve all heard what you said. You said your doctrine was pure, and you were clean in our eyes, but if this is the case, then why are you in the condition you’re in? It’s not difficult to imagine wagging fingers, bulging neck veins, and spittle. Lots of spittle.

You can tell by the tonality of his opening salvo that Zophar had been sitting and stewing for some time. He was emotionally bottled up, had been for days, if not weeks, quiet, brooding, thinking of all the things he would say to his friend, and finally, it was his turn. By this time, Zophar had worked himself up into such a lather that he concluded that God’s punishment of Job in the condition he was in was less than what his iniquity deserved. No, I’m not sorry God is punishing you; I’m just surprised He isn’t punishing you more. Kind of harsh for a friend; then again, we’ve all been there.

Have you ever thought someone had wronged you or that something they said was intended as a slight, and the more you ruminated upon it, the bigger the issue became? The initial interaction might have been something so benign and inconsequential that had you not meditated upon it, you would have forgotten within an hour at most, but you dwelt on it, and let it fester, and it grew, and ballooned to the point that it’s all you can do to go up to the person you once called a friend and demand to know why the hated you.

All I said was that a striped tie doesn’t go well with a polka dot shirt! How did you get I hate you from that? What Zophar did was worse still, because Job had leveled no sleight or accusation against him personally, yet Zophar felt compelled to stand in judgment of him, and somehow, in his mind not only defend God, but insist that Job wasn’t being punished enough! The injustice of it all was palpable.

What more could there be? How much worse could it get? Unless an ear, fingers, or toes started sloughing off Job and falling off randomly, there wasn’t a worse for him. Satan had done his absolute worst and visited upon him all the pain and torment he could think of, yet a man Job called a friend sat before him now and insisted that he was getting less than his iniquity deserved.

What iniquity? That is the question none of Job’s friends could answer, a question Job himself asked of God for which he likewise received no answer because there was no iniquity to be revealed or exposed.

All three of Job’s friends were so certain of their conclusions that they chose to believe him a liar, even though they never called him such to his face, while ignoring the absence of any evidence to buoy their assertions. There was no presumption of innocence on their part, nor did they require proof of guilt. They knew what they knew based on the things they’d learned throughout their lives, and the only thing that made sense to them was that Job was guilty of something horrendous.

Some people are so set in their ways and unwilling to course-correct that even when evidence challenging their preconceived notion is evident and plentiful, they continue to justify their position. This becomes dangerous when the issue is a spiritual matter and when the Word of God is clear on the topic. When we ignore Scripture because it contradicts our entrenched beliefs regarding some doctrine or another, what we are doing, in essence, is placing ourselves above God and insisting that we must be right, even if that means He must be wrong.

This danger is a key moral and philosophical insight from the Book of Job, highlighting the importance of humility and openness to God’s truth. Rather than stare in the mirror and repeat some dated mantra Joel Osteen stole from Tony Robbins, perhaps a better use of our time is to stare in the mirror and tell ourselves we don’t know it all until we actually believe it.

Zophar was a traditionalist through and through. Things are as they have always been, they will always be as they are, and nothing will change; therefore, if you are being ground into the dust of the earth, it must be the direct result of sin.

I hear what you’re saying; I just don’t believe it. Moreover, your punishment is less than you deserve, so you should be thankful for that, at least. The old adage that with friends like these, who needs enemies comes to mind because whatever empathy or compassion they may have shown Job when they first arrived to visit him was well and truly gone. 

With love in Christ,

Michael Boldea, Jr.             

Job CXXX

 2 Corinthians 4:16-18, “Therefore we do not lose heart. Even though our outward man is perishing, yet the inward man is being renewed day by day. 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.”

Not only does Paul beautifully encapsulate the reality of life in general, he likewise differentiates between the life of the believer, those who have surrendered their lives, and been born again in Christ, and the life of the godless, who wither daily just as we do, but without the benefit of the inward man being renewed day by day.

