Proof The Bible Is True

 Job 5:17-27, “Behold, happy is the man whom God corrects; Therefore do not despise the chastening of the Almighty. For He bruises, but He binds up; He wounds, but His hand makes whole. He shall deliver you in six troubles, yes, in seven no evil shall touch you. In famine He shall redeem you from death, and in war from the power of the sword. You shall be hidden from the scourge of the tongue, and you shall not be afraid of destruction when it comes. You shall laugh at destruction and famine, and you shall not be afraid of the beasts of the earth. For you shall have a covenant with the stones of the field, and the beasts of the field shall be at peace with you. You shall know that your tent is in peace; you shall visit your dwelling and find nothing amiss. You shall also know that your descendants shall be many, and your offspring like the grass of the earth. You shall come to the grave at a full age, as a sheaf of grain ripens in its season. Behold, this we have searched out; it is true. Hear it, and know for yourself.”

It’s easy to rationalize someone else’s pain and conclude that they’re reacting in a manner they shouldn’t be. We go back to the idea that every situation is unique, and every trial and the reaction to it is exclusive to the individual in question. We tend to generalize much more than we ought, and although generally speaking, the notion that the man whom God corrects is happy, in Job’s case, it was not correction; it was something wholly different, a new experience heretofore unheard of by Eliphaz and his two friends, and it was something they couldn’t wrap their minds around.

Correction is one thing. Giving Satan free rein to tear you down to the studs and then cover those with painful boils as a means of testing is something wholly different. Job’s friends couldn’t have known why these things were happening to him, and Job himself was likewise in the dark.

It’s even discombobulating for us who have the benefit of the Word and understand that sometimes God tests our faith for reasons that have nothing to do with correction, but as far as Job was concerned, he was the first, the prototype, the forerunner of being sifted, and tried to the point of unimaginable pain. He had no point of reference for what he was going through. There was no one he could point to in the past and reconcile his current lot with what another had gone through before.

Job’s friends had done their due diligence. They’d searched it out and concluded it to be true, but there had never been a man to have been sifted for the reasons Job was being sifted for, and so having a partial understanding of the situation, they spoke to him in words whose substance was undeniably true, but which did not apply to his current circumstance.

Having seen Job at his lowest, they’d concluded that his situation did not warrant the level of desperation or suffering he was feeling. God bruises, but He binds up; He wounds, but His hand makes whole; all true, but difficult to see when you’re still being bruised and wounded for no reason that you can discern.

The promises of God hold true even if their fulfillment is delayed. That is an absolute truth we, as children of God, with the benefit of hindsight and the foundation of Scripture, can abide in and draw comfort from. Even when you don’t know the reason you’re going through testing, when you’ve searched your heart and know that there is no unconfessed sin therein, when you conclude it isn’t correction but something else, take strength from the knowledge that He will bind up, restore, and heal in due season.

The knowledge of this doesn’t make it any easier, but it gives us the strength to press on, to endure and persevere when others have fallen by the wayside and given in to despair. I don’t have hobbies. I don’t bowl, golf, hunt, or roller derby. One thing I have been doing as far back as I can remember is collecting stories of individuals who spent time in prison, were tortured, persecuted, and unfairly treated for the sake of Christ during the communist rule in Eastern Europe.

None of these people had any recourse. They couldn’t go to the justice system, appeal their arrest with a judge, and though they trumpeted their innocence, no one paid them any mind. There wasn’t even a promise of deliverance or that someday they would know freedom once more. All they had was the daily choice of remaining faithful or giving in to bitterness.

It was a binary thing. Either they persevered and committed their ways to the Lord in all things or requested an audience with an overseer and wrote down some names on a piece of paper. The reward for their betrayal was no small thing. They would get to go home to their wives and children, they would no longer be harassed by local officials, and the threat of torture and imprisonment would no longer hang over their heads like the sword of Damocles. Even so, many, if not most, endured untold horrors at the hands of those who saw them as less than human because they understood that there had not failed one word of all His good promises.

If there had been any doubt regarding God’s omnipotence, faithfulness, and sovereignty in the hearts of these individuals, the offer on the table would have been too good to pass up. With one stroke of a pen, all your problems went away. No more beatings, humiliations, hard labor, or psychological torture; all of it went away in an instant.

They could not see the promises of God being fulfilled presently; there was no particular date they could count down to, yet unshakeable faith in the God they served gave them the assurance that one way or another, their deliverance was a certainty. God will heal; He will bind up, restore, and make the crooked paths straight because He promised it would be so, but in His time and for His purpose. When we’re in the midst of it, every second seems like an eternity, and we wonder if deliverance will ever come, but rest assured, it will.  

With love in Christ, 

Michael Boldea, Jr. 

 Job 5:12-16, “He frustrates the devices of the crafty, so that their hands cannot carry out their plans. He catches the wise in their own craftiness, and the counsel of the cunning comes quickly upon them. They meet with darkness in the daytime, and grope at noontime as in the night. But He saves the needy from the sword, from the mouth of the mighty, and from their hand. So the poor have hope, and injustice shuts her mouth.”

None of what Eliphaz testifies is wrong or wayward. God does frustrate the devices of the crafty; He does catch the wise in their own craftiness; He does save the needy from the sword and from the mouth of the mighty, but He does so as He wills, when He wills, for His purpose and glory. Whether wittingly or unwittingly, Eliphaz omitted that last part as though it wasn’t relevant or was not the fulcrum upon which his entire thesis rested.

In any given situation God can intervene, God may intervene, but whether or not He will is solely incumbent upon Him and His purposes. God does as He wills. He is sovereign. You can’t be praying “Your will be done” every morning, then throw a hissy fit when He does His will. His will being done on earth as it is in heaven is not dependent upon whether or not it’s in concert with your will or mine. That would mean my will supersedes His will, and I become some sort of defacto god looking for a wish granter who does my bidding, asks no questions, and requires nothing in return. It’s easier said than done, but we must receive the blessing as well as the testing from the hand of God with equal aplomb.

Some of us are so desirous to bring comfort to another that we take it upon ourselves to speak for God and insist that He will remedy the situation. Unless God has spoken that to you directly, and you heard His words clearly and know them to have originated from Him, telling someone God will do something He never said He would may give them temporary comfort, but the end will be worse than the beginning for they will surely give way to bitterness and resentment when what you said God said He would do never materializes.

We approach the entire realm of the prophetic or revelatory insight far too flippantly nowadays, thinking that there will be no consequence for speaking when God has not spoken, not realizing that He’s already laid out the punishment for such transgression in His word. God never said He would give someone a pass if the word they spoke in haste, that did not originate from Him was done with good intentions. A lie is still a lie, even if it was intended as a comfort.

