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.