We are not the same. Yes, once we were like those of the world, counting down the days hopelessly and without the blessed assurance of eternity, but no longer. It’s not a reason for gloating, pomposity, or pride, but rather a reason for heartfelt gratitude, thankfulness, and indebtedness. But for the grace of God, we would be likewise desperate, hopeless, and adrift. But by the grace of God, we would be living purposeless lives with no hope beyond the handful of days we are given on the earth.

Because our perspective has shifted from the temporary to the eternal, from the things that are seen to the things that are not seen, our reactions to the trials, hardships, setbacks, and valleys of life are different than those of the world.

Job’s outward man was perishing. There was no denying it, no matter how one might hope otherwise. He went from a man in possession of his faculties, of reasonable health, with no apparent issues, to one who was on the threshold of death, covered in painful boils, caked with worms and festering wounds. Although men could only see the outward appearance and pity him, God saw what was taking place in the inward man, and the two side-by-side snapshots of Job couldn’t be more different.

True enough, the outward man was perishing, but the inward man was being renewed day by day. It’s easy to focus on the physical, especially when we’re going through pain or suffering some malady, but the question we must ask ourselves is how is this present trial benefiting my spiritual man? How am I growing through this, learning to trust God despite it, expanding my faith in it, and what will my spiritual man look like once this momentary affliction passes?

Trust that God is doing something you can’t see, but doing it nonetheless, and the final iteration will be a stronger you, forged in the fires of trial and testing, purified and refined into the image of His Son Jesus. By its very nature, the refining process cannot be painless. Although it doesn’t necessarily have to be physical pain, whenever God begins to prune and cut away the things not conducive to spiritual growth, there will be pain. Your flesh will cry aloud, pitch a fit, protest, because it is being mortified, and it doesn’t like it one bit.

The flesh never has a problem with you paying God lip service. What the flesh has a problem with is a steadfast determination of pursuing righteousness and growing in Christ. It knows that the more of Jesus there is in you, the less sway it will have over you. When Jesus sits on the throne of your heart, the flesh is weakened, muted, and unable to assert its influence over your decisions. The more you grow your spiritual man, the easier it becomes to resist the devil, deny the urges and impulses, and overcome the temptations the enemy lays at your feet. It’s work, no, not works, but work. It’s also effort, it’s being watchful and sober-minded in all things, it’s striving to enter through the narrow gate so that the fullness of the indwelling of Christ in you may be so complete that you’ll always be one step ahead of the enemy, and intuit the snares that he sets before you.

The mouse might not know that the piece of cheese is baiting a trap that will take its life, but we’re not mice; we are human beings with the ability to reason and use logic, and you know that there’s no such thing as free cheese, and whenever you see it offered up, you grow weary and cautious understanding that it may look good, smell good, and taste good, yet is nevertheless the means of your destruction.

Although he may have been up until Satan asked to sift him, Job was not living his best life. If this present life is all there was, and here was no eternity, if the only thing that mattered was how much we can accumulate and how comfortable we could make the flesh, then we would rightly conclude that Job got the short end of the stick even with all his uprightness and blamelessness.

Had he grown despondent? Most assuredly, but even in such a deplorable state, he held to his integrity because while his intellect could not make sense of why these things were happening to him, his spiritual man perceived that there was more to the story than he was given to understand.

The notion of blind faith is a misnomer at best. Faith grows and stretches and matures because it perceives that although it may not fully understand a given situation, it understands the nature and character of the One who is above all, the One who spoke the universe into being, and the One who has intimate knowledge of one’s joy, pain, hardships, and trials. We have faith in God and His sovereignty because we know Him, we know that He loves us, and we understand that there is a purpose for all things even though we may not be able to currently define the purpose itself.

With love in Christ,

Michael Boldea, Jr.  

Job CXXIX

 The reason Picasso or Rembrandt, even their lesser known works, or just some charcoal sketch are valued at such exorbitant prices is because the artists not only created the art but signed their names to it. Although there are plenty of others who attempted to imitate their artistry, whether brush strokes, color palate, or configuration, and some even came close, they could not claim to be the artist in question, just a copycat.