Jeremiah 23:25-27, “I have heard what the prophets have said who prophesy lies in My name, saying, ‘I have dreamed, I have dreamed!’ How long will this be in the heart of the prophets who prophesy lies? Indeed they are prophets of the deceit of their own heart, who try to make My people forget My name by their dreams which everyone tells their neighbor, as their fathers forgot My name for Baal.”

Jeremiah 23:30-32, “Therefore behold, I am against the prophets,” says the Lord, “who steal My words every one from his neighbor. Behold, I am against the prophets,” says the Lord, “who use their tongues and say, He says. Behold, I am against those who prophesy false dreams,” says the Lord, “and tell them, and cause My people to err by their lies and by their recklessness. Yet I did not send them or command them; therefore they shall not profit this people at all,” says the Lord.”

These verses should be on the front page of every school of prophecy workbook in big, bold letters because it is a fearful thing to fall into the hands of the living God. They’re not, though, for fear that it will tamper the enthusiasm of the folks who forked over a grand or five to be taught how to prophesy and walk in their anointing. Prophecy is not guesswork, a gut feeling, or a personal opinion repackaged to make it seem like it came from God. We’ve seen the aftermath of the lies and recklessness far too often to ignore it, but we’re still beating the same drum and offering the same courses on tapping into your prophetic gifting regardless of how many souls are shipwrecked and how many hearts are shattered because of words they received that never came to pass because they never originated from God.

It’s not that the reckoning is coming; it’s already here. We’re seeing it in real-time, and it will only intensify because God will not be mocked, no matter how many individuals think otherwise.

By all means, be a comfort, a shoulder to cry on, a caring friend, and an empathetic brother or sister in Christ, but don’t presume to know the mind of God or give words you know full well did not come from Him.

Your first duty is to delineate between feelings, emotions, what you think the individual wants to hear or needs to hear, and a true word from the Lord. Don’t conflate the two or insist a word is from the Lord when it’s not, even if it makes you seem less spiritual than you might like to be viewed. Being deemed spiritual by others is not worth God’s wrath, and this is yet another lesson the modern-day soothsayers have failed to learn to their detriment.

Intent may hold weight when it comes to other things we do in this life but is wholly irrelevant when it comes to speaking in the name of God when He has not spoken and insisting He will do something He never promised He would do. That you wanted to be a comfort, a healing balm, a source of hope, or some other trope one might use to justify such actions, they will be dismissed offhand because, in your presumption, you appropriated the omniscience of God and spoke in His name.

Mark 4:22, “For there is nothing hidden which will not be revealed, nor has anything been kept secret but that it should come to light.” 

With love in Christ,

Michael Boldea, Jr. 

 When we are unaware of the possibility, perhaps even the probability of having our faith tested, of being sifted, of going through the valleys of life that make us cling to God all the more, while all seems pleasant and uncomplicated, while we are not being buffeted and the safety nets we’ve built for ourselves still hold ignorance may truly seem like bliss. It’s like the folks who don’t file taxes for years on end, thinking they’ve gotten one over on the rest of us, that they’ve found a loophole, or have discovered a heretofore unknown cheat code, only to get a knock on their door from a serious looking individual informing them that their wages have been garnered, and they own back taxes to the tune of six figures. I’m sure it was fun while it lasted, but the music eventually stops, and the reckoning commences.

For those living in the land of fantasy where the peaches are always perfectly ripe, the sun is always shining, and no ill or trial can ever be visited upon them, it’s all sunshine and lollipops until it’s not. Don’t get me wrong, if it wasn’t such dangerously faulty logic, it would be fun to entertain.

Once in a great while, we’ll show up for church, call money down from heaven, get a pat on the back for showing up, and go on about our lives unencumbered by the constraints of righteousness or holiness unto God. Building up our most holy faith sounds like too much work, so we’ll pay the fifty bucks per month to get an AI chatbot to spend time with God on our behalf, and that way, we won’t have to miss our tee time.

I’m still waiting for the sin eaters to make a comeback, but given the trajectory the modern-day church is headed in, it’s only a matter of time.

If one is not aware that trials, testing, and hardships are part of the Christian walk, when they make their presence felt, they will either retreat or be frozen to the spot, not knowing what to do and fearful that any course of action may only exacerbate the situation.

There is a reason we are repeatedly warned via Scripture that we have an enemy, that he seeks our destruction, and that he is ruthless and single-minded in his desire to keep us from finishing well. Anyone not aware of this hasn’t been reading their Bible or has been taught that it’s within their purview to ignore the parts of it they don’t like.

Once in a while, you hear stories of starry-eyed tourists who travel to dangerous corners of the world trying to prove the warnings wrong and unfounded only to end up dead in a ditch, butchered like so much cattle, because ignoring reality doesn’t change the fundamental nature of it, and pretending as though something does not exist doesn’t make it so. This isn’t the Matrix; you can’t just tell yourself there’s no devil and make that your reality.

It’s not as though some of the words Eliphaz spoke weren’t beautiful, true, and even poetic, words that resonate to this day in their delivery, but not all true and beautiful words apply to a given situation. You can have an entire tool bag full of tools, but if you don’t have the right tool for the job, you still lack what is necessary for the current situation. It goes without saying that Eliphaz was a wordsmith. It’s also undeniable that he was an intelligent man who was a deep thinker and pondered the deeper truths of his existence, but in the current situation, watching his friend Job suffer both physically and emotionally, he did not possess the right tools to remedy the situation. It’s no slight on him; sometimes, the only one who can heal a broken heart and give hope is God, and no matter who it is standing before us, either trying to comfort or rebuke us, they fall short.

If you’ve ever been in a situation where you’ve tried your best to lend a hand, be a support, bring comfort, or give wise counsel and knew yourself to have fallen short of the mark, it wasn’t you, or your inability to be a good friend in due season, it was the fact that only God could have put back together the pieces that were shattered.

It’s one thing to give good counsel, and it goes unheeded; it’s another when the counsel you give falls short in some way. You can’t help but feel responsible in some capacity, and although I’ve gotten better about beating myself up over being unable to be of help in certain situations, it still gets to me. It used to wreck me utterly. Although I was not personally responsible for the situation the individual found themselves in, being unable to do anything to fix it made me feel like a failure.

The worst by far is wayward children and broken marriages. You sit down with the individual and go through the Biblical steps required for healing; they go through them, and though they prayed, wept, and showered their progeny with love, their hearts are still hard, and the spouse still refuses to reconcile. What more can I do? They would ask pleadingly, and all I could offer was to repeat the steps because you can’t change someone’s heart; only God can.

I had to humble myself enough to come to terms with the reality that my abilities were limited, that I’d done all I could, and must now surrender it to God and allow Him to have His way in the matter. Not every story has a happy ending. Not every prodigal finds their way back home; not every marriage can be put back together, and I discovered that my trying to make it so by sheer will alone was a folly of the worst kind. There is a difference between God can and God will, and we cannot conflate the two.

As Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego stood before the raging flames of the furnace, their answer to the king wasn’t that God would surely deliver them from the burning fiery furnace but that He was able to. Whether He did or not was solely up to Him. One thing was certain, and three young men said as much; one way or another, they would be delivered from the king’s hand that day.

We cannot presume that our deliverance will come by being spared the flames. In many an instance, our deliverance comes by standing in the fire.  

With love in Christ,

Michael Boldea, Jr. 

 Given the historical context of the time, Eliphaz was likely the eldest of Job’s three friends, as great value was placed on the wisdom of age in those days. It used to be that the younger deferred to the older among them, whatever the situation might be. It’s easy enough to trace back the decline of society and correlate it to a growing disrespect for authority, one’s elders, one’s parents, and those who’ve been where you are and may have a thing or two to teach you about it.

Just because you know how to change the background screen on Google doesn’t make you omniscient, and although you can watch YouTube videos on how to hammer in a nail, that first time you crack your thumb with the business end of a claw hammer, you’ll come to appreciate the many times your dad told you to always be aware of where your thumbs are placed. There are some things only experience can teach. Either that or find someone with experience and ask them to teach you. It is a wiser course by far since you’ll be circumventing the pain of failure on your way to learning whatever the individual might have to impart.

It’s telling that Eliphaz was the first of Job’s three friends to speak up and that the other two deferred to him and did not attempt to interject or add their own ideas to what he was saying. Their turn will come in short order, but for now, it was Eliphaz who took up the reins.

Job 5:8-11, “But as for me, I would seek God, and to God, I would commit my cause – who does great things, and unsearchable, marvelous things without number. He gives rain on the earth, and sends waters on the fields. He sets on high those who are lowly, and those who mourn are lifted to safety.”

If you’d read the entire chapter through from start to finish, it is here that you begin to wonder if the same individual is speaking. Up until this point, he was disparaging both Job’s faith and his integrity, questioning the power of the God he served, and suddenly, he reverses course and begins to wax poetic about the power of God and the marvelous things He does without number.

But wait; weren’t you the guy insisting that no one was there to answer and wondering which of the holy ones Job would turn to next? Weren’t you the one doing your utmost to vex Job’s spirit and crush him even deeper into the dust if that were at all possible?

Any reasoned dive into this chapter would lead to the conclusion that two people were speaking. The first person through the seventh verse and the second person from the eighth verse onward. Whether it was Eliphaz coming to his senses or resisting the enemy’s whispers, we cannot know, but what is evident and beyond doubt is that the entire tone of his discourse shifts, and he begins to list the attributes of God, who is worthy of being sought, and to whom one’s cause is worth committing to.

The view from an ash heap and a high horse are markedly different. You get a different perspective, one looking up, the other looking down, and Eliphaz decided that after having rebuked Job, it was an opportune moment to highlight his virtues and insist that were he to be brought low and be in Job’s position, he would seek God and commit his cause to Him, as though Job had done any different.

It’s easy to pontificate when you’re not the one struggling. It’s easy to sit in judgment of another when you don’t know the details of the hardship they’re going through or the effort it’s taking for them to hang on by the skin of their teeth. When someone is beaten into the dirt, surprised at themselves for not having given up already, the last thing they want to hear is how someone else would have done it differently. In theory, they might have, but in practice, they may have been more of a blubbering mess than the individual they’re trying to illuminate as to where they went wrong.

What happened to Job wasn’t bad decisions, bad investments, gambling addiction, unwise relationships, faithlessness, duplicity, or lack of reverence for God. There was nothing he could have done to mitigate the disaster that consumed him because the devil had been given leave to do as he willed with Job’s family, possessions, and health.

Some trials cannot be hedged for, planned for, mitigated, or avoided. The best we can hope is that we suffer well through them and that our faith is so rooted and well-established that we will weather the trial and come out stronger for it.

When Jesus had his heart to heart with Peter, informing him that Satan had asked for him that he may be sifted as wheat, the only consolation he received was that Jesus had prayed for him that his faith should not fail. It wasn’t that he be spared the sifting, it wasn’t that he be sheltered from the trial, it was that his faith would be strong enough in the face of it that it would endure the pressure of the testing.

If you believe yourself to be spiritually superior to Peter or somehow more highly favored than he was or more blameless and upright than Job, that’s one thing. If you don’t, rather than assume you will never be tested or sifted, your time would be better spent building up your most holy faith that when your season of sifting comes, it should not fail.

Because the spiritual understanding of many contemporary Christians is superficial at best, they fail to differentiate between God’s protection, provision, and providence in their walk of faith and those seasons where we are allowed to be tested and sifted. The two are not mutually exclusive because God chastens those He loves, and our faith is strengthened, refined, and proven in the flame of the trials He allows in our lives.  

With love in Christ,

Michael Boldea, Jr. 

 Job 5:1-7, “Call out now; is there anyone who will answer you? And to which of the holy ones will you turn? For wrath kills a foolish man, and envy slays a simple one. I have seen the foolish take root, but suddenly I curse his dwelling place. His sons are far from safety, they are crushed in the gate, and there is no deliverer. Because the hungry eat up the harvest, taking it even from the thorns, and a snare snatches their substance. For affliction does not come from the dust, nor does trouble spring from the ground; yet man is born to trouble, as the sparks fly upward.”

The subtext and innuendo in Eliphaz’s discourse are staggering to behold. As we continue into the fifth chapter of Job, about halfway through, you can see the tonal shift once again, as if two different men were speaking. If we pay close attention, we can see where Satan’s influence ends and Eliphaz’s own thoughts begin.

You’re all alone, buddy, is what the subtext implies. Call out now. Is there anyone who will answer you? You trusted in God, you served Him, you feared Him, and He’s brought you to this low point in life. You’re crying out, and He’s remaining silent. Perhaps he wasn’t worthy of your veneration. Perhaps you misplaced your faith. Which of the holy ones will you turn to now? Given that this God has failed you, which god will you pursue now? The depth of evil in Satan’s implications is jarring. That he would use one of Job’s closest friends to deliver this message is cunning and unseemly.

Not to belabor the point, but oftentimes, you can tell when someone is speaking their words, sharing their heart, and when an external, nefarious force is using them to sow despair in your heart. Perhaps unintentionally, unwittingly, without his knowledge or consent, but it is evident that Satan was using Eliphaz to dispirit Job, to the point of questioning if he’d picked the right God to serve and obey.

