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.