A work of art must be authenticated, as must the signature, for it to qualify as a true creation of the artist, and although counterfeits have been floating around for decades, a trained eye who has studied the originals to no end can spot a forgery in an instant. Likewise, we are authenticated as belonging to God by having the presence of Jesus in our hearts and being clothed in His righteousness. God knows the real from the fake. He knows those who have the indwelling of His Holy Spirit within them and radiate the image of His Son and those who pretend to.

Men may fool men, but they’ll never fool God. No matter how close they may come to mimicking the presence of Christ, God will spot the forgery.

Psalm 37:3-5, “Trust in the Lord, and do good; dwell in the land, and feed on His faithfulness. Delight yourself also in the Lord, and He shall give you the desires of your heart. Commit your way to the Lord, trust also in Him, and He shall bring it to pass.”

What those who misappropriate this passage fail to acknowledge is that if we trust in the Lord, feed on His faithfulness, and delight ourselves in Him, the desires of our hearts, which He promises to give us, will not be some vain, base, or worthless bauble, but more of Him. A regenerate heart, a heart that has been spiritually reborn and transformed by God, does not desire the things of this earth but the things that are exclusively theirs by right of sonship.

The things of this earth, whatever that may entail, grow strangely dim in the light of His glory and grace. If the focus of an individual and the desire of their heart is focused on earthly pursuits, then by definition, their heart has not been regenerated or renewed.

Job 10:18-22, “Why then have You brought me out of the womb? Oh, that I had perished and no eye had seen me! I would have been as though I had not been. I would have been carried from the womb to the grave. Are not my days few? Cease! Leave me alone, that I may take a little comfort, before I go to the place from which I shall not return, to the land of darkness and the shadow of death, a land as dark as darkness itself, as the shadow of death, without any order, where even the light is like darkness.”

Life is not the destination, but rather the journey toward eternity. It’s fleeting and swift and full of molding, pruning, trimming, heartaches, heartbreaks, victories, defeats, betrayals, disappointments, simple joys, profound gratitude, and epiphanies, whether realizing we were stronger than we thought or weaker than we feared, faith building, faith walking, learning to trust God’s sovereignty, learning to deny ourselves, understanding that His yoke is not heavy, and the reward for those who endure to the end is great indeed, and that’s just an average weekday.

When we conclude that God is an existential need, that without Him we can do nothing, His presence in our lives becomes both the goal and the purpose of our existence. Once that occurs, we gladly forfeit all else for the excellency of the knowledge of Him, looking upon the things we’ve surrendered not as something we had to sacrifice but as something we were freed from.

Once in a while, I’ll happen upon a video where someone has been sober for a year, ten years, or fifteen years. None of these individuals look back on their addiction and conclude that they sacrificed alcohol, but rather that they were freed, and unburdened from it, because they realized it was slowly killing them, destroying their relationships, and making a living hell out of their lives.

 That’s what sin does. It’s killing you ever so slowly, so when God commands us to repent and turn our backs on the desires of the flesh and the shackles to which we were fastened, it’s because He wants you to live, not because He doesn’t want you to have fun. I’ve heard the argument often enough from professing Christians that just a little sin is negligible as long as you can keep a handle on it, control it, and manage it. That’s like saying a little bit of poison is good for you. It’s not, and the one demonstrable absolute is that sin is never static. What satisfied the flesh today will not satisfy it tomorrow, so the depravity of the ‘little sin’ you thought you could manage grows incrementally day by day.

No one ever started out drinking a fifth of Jim Beam upon waking. A beer turned into two, two turned into five, then the flesh wanted something stronger, more potent, and those unwilling to see themselves as they truly were found ways of rationalizing their descent into oblivion. Playing with sin, any sin, is like playing with fire while being covered in gasoline. You never know when what you thought was a release or a way of smoothing out the edges becomes an albatross around your neck, dragging you further into the deep.