This was not Eliphaz talking. It was his voice, his tongue, his cadence, but as far as words are concerned, these were not his words. It’s a terrifying prospect when you start to think about it. Here he was, having traveled a long way, having sat with his friend in silence for seven days just hoping to be a comfort, and now that he opened his mouth to speak, his words were anything but comforting or encouraging. On the contrary, up to this point in his monologue, his entire focus was on getting Job to doubt his resolve and make him question whether his service to God was worth it.

If the Word tells you to hold fast to your faith, to put on the whole armor of God, to resist the devil, and to persevere, and a friend, a family member, or even one you deem a spiritual authority comes along and tells you it would be better if you just gave up, packed it in, perhaps find another religion you should gravitate toward because the God you currently serve isn’t taking any calls, you should know without doubt that they are being used of the enemy to try and shake your faith.

The enemy is fully aware that faith to the spiritual man is like oxygen to the physical man. It is the stone thrown into a still pond, causing ripples in every area of life. Once you begin to understand faith, you cannot remain unchanged, unaffected, or unmoved. If you deprive the physical man of oxygen for any lack of time, then he will surely die. The same is true for the spiritual man, and the enemy’s goal for anyone who comes to faith in Christ is to diminish, weaken, or destroy the faith of the individual, knowing that it will separate him from the vine, wherein he will shrivel and begin to die because no life is flowing into him.

If the devil can use some circumstance, acquaintance, temptation, or sin to separate you from faith in Christ, he has ostensibly separated you from Christ Himself. True faith is an active reality that fuels our desire to grow deeper and stronger in God, leaving the world and the things of the world behind.

The entire argument within the household of faith regarding faith and works is utterly pointless because when you possess true faith, the fruit thereof will be evident for all to see. It is faith and hope in the life to come, the eternal reward, the saving power of Christ, and His sacrifice that gives us the wherewithal to endure and persevere. Don’t let the enemy shake your faith or separate you from it, for if he accomplishes this, then victory will forever be out of reach for you.

This was now the enemy’s new strategy: to use Job’s friends to weaken his resolve and shake his faith in the God he served. If at first you don’t succeed, try, and try again seems to be the devil’s motto when it comes to attacking God’s faithful, and this is a truth we would do well to remember. Far too often, we are busy celebrating a victory and don’t notice the next attack that’s more devious than the last. There will be time to celebrate, to rejoice, and to be exultant, but that’s when we’ve finished the race, crossed the finish line, and stand before God, hearing well done. Any celebration or chest-beating before that glorious day is a recipe for disaster, and a moment of inattentiveness can set our faith journey back months if not years.

The journey isn’t over until it’s over. Whether in a valley or on the mountaintop, whether you can’t wait to escape the season you’re in and be on to the next, or you want to remain in it because it’s comfortable, your duty is to look up and keep walking toward Jesus with the same enthusiasm, focus, and commitment. It’s the goal, the prize, the finish line that we must focus on regardless of current circumstances, and with faith that He is a rewarder of those who diligently seek Him, we press ever onward.

Romans 6:4, “Therefore we were buried with Him through baptism into death, that just as Christ was raised from the dead by the glory of the Father, even so we also should walk in newness of life.”

With love in Christ,

Michael Boldea, Jr. 

Eliphaz never said the Lord showed him, told him, or revealed to him that Job had sinned. The entirety of his dream and the words the spirit he saw spoke were innuendo. Using human reason alone, what the spirit in his dream said to Eliphaz made sense. If God charges His angels with error, how much more those who dwell in houses of clay, whose foundation is in the dust, who are crushed before a moth? You’d have to be some kind of special in order to attain something so out of reach as being upright in the sight of God, wouldn’t you? Indeed, this is why God singled Job out among his contemporaries as being blameless and upright, and although Satan was fully aware of this, he still attempted to use Job’s friends to weary him and sow doubt in his heart.

It’s so nefarious and evil that only the father of lies could come up with such a plan.

There are two major and often overlooked takeaways from the fourth chapter of the book of Job, the first being that the devil never gives up, no matter how many times he fails. It is why we are commanded, and repeatedly so, that we must be watchful, on guard, sober-minded, and ever aware of the enemy’s plots and schemes.

When Satan had no more appeals before God, having taken everything from Job apart from his life, he resorted to using those close to him and attempted to coerce them on the off chance that he might relent to their counsel when his own machinations did not play out the way he hoped they would.

First came the wife insisting that Job should curse God and die, be done with the pain and the torment of mourning the loss of his children, and sitting on an ash heap scratching at himself with a potsherd; then he went to his friends, going so far as to appear to Eliphaz in a dream in the hope of shaking Job’s resolve and making him wonder what he’d done or what sin he’d committed for having been brought so low.

It was easy for him to accomplish this with Eliphaz because he was just reinforcing Eliphaz’s confirmation bias in that he’d already concluded that none perish being innocent. The enemy will often use what seems right to a man to undermine the plan of God or at least to attempt it. He will even go so far as to put a false word in the mouths of those who deem themselves prophets or give false dreams, as was the case with Eliphaz.

He is a master at twisting Scripture to accomplish his ends, including his attempt to tempt Christ into throwing Himself from the pinnacle of the temple, reminding Him of what was written regarding being caught by the angels so that His foot would not dash against a stone. The devil is shameless in his attempts to deceive and will go to any lengths to get his way. The only means by which we can defend against this is to resist him and know the Word of God for ourselves so that when he attempts to twist it, we recognize it for what it is.

The second major takeaway is that the devil isn’t above using anyone and everyone around you, whether friend or family, in his attempt to sow doubt in your heart or shake your faith in the sovereignty of God. Whether it’s a friend, a spouse, or someone you tend to confide in, Satan is quick to try and finagle his way into their hearts and attempt to steer their thoughts in such a manner wherein when they open their mouth and give counsel, it is hurtful, destructive, and counterproductive within the context of the situation you find yourself in.

As with all things, many who have no desire for the truth will exploit this reality and resist the Word, insisting that it doesn’t bear witness to their current state, but we cannot ignore the overarching truth that Job had committed no sin and had remained blameless and upright. Calling out sin and accusing someone of a sin they have not committed are two very different things.

When the counsel you feel compelled to give is contrary to Scripture, then by definition, it is not godly counsel, and you must assess where the compulsion originated from and resist verbalizing it. Conversely, when you are offered counsel that goes against the Word of God, even if said counsel might seem well-reasoned, it is your duty to reject it because it contravenes Scripture. We get in trouble when we accept advice from those around us that directly opposes the Word because, at the moment, it makes us feel validated or in the right.

I’ve seen more relationships, marriages, and friendships fall apart because a third party thought they knew better and gave advice that was wholly focused on the flesh, on feelings, and on some momentary perceived victory than anything spiritual, long-lasting, and conciliatory.

It is wisdom itself to know when to reject unwise counsel, even if it is well-intentioned or comes from a good place. After Jesus had informed His disciples that He must go to Jerusalem, suffer many things, be killed, and be raised on the third day, Peter took Him aside and rebuked Him.

“Far be it from You, Lord, this shall not happen to You!” This was Peter’s reproof, and I don’t doubt that it came from a good place. He didn’t want to see Jesus suffer or die, and he thought he was encouraging and positive in his rebuke. Christ’s answer was direct and to the point, however, because He understood that in that moment, the enemy was attempting to use Peter to sow doubt in His heart: “Get behind Me, Satan! You are an offense to Me, for you are not mindful of the things of God, but the things of men.”

Peter was still Peter, but Satan was using him. While I don’t recommend using the same response with a spouse or a friend, there are more tactful ways of delivering the same message. Just because someone’s counsel comes from a good place, it doesn’t make it godly. Just because they have good intentions as far as what they’re insisting you should do, it doesn’t mean it’s what God intends for you to do.

With love in Christ,

Michael Boldea, Jr.  

 At first glance, using only human reason and earthly understanding, Eliphaz may have the right of it. No man is perfect, and all have fallen short. Whether by commission or omission, we’ve erred, and he couldn’t possibly know that God had evaluated Job’s life and found him blameless. Again, conventional wisdom and godly wisdom don’t often coincide, and more often than not, they are at odds with each other.

Isaiah reminds us that God’s ways are not our ways, and His thoughts are not our thoughts. If they were, it could only mean one of two things. Either God is human, or we are gods, and neither is true. Being a bride does not make you the groom, and being a creation does not make you the Creator. The mental gymnastics some men go through to conclude that they are more than God created them to be is mind-boggling and leads to all manner of deception wherein they conclude that they are on even footing with the Almighty Himself.  

Much later, Paul would conclude that it is within God’s purview to choose the foolish things of the world and use them as a means to confound or put to shame the wise and, likewise, the weak things to put to shame the mighty.

The potter cannot be molded. The potter does the molding. It takes a certain level of humility to accept this and live accordingly, allowing Him to mold us as He sees fit without resisting it or thinking we are entitled to more.

Where Eliphaz and Job’s other two friends erred is that they approached the situation with already established presuppositions. This is why twists in movies or novels have such a great impact on the individual. You presume you know how it’s going to play out, from start to finish, and then something unexpected happens that shakes the foundations of what you thought you knew. Whether who you assumed to be the main character dies in the first act, or the supposed hero does something unheroic and rather than defend his homestead hides in the cellar shaking with fear, it disorients the viewer or the reader to the point that they are uncertain of how the rest of the story will play out.

If no two snowflakes are identical, then no two situations are identical either. Every time you approach someone in trouble, going through hardship, or dealing with loss, you must do so with a clean slate, without the burden of presupposing that you’ve seen this kind of thing before, you know what caused it, and you can rightly judge it based on previous experiences.

There can be a multitude of reasons as to why your engine is making that noise, but you remember that one time when it was clattering because you were low on oil, so you add some oil and go about your day only to have your engine die in the middle of the highway because it wasn’t more oil you needed, it was your timing belt going the way of all things.

We presume, and we assume because it’s in our nature to do so. Having gone through life and lived similar experiences, our natural inclination is to conclude that we know the reasons behind it, even though it’s just a guess, an assumption, a conclusion drawn on nothing more than the possibility of what something may be, rather than the reality of what it is.

Job’s friends assumed he had sinned and was being judged by God because every other instance in which they’d encountered similar circumstances had been because the individual had sinned.

It’s easy to stand in judgment of others when they’re going through hardships and drawing baseless conclusions, but when it’s your turn to go through some fiery trial or another, you expect those you’ve judged to show grace, mercy, understanding, and compassion.

Matthew 7:1-2, “Judge not, that you not be judged. For with what judgment you judge, you will be judged; and with the measure you use, it will be measured back to you.”

Granted, these verses have been abused, taken out of context, used to justify sin, and all manner of vice even though that’s not what Jesus meant by them, but the underlying truth of it still holds and is applicable to this day.

Jesus never said to ignore sin within the church or turn a blind eye to something you see as wrong or unscriptural, but rather, not to jump to conclusions and assume we know the whole of the situation when we only know it in part.

Job 4:12-21, “Now a word was secretly brought to me, and my ear received a whisper of it. In disquieting thoughts from the visions of the night, when deep sleep falls on men, fear came upon me, and trembling, which made all my bones shake. Then a spirit passed before my face; the hair on my body stood up. It stood still, but I could not discern its appearance. A form was before my eyes; there was silence; then I heard a voice saying: ‘Can a mortal be more righteous than God? Can a man be more pure than his Maker? If He puts no trust in His servants, if He charges His angels with error, how much more those who dwell in houses of clay, whose foundation is in the dust, who are crushed before a moth? They are broken in pieces from morning till evening; they perish forever, with no one regarding. Does not their own excellence go away? They die, even without wisdom.’”

Eliphaz does not relent in his assertion that Job must have sinned or done something displeasing in the sight of God but doubles down and gets spiritual about it. He speaks of a dream he had, wherein a spirit passed before him, and a form was before his eyes; then the spirit spoke and began to ask leading questions reminiscent of the serpent in the garden asking Eve whether God had really said they must not eat the fruit of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil.

It’s worth noting that Eliphaz never insisted it was the Spirit of the Lord, rather a spirit, faceless and without discernable appearance, but since it echoed what he already presupposed, he received it as such.

We get a snapshot of how devious Satan is in the questions he poses to Eliphaz. Satan knew Job was a righteous man who feared God and shunned evil. He’d proven it repeatedly by holding fast to his integrity and not sinning against God, yet here he was, whispering into Eliphaz’s ear, can a mortal be more righteous than God? Can a man be more pure than his Master?

Satan was inferring that Job couldn’t be as righteous as he seemed because no man could be as such when you come right down to it. He knew the truth of it. He knew better, yet you can never expect the devil to be an honest arbiter or tell the truth. As is the case with most politicians today, the truth is situational at best when it comes to Satan, and he will twist it, distort it, butcher it, omit it, or reimagine it to further his goals.     

With love in Christ,

Michael Boldea, Jr. 

 Job 4:8-11, “Even as I have seen, those who plow iniquity and sow trouble reap the same. By the blast of God they perish, and by the breath of His anger they are consumed. The roaring of the lion, the voice of the fierce lion, and the teeth of the young lions are broken. The old lion perishes for lack of prey, and the cubs of the lioness are scattered.”

Job’s friend believed that his situation was a direct result of something he’d done or some sin he’d committed. He interpreted Job’s testing to be punishment, and in order for a just God to dish out punishment, the individual must have committed some grievous act for which punishment was warranted.