We cannot fail to differentiate between someone who trips over a tree root, gets up, wipes off the dust, and keeps going and someone who cannonballs into the pig pen, rolls in the mud, slaps away the hand of anyone reaching to pull them out, and feels at home among the swine. We all fall short, whether that flash of anger when someone cuts us off in traffic or the acidic remark on the tip of our tongue when we deem someone has it coming, but that is very different from willful, protracted, and habitual sin.  

Rebellion and disobedience will bring us to a direr state than any testing will, because while during a time of sifting and testing the presence of God is felt, during seasons of rebellion we remove ourselves from fellowship with Him, and are alone in the dark, groping about, refusing to acknowledge the extent of our own blindness.

With love in Christ,

Michael Boldea, Jr.  

Job CXXVIII

 Most of us don’t look in the mirror and see a masterpiece or a work of art. Especially as we grow older, the hairs on one’s head begin to migrate to parts unknown, and the battle scars of too much food and too little sleep become frighteningly evident, it becomes impossible to reconcile objectivity with the conclusion that we are a wonder to behold. We do our best, looking at ourselves from the side, sucking in our gut, combing over the patch of hair so it covers the entire scalp, but we know what we’re looking at, and it’s not Michelangelo’s David.

Conversely, there are also people who see what they want to see, and when such individuals are asked to rate their looks, they stare up from their mobility scooters, chins wagging and huffing as though they’d just sprinted a marathon, and with a straight face insist that they’re a solid 10. You’d think that if it weren’t for their swollen ankles and inability to find a swimsuit in their size, they’d be entering beauty pageants left and right.

To a certain extent, the self-delusion is admirable. I know I couldn’t pull it off with a straight face, and I harbor admiration for anyone who can do something I can’t. It’s why I hold people who deal with gore, blood, and death on a daily basis in such high regard. I know I could never be a nurse, a doctor, or a mortician because it would disturb me to no end.

At some point, however, objectivity must have a voice, and though grudgingly, we must admit, if only to ourselves, that given the opportunity, we wouldn’t lay down our lives to redeem one such as the individual staring at us from the mirror, yet Jesus did. He saw in you what you fail to see in yourself, which is the Father’s design and creation, and deemed you worthy of redemption, not because the flesh had some inherent value or because in and of yourself you were more special than your neighbor, but because He saw the work of His Father’s hand.

There is a difference between being deemed worthy of something by another, independent of your input or agency, and being deserving of it. Being worthy is showing some quality or ability that merits recognition and investment so that the full potential of the individual in question might be achieved.

Some people are born with raw talent. Whether in sports, mathematics, or a turn of phrase, all raw talent does is reveal the potential of an individual if they apply themselves and are diligent in pursuing the mastering of their natural abilities.

Being deserving, on the other hand, implies that something is owed to you, that by your own agency, you did something that merited Christ’s sacrifice, and so you feel entitled to it. It’s called unmerited favor for a reason. Neither you nor I were so indispensable in our unregenerate state as to compel Christ to walk up Calvary’s hill. Christ’s compulsions were love and obedience to the Father. He saw the potential of what we could become in Him and knew it was the only way to facilitate the becoming.

Jesus deemed mankind worthy of His sacrifice, not deserving. It may seem like splitting hairs, but it’s not, given that so many today feel they are within their rights to take it for granted, abuse it, and be indifferent toward such a grace as this. We approach God differently when we acknowledge that even the best of us are no more than withering husks here only by the grace and mercy of God than when we think ourselves so great and invaluable that Christ’s sacrifice should be his opening gambit and not His final offer. When we do not see ourselves as we truly are- wounded and broken and in need of healing and restoration, shackled and imprisoned in need of a savior who can and will unfetter us from darkness and death and bring us to life in Him- we’re always angling for something more.

Being set free from the depths of despair and renewed of mind and heart that we might glory in our Savior is all well and good, but can you sweeten the pot some? Perhaps a makeover, a new car, a few bucks in the bank, and the recognition of our contemporaries? That would be a good start, don’t you think? Men tend to view Jesus as a corporate head hunter making competing offers, hoping they switch sides, and not as who He is, the Lord of glory and the only one with the power and authority to set them free.         

My wife is beautiful. By any objective standard, she is gorgeous, and I know I lucked out when she said she would marry me. Even so, once in a while, I catch her looking at herself in the mirror with a look that tells me she is seeing something that displeases her. Even though she’s nearing fifty, she is supremely beautiful to me, whether upon waking first thing in the morning, replete with bedhead and bleary eyes, or during one of the rare days when she doesn’t have to go in to work and is wearing her favorite pair of pajamas all day, with her hair up in a bun. She is the love of my life and ever will be thus.

Does she look exactly as she did when I first saw her almost thirty years ago? Obviously not. We’ve had two daughters together and twenty-five years of marriage, with the ups and downs of life and a handful of curve balls thrown in for good measure. The prism through which I see her, however, is as that ever-young, ever-youthful seventeen-year-old I saw sitting on a park bench one random day in the summer of 1997.

God sees us through the prism of His Son, and it is ever thus once we deny ourselves, pick up our crosses, and follow after Him. We are born again to new life, and though we might see gray hair and wrinkles and fleshy bits that weren’t there a few years ago, what God sees is Jesus.

Job wasn’t holding a mirror up to himself, contemplating his appearance, and concluding that he was a masterpiece or the pinnacle of God’s creation in his state. He understood that beyond his present appearance, beyond what eyes of flesh could see, God had fashioned him, molded him like clay, clothed him with skin and flesh, knit him together with bones and sinews, and breathed life into him.

With love in Christ,

Michael Boldea, Jr. 

Job CXXVII

 Job 10:13-17, “And these things You have hidden in Your heart; I know that this was with You: If I sin, then You mark me, and will not acquit me of my iniquity. If I am wicked, woe to me; Even if I am righteous, I cannot lift up my head. I am full of disgrace; See my misery! If my head is exalted, You hunt me like a fierce lion, and again You show Yourself awesome against me. You renew Your witness against me, and increase Your indignation toward me; changes and war are ever with me.”

Job wasn’t trying to have a one-man pity party for himself. He was trying to make sense of his present condition and reconcile the God he knew and served all his life with this seemingly new iteration of Him that Job viewed as a fierce lion on the hunt for him.

He knew he couldn’t find the answers he was seeking from his friends, but he did know the one place where the answers might be found. To that end, Job petitioned God repeatedly, hoping for an answer, yet no answer came. Sometimes, the toughest part of going through a trial isn’t the trial itself but God’s silence in the midst of it. It’s not wondering whether or not we’ve been forsaken because He promises He will neither leave us nor forsake us, but wondering why the silence stretches on and there is no answer to our supplications.

Anyone who says it’s an easy thing to contend with has never been in such a predicament. You know God is there, you feel His presence, you know that He hears, but He chooses to remain silent. You begin to wonder if you’re not praying hard enough, long enough, or eloquently enough; you consider laying prostrate rather than kneeling because the silence is deafening and jarring and something you are not accustomed to.

There’s no one-size-fits-all answer to what we should do when God is silent, but there are a handful of general truths that have been tried and tested throughout mankind’s existence.

The first thing we must do when God is silent is acknowledge that He is still God. His silence toward me does not imply that His power has diminished or that His sovereignty has waned. His silence does not give me license to come up with my own answers or plot my own course. In His time, He will speak just as He did to Job, but while He is silent, rest in the knowledge that He is still present and aware of every hurt, every pain, every hardship, and every tear.

He has not suddenly become cold or calloused. He has not suddenly changed His nature wherein He no longer cares or loves. Just because God is silent, it doesn’t mean you should be. Continue to pray, to seek His face, to verbalize the pain of your heart just as Job did, because His silence does not mean He isn’t listening.

The second thing we must do when God is silent is to resist the urge to equate His silence with His displeasure or punishment. A wise man searches his heart daily, and if perchance there is something requiring repentance, he is quick to repent. If having searched your heart, you conclude there is nothing displeasing to God therein, do not conflate His silence with His reproof.  

The third thing we must do when God is silent is understand that there is a purpose to the silence, just as there is a purpose in hearing His voice. I may not understand the purpose; I may prefer that He speak clearly and resoundingly rather than opt for silence, but in the end, I must defer to Him and submit to His purposes. 

The fourth thing we must do when God is silent is be still and know. Know that He is God, know that He is on the throne, and know that He has your situation well in hand. Knowledge goes beyond hope or presumption. When we know something, it is an established reality that cannot be shaken or altered. Know that He is the God of your life. Know that He will make a way. Know that He will speak in His time and bind up your wounds and broken heart.

Just as there are things we should be doing when God is silent, there are things we shouldn’t be doing when this occurs because they tend to be detrimental to faith, resolve, and the endurance of our spiritual man.

By far, the worst thing we can do when God is silent is to grow exceedingly anxious, nervous, and restless. The escalation in emotional responses to God’s silence can only lead to despondency, and that’s the chink in your armor the enemy will use to try and sow fear and doubt in your heart.

He will invade your mind with thoughts of abandonment if you allow him to, attempting to weaken your faith and resolve, hoping to get you to do what he tried and failed to get Job to do, which is to find fault with God.

Coming in a close second is trying to force God’s hand to speak to us when He has chosen to be silent. This is a futile endeavor that can lead to further spiritual confusion.

After the death of Samuel, the prophet of the Lord, the Philistines gathered their armies and brought them to a place called Shunem. Seeing this and being afraid, Saul inquired of the Lord, yet the Lord did not answer him. Whether by dreams, by Urim, one of two stones in the high priest's breastplate, which was used as a means of revelation, or by the prophets, God chose to remain silent.

Saul could not abide God’s silence, so he took it upon himself to seek out a medium of whom he might inquire. The rest of the story is long and sordid, a meaty topic of discussion for another time as to the power evil forces possess, going so far as to call Samuel’s spirit up, but the point for this particular topic is that Saul tried to circumvent God’s silence by seeking out a voice, any voice, even if that voice was what amounted to a witch, well known in those part and during those times.

It did not end well for Saul. God didn’t view his actions as being a go-getter or give him praise for trying to make things happen on his own; on the contrary, Samuel’s spirit informed him that not only had the Lord departed from him, but had become his enemy.

You’re not smarter than God, and He will not be mocked. If He chooses to be silent, trust that there is a purpose to His silence, and continue to come before the throne of grace with your prayers and supplications.

With love in Christ,

Michael Boldea, Jr.  

Job CXXVI

 Imagine laying in the dust, covered in worms, bleeding from open wounds, and seeing your life seeping away, yet having the insight to acknowledge that the hands of God made and fashioned you. What Job was seeing went beyond his mournful state, beyond his current circumstance, something that could not be perceived with the eyes of flesh.

Whether prince or pauper, we are all fearfully and wonderfully made. Your station in life does not determine the value God sees in you as one of His creations. God is neither interested in a financial commitment nor a recurring monthly gift. His only desire is that you humble yourself, surrender yourself, and give Him your heart that He may wash it clean and dwell therein. Job saw beyond the reality of his current circumstance and acknowledged God’s fashioning of him even as he picked worms off his rotting flesh.

It was not an issue of self-esteem or visualization with Job. Even if he’d tried, he couldn’t talk himself into seeing the best version of himself in the state he was in. Less open sores? Less worms? Perhaps a nice hot bath? That was the extent of what he could imagine for himself, yet he understood that bedraggled as he was, he remained one of God’s creations.

Your inherent worth is not based on how well you dress or what kind of car you drive but upon the price paid on your behalf on the cross by the sinless Son of God. Although Christ’s sacrifice extended throughout time and generations so that whosoever believes in Him should not perish but have everlasting life, it’s also personal and intimate. A life for a life. He died with you and me in mind. He sacrificed Himself so we might know freedom and have life in Him, knowing that there is no life outside of Him.

We can never minimize what Jesus did for us, nor can we ever cease making it personal. He died for me. The perfect Son of God died for me so that I might, in turn, have life and have it more abundantly. He paid the debt I did not own; I own the debt I could not pay, and for this, my life is His to do with as He wills. That is our baseline. Not looking in the mirror and seeing something that isn’t there or talking ourselves into believing our duplicity, lukewarmness, and half-hearted commitment to Him will have to do, or worse still, that it’s all He is entitled to. But knowing that He loved us enough to die for us, individually and personally.

There are certain terms we use so often that they’ve lost their meaning. Being saved is one such term wherein we’ve lost sight of what it means both implicitly and explicitly. For someone to be saved, they need to be in a situation where they need saving. If you walk up to someone lounging in a hammock on a sun-dappled beach and insist you’re there to save them, you’ll likely get strange looks, if not an outright tongue-lashing.

Jesus didn’t come to save you from poverty, crooked teeth, or a negative self-image. He came to save you from hell, from eternal separation from God, and the outer darkness where there is weeping and gnashing of teeth. He came to save us because we needed saving, and once we are saved and have been redeemed, we owe a life debt. He bought us at a price. Having been purchased, we no longer belong to ourselves but to Him. This is what it means to be a bondservant: a willing slave who serves out of love and gratitude for the Master’s kindness and mercy.

If you’ve ever wondered how some are able to withstand persecution, privation, or martyrdom, it’s because they understood the reality of what Jesus did and that they are now bondservants whose duty is to obey their Master. It’s not because they’re made of tougher stuff or have greater pain thresholds than you or I. It’s because they understand the true meaning of salvation and what they were saved from.         

Until the calamity visited upon him turned his world upside down, Job seems to have shared the same straightforward, if overly simplistic, view of life: God favors the righteous and punishes the wicked. Good things happen to good people, bad things happen to bad people, and never the twain shall meet. That is the essence of what Job’s friends had concluded, after all, wherein the reason for his current lot was some hidden, as yet unconfessed sin. Whether Eliphaz, Bildad, or Zophar, the underlying premise of their conclusions was that sin was somehow involved, and Job had displeased God in such an egregious fashion as to find himself wishing for death.

It was the implicit contradiction Job was having difficulty wrapping his mind around, wherein the selfsame God who made and fashioned him now sought to destroy him. It didn’t make sense, no matter how many times he returned to this paradox, and with each iteration of allowing his mind to ponder this discrepancy, Job’s desperation becomes ever more evident. It was a conundrum without resolution, and it naturally gave way to indignation.

Having the entire structure of what you believed turned on its ear in an instant and being able to withstand it is no easy feat. We see this play out often enough when some elevated figure that seemed beyond reproach turns out to be less than, and those who followed the individual rather than the Christ have to contend with the reality that all was not as it seemed, and they’d placed their trust in someone who ultimately betrayed it.

Trusting a man will lead to heartache, disappointment, bitterness, and resentment. Trusting God will never lead to any of these things because God is not like man, fickle and faithless, but ever faithful and true from age to age.

Our faith must be cemented in Christ and Christ alone. Not in a given denomination, doctrine, or individual, but in Christ. When we are anchored in Jesus, and the Word of God is the plumbline and filter through which we process spiritual matters, we become unshakeable in our resolve and know that come what may, He will be an ever-present help.

We would spare ourselves so much grief, heartache, and heartbreak if we took the Word of God to heart and followed it rather than the ramblings and machinations of men whose words stand in stark opposition to what Scripture has declared. Unfortunately, there will always be a market for fool’s gold, and it’s usually acquired by fools who only see the depth of their folly when they try to cash it in and discover it to be worthless.

Men make empty promises; God doesn’t. When God makes a promise, He keeps it, and the only time we run the risk of being demoralized and disillusioned is when we talk ourselves into believing that men’s promises are interchangeable with God’s or that God is bound to keep the promises men made in His name.

God will have the last word. He always has and always will, no matter what men might say or what conclusions they may come to regarding your station, situation, circumstance, or trial. As such, it is incumbent upon us to be more concerned about how God views us than how men view us, what He has to say about us, than what men do. His opinion is the only one that matters.

With love in Christ, 

Michael Boldea, Jr.