Eliphaz’s understanding of how things work was more akin to karma than it was to how the God of all things, He who created the seen and unseen realms alike, operates. If you plow iniquity and sow trouble, that’s what you’ll reap. Do good, and good will come to you. What’s the saying the hippies have? You get back whatever you put out into the world! Good vibes, brother. I’m not saying you should be going around kicking kittens and stealing children’s lunches when they aren’t looking. Yes, you should strive to be noble, virtuous, kind, empathetic, and helpful, but the reason for being these things shouldn’t be the expectation of some mystical exchange of kind for kind, but because it’s the right thing to do.

It’s the reason many believers find themselves in the perfect environment for bitterness to sprout and grow in their hearts. They fall for the promises of charlatans wherein not only are they to expect kind for kind but they’re also told to expect a return on their investment here on earth. It started with the hundredfold return and worked its way up to the thousand-fold return. I mean, who’d pass up that kind of deal? Give a dollar to the sweaty man in the silk suit and gold rings on his fingers, and in no time flat, you’ll get back a thousand. 

Even though they knew of his integrity and that he was a man who feared God and shunned evil, because of their preconceived notion that God would not allow tragedy to befall someone had they not transgressed, Job’s friends concluded that there had been some hidden sin he was guilty of that brought this travail upon him. Since you’re in a spot of trouble, then you must have sown these things at some point. This was Eliphaz’s conclusion because he did not have the mind of God, nor did he understand that their ways differed fundamentally.

The inconsistency between what people in the West are being told they should expect once they become believers and what those of the body of Christ are enduring in regions of the world and entire continents has always been present. What has changed in recent years is that those of the West who glut themselves on fineries and live a life of such duplicity that the devil doesn’t even bother with them are looking down their noses and condemning those currently being persecuted, accusing them of not having enough faith to speak the persecution away and bring on themselves riches and prosperity. It would seem Eliphaz had sons and daughters, and they had sons and daughters, too, and most of them migrated to the West and became members of mega-churches. They assume it’s lack of faith that has brought hardship upon believers in other lands and not the refining of their faith.

Conventional wisdom isn’t always beneficial. When we try to apply conventional wisdom to spiritual things, we often err and, in so doing, position ourselves in opposition to the will and word of God. That we’ve been trying for the past half-century to fuse the two, insisting that they are interchangeable, has only served to confuse and distract the average Christian from pursuing the righteousness of God, refocusing their passions from the things above to the things of this earth anew.

The constant onslaught of prosperity preaching, prosperity thinking, and prosperity living is not as innocuous as some might hope because it redefines and reimagines what it is to be a servant of God, thereby making us bristle and resist every time the testing of the Lord comes upon us, and we do not experience the easy, carefree life we were promised by those we deem to be honest arbiters of the Word, and ambassadors of Christ upon the earth.

When we take a personal opinion or a personal conviction and attempt to generalize it, broad-brushing the entirety of Christendom and insisting that they make it the salvific issue it’s not, we are no better than Job’s friends, who, having started out trying to comfort him, ended up insisting that he’d done something to cause this calamity to come upon him.

If it’s not a salvific issue, don’t make it a salvific issue. If you are ignorant of all the details or only see a piece of the puzzle before you and not the whole, don’t assume that you know what you’ve not been given to know or sit in judgment of someone because it’s not your place.

Job had not sinned. God said as much. Neither with his lips nor his actions, yet here were his friends insisting that he had. While Eliphaz was the first to address Job, he would not be the last, and as we dive into the words they spoke to Job, we can see the difference in their temperament coming to the fore.

By his words and inferences, we can discern that Eliphaz was a moralist through and through. For him, life was black and white, cut and dry, and the entire foundation of his discourse was that the righteous man prospers, and the sinner suffers. Do good, and good will come to you. Do evil, and you will reap evil. It’s the theory of reward or recompense in its simplest form. He could not allow that something beyond his understanding could be taking place in Job’s life or that God had allowed these things to happen to him for some other reason than that of punishment.

 Even though he started out in a conciliatory fashion, Eliphaz’s tone quickly shifted, and though the question wasn’t asked outright, the subtext was clear: What did you do? It had to have been something grievous. It had to have been something so horrendous as to stir the anger of God Himself. Remember now, who ever perished being innocent? Ergo, you cannot be innocent since you are perishing!

Since the upright is never cut off, and you have been, is it perhaps because you were no longer upright? These were not words spoken in haste. Eliphaz had seven days of silence to work through his thought process, and because he’d never seen someone in such torment without being able to point to their lack of uprightness, he assumed it was the case with Job.

It’s one thing for someone to realize that their sin has brought them to a low place and robbed them of their health, their peace, and their joy. It’s another thing entirely to know you’ve remained blameless and unspotted by sin and yet endure the things Job was enduring. If not for absolute trust in the sovereignty of God, no man could withstand what Job was going through, including Job.

That we serve a good God must be a fundamental truth we not only acknowledge but embrace and allow to take root in the depth of our hearts. The assurance of His goodness and faithfulness, the unshakeable belief that whatever it is we are going through is working a good thing in us, must be the ever-present reality we reside in. God isn’t good just some of the time, or when He pours out blessings upon us, but is so even in the season of trial and purification. God never ceases to be good. It is a constant. He never ceases to be loving. It is His nature.

If the theory that our perception of a thing shapes its reality holds true, then how we see the trials of life goes a long way toward shaping how we react to them.  

Both Job’s integrity and reverence for God were such that had he known himself to have sinned, he would have repented and humbled himself in the sight of the Lord. He feared God and shunned evil. He knew God well enough to know that a bruised reed He would not break.

Do I believe Job’s friends were trying to dispirit him? No, they’d invested too much time and put in too much effort to have done it with nefarious intent, but they had yet to encounter someone whose situation and circumstance did not directly correlate to their actions. This was a new experience for them, and in their attempt to puzzle it out, their conclusion was that Job had sinned, and so incurred the wrath of God.

When someone is struggling, even an innocuous, seemingly innocent remark can cause ripples in their heart because they perceive every experience through the prism of their pain and hardship. In their suffering, they become hyper-sensitive and hyper-aware of every word spoken and every action undertaken by those around them. It’s not intentional, at least in most cases it isn’t; it’s the natural reaction of one who has been beaten down into the dust, wondering where the next blow is coming from.

Granted, there are those who revel in victimhood nowadays, who perceive everything in the worst possible light, and attempt to find threads to pull at, whether real or imaginary, but this was not the case with Job, especially given the cultural environment his story transpired in.

It’s the easiest thing in the world to get polemical when we encounter someone who is struggling, being tested, tried, and going through a season of refining. Not only does it make some people feel spiritually superior, but it also justifies their unwillingness to reach into the dust and pull someone out of their pain. It takes more effort to pull someone to their feet and let them lean on you, dirty, broken, and disheveled as they may be, than it does to kick someone when they’re down.

Every time we open our mouths and speak, we make the conscious choice of using a cleaver or a scalpel. Even when correction is valid and warranted, the way in which we deliver it can make the difference between whether one receives it or rejects it altogether. In some instances, all that is required is a salve and some bandages because the wounds are grievous, and making fresh cuts is unwarranted and needlessly cruel.

Be wise in weighing your words because death and life are in the power of the tongue. I’ve seen seemingly well-meaning people do the devil’s job for him once too often to brush off the importance of the words we speak to those who are hurting. I’ve seen what little remained of the light in people’s eyes go out entirely because rather than be comforted in their grief or offered a semblance of hope in their despair, the individual in question chose to pour salt on the wound by the words they spoke.

We’ve all been there. We’ve all been eager to give someone a piece of our mind, set them straight, and tell them what we really think about one thing or another, but if our mind is in conflict with God’s purpose, and our thoughts are not in harmony with His thoughts, it is a far better thing to keep silent and allow for the possibility that we only know one side of the story, and as such are unqualified to pass judgment.

At best, we are operating on partial information. All we can go on is what our eyes see, our ears hear, and precedent relating directly to the circumstance the individual in question is dealing with. It’s not that God may know something you don’t; it’s that God surely does. It is a certainty beyond doubt, and using wisdom and humility when dealing with friends, family, brothers, or sisters in Christ who are going through hardship is paramount if our desire is to be a comfort and a voice of reason.

With love in Christ,

Michael Boldea, Jr. 

 Give credit where credit is due. Job’s friends sat with him in silence for seven days, then listened as he poured out the travail of his heart without interrupting him or trying to stimmy him, but now, Eliphaz the Temanite took up the charge and addressed him. Even so, his first question was, “If one attempts a word with you, will you become weary?”

It’s evident that Job’s friends respected him, not so much through their words but through their actions. Even when planning to push back on Job’s words, Eliphaz deferred to him in a manner reminiscent of a little brother attempting to broach a difficult subject with an older one.

It’s likewise evident that these friends had a long history and knew of each other’s exploits because the first thing Eliphaz attempts to remind Job of was all the times he’d instructed others and strengthened weak hands. Job had not insulated and isolated himself. He’d not removed himself from the lives of those around him even though he’d been the greatest of all the people of the East. He’d neither looked down on his contemporaries nor had an air of superiority about him because of his wealth, but throughout his years, his words had upheld he who was stumbling, and he’d strengthened the feeble knees.

Now it was his turn to be on the receiving end of encouragement, of strengthening, of needing his hands to be strengthened, and it was a new and uncomfortable position for him to be in. Within any family or congregation, there will be those who are always encouraging and those constantly in need of encouragement. If you think on it for any length of time, you can readily divide the people you know into one of these two groups.

And this is where I can obfuscate or generalize, and it would be easier for me to do it, but I must admit I’m one of the people in the former category for whom it is very difficult to ask for help, accept help, or admit that I need encouragement on occasion. No, it has nothing to do with toxic masculinity, a modern-day contrivance meant to feminize men to the point of androgyny, or some ever-present need to be a rock for everyone around me; it’s just how it’s always been, and I’ve gotten accustomed to it to the point of being uncomfortable in any other role.

It’s not something I signed up for or volunteered for, but rather something I fell into from a young age. Being the first to learn English in my family when we first came to America, I was always called upon to be the fixer. Whether calling the electric company for an explanation about an uncommonly large bill or dealing with insurance agents after someone hit our car in a parking lot, signing my brothers up for the lunch program at school, or translating my grandfather’s life story, whenever there was a problem, Mike was expected to be an integral part of the resolution even though he was not yet a teenager at the time.

It forced me to forfeit a childhood and grow up before my time, but sometimes, you don’t have a choice in how your life plays out; you just hang on for the ride and hope it’s not too bumpy. I didn’t mind it then, and I don’t mind it now, but it has made me almost incapable of being vulnerable enough to show it when I need encouragement. Somehow, my wife always knows, but wives always do. Other than her, and perhaps my little brother on occasion, no one can tell.

When the ones always doing the encouraging come to the point of needing encouragement themselves, it can be discombobulating and odd because they’ve never been on that side of the aisle. They’ve never needed to hear words of encouragement, or having to have their hands strengthened, and the idea of depending on the strength of others because their own strength has failed them is foreign to them.

As the song goes, everybody needs somebody sometimes, and for some of us, the hardest part is acknowledging the need and having the requisite humility to allow someone to meet it. It’s not as though Job could wave off his friends and insist it wasn’t as bad as it looked. He’d already poured his pain out before them, so now all he could do was sit and listen.

Given that Job’s friends were just as in the dark about why he was going through the trial he was going through as he was, they’d concluded that Job had done something to stir the ire of God against him or that he had sinned. It’s the conclusion most people jump to when they hear of someone’s misfortune or hardship, and they’re quick to voice their opinion whenever called upon to do so. More often than not, they’ll voice their opinion even if no one asked for it because they deem their wisdom indispensable.

Granted, there are situations people go through as a direct consequence of their sin or rebellion, but that is neither a trial nor a test. It’s the crossroad where actions meet the consequences thereof, and what many who get exposed try to do is repurpose their sin and call it a trial in the hope of garnering sympathy.

Because they had never run across someone who had been brought so low as to curse the day of their birth, nor someone for whom their situation was not the direct result of their sinful ways, Job’s friends assumed there was some hidden sin he had yet to confess, or something he’d done which had angered God to the point of causing him to sit on an ash heap and scratch at himself with a potsherd.

Assuming that you know the reason behind someone’s trial is akin to declaring yourself to be omniscient, and we know that only God is all-knowing because His word says as much. What’s worse is that oftentimes, we are so certain of our conclusion that even when it is proven to be wrong, we nevertheless cling to it because we think admitting otherwise would somehow diminish us. If you’ve ever wondered how a self-righteous, sanctimonious, self-aggrandizing, and unloving spirit has its genesis, now you know.

Just because we see someone going through a fiery trial, we cannot automatically assume they have sinned or rebelled against God. It’s a lesson worth learning and applying lest others assume likewise when we ourselves are being tested.  

With love in Christ,

Michael Boldea, Jr. 

 Job 4:1-7, “Then Eliphaz the Temanite answered and said: “If one attempts a word with you, will you become weary? But who can withhold himself from speaking? Surely you have instructed many, and you have strengthened weak hands. Your words have upheld him who was stumbling, and you have strengthened the feeble knees; But now it comes upon you, and you are weary; It touches you, and you are troubled. Is not your reverence your confidence? And the integrity of your ways your hope? Remember now, who ever perished being innocent? Or where were the upright ever cut off?”

Not every problem has a simple solution, and not every question has a simple answer. Life is messy. You can’t just wrap it up in a nice little bow, throw some mantra or daily affirmation stickers on it, and walk around with a glazed look in your eyes and a goofy smile on your face. We’ve gotten used to expecting resolutions to the most complex of problems in sixty minutes flat because if the TV show I’ve been watching can manage to track the killer to Alaska from a nose hair he left at the scene after unthinkingly flicking a booger, why can’t all of life’s problems be as easy to solve?

We’re taken aback when the good guy doesn’t show up to save the damsel in distress because that’s what happens in the movies. It may be that, in some cases, life imitates art, but in others, it couldn’t be further from the truth. We’ve seen enough to know that you can’t always bank on human compassion, decency, empathy, or selflessness. The more time passes, the worse it gets, and there have been instances when, rather than helping someone floundering out of a lake or getting them out of the road once they’ve been hit by a car, the bystanders do nothing more than pull out their phones and film it. We’ve gotten so used to people documenting tragedy, whether for posterity or their ghoulish desire to replay it for friends and strangers alike, that their absence of humanity in those situations no longer registers.

We keep beating our chests, insisting that we are the most caring, compassionate generation to ever grace the face of the earth, but facts prove otherwise. Our humanity is stripped away daily, replaced by callousness, selfishness, and entitlement, to the point that as long as I get mine, it doesn’t matter how many people it hurts as a consequence.

The only segment of the population to have retained their empathy throughout our decline of humanity has been the household of faith, not because we were inherently different people than those of the world but because we’ve been transformed into the image of Christ, who is the prototype of what the pinnacle of the human experience ought to be. To be more like Jesus is to be less like the world.

While the world covets what they do not have, we are thankful for every grace that has been given to us, knowing from whose hand it comes. While the world is obsessed with acquiring ever more, whether it’s fame, fortune, accolades, or influence, we are content and satisfied with desiring only more of God. We are different because we can’t help but be different. We are a peculiar people to those of the world because what animates and energizes them is not so with us, and what drives us is different than what drives them.

If we have been set apart, plucked from the darkness of sin, and brought into His glorious light, then our actions, aspirations, and desires must be different than those of the world by the very nature of what we have become in Him.

When you see a self-professing vegan chowing down on a steak every time you run into them, you’re forced to conclude that they’re either lying about their veganism or they don’t know what it means to be a vegan. The same goes for self-professing Christians in whom there is no discernable difference from the godless they associate with except for the fish sticker on their car. They’re either lying to themselves, or they don’t know what it means to be redeemed, reborn, saved, and sanctified.

Verbal consent that you received Jesus without denying yourself, picking up your cross, and following after Him, allowing Him to mold you, sculpt you, and renew your mind and heart, only means that you spoke a lie.

There are no caveats or carveouts to committing your way unto the Lord and following where He leads you. You can’t say you will follow only so long as where He leads is where you intended to go in the first place. Your destination, desire, and will do not start out in harmony with His. It is as you consistently submit and obey Him that they begin to harmonize, and your will no longer has sway, but the desire of your heart is that His will be done in all things.

In all things, Jesus served as an example for us. He was not of the do as I say, not as I do school of thought, and so throughout His ministry, He made Himself an example for us and the ideal we should aim to emulate. Thrice He prayed in the garden of Gethsemane for the cup to pass from Him if it were possible, and each time, He ended with “not as I will but as You will, Father.”

If Jesus deferred and submitted to the will of the Father regarding something so soul-wrenching as death by crucifixion, why do we have such a difficult time submitting to His will regarding far less strenuous things in our lives? It’s not as though His desire is to needlessly hurt us or cause us harm but rather to purify us and sculpt us ever more into His likeness.

It’s never the spiritual man that bristles at God’s correction or despises His chastening. It’s always the flesh because it knows that with every iteration of God’s reproof, it will become that much weaker and less able to assert dominance or influence over the individual. The flesh isn’t being magnanimous or kind-hearted when it tries to circumvent the chastening of God; it’s trying to protect its power and influence. It’s whispering sweet nothings in your ear while planning your destruction. Do not give heed to your flesh, for it will always seek to draw you away from God.

With love in Christ,

Michael Boldea, Jr.  

 I woke up with a thought I just can’t shake: If God allowed Job to be tested to the point of wishing he were never born, while by God’s standard, he was a blameless and upright man, what will be the lot of those who reject Him, despise Him, mock Him, and trample the Son of God underfoot? It is a fearful thing to consider.

By his own admission, Job had played the what-if game in his mind, and now his worst fears had come to life. Satan had been given leeway to the point of touching everything in Job’s life, including his flesh, and he’d gone about the task with the ferocity of a predator bent on destroying its prey. His goal was to prove God wrong, and the only way he could accomplish this was by putting enough pressure on Job so as to make him curse God, deem Him unjust, or sin with his lips. All three would have been preferable, but had he gotten Job to do just one of these things, Satan would have considered it a win.

The enemy knows your weaknesses. He knows your pressure points and the sensitive areas of your life that could be exploited and picked at. If you say you have no weaknesses, you’re fooling yourself and making for easier prey. Rather than play at hyper-spirituality, our time would be better spent identifying those areas in our lives that need shoring up and proceeding to do it diligently and without delay.

Satan knows what makes you tick. He knows your deepest fears and preys upon them, hoping to fuel them and grow them beyond what the situation reasonably calls for. He also knows the things your flesh gravitated toward before you nailed it to the cross. You belonged to him before you belonged to Jesus, and his memory of what had you shackled before you were freed is fresh on his mind. When we underestimate the enemy’s cunning and knowledge of us, we are not as watchful as we ought to be, thereby offering him an opportunity to plant seeds of destruction anew.

Constant vigil is not a suggestion; it’s a command. Jesus commanded us to be watchful and to pray that we might not fall into temptation. This implies that the danger is real, and the constant onslaught of the enemy is something we must be aware of. When we fail to obey the commands and edicts of Christ, we do so at our peril. He told us what we must do to remain steadfast and resolute. It is not one of many options; it is the only option.

Other than Job, there was one other who cursed the day he was born in the entirety of the Bible, and that is Jeremiah, also known as the weeping prophet. Elisha came close, wanting to die but never taking that extra step and cursing the day he was born. Numerically speaking, it’s a small club compared to how many men are highlighted throughout the pages of Scripture. It’s not that Job and Jeremiah were weaker than Samuel, David, Joshua, Elijah, or Daniel, but the level of their testing and depth of their pain was such that they poured out their groaning in the form of a verbalized heart cry.

Some years ago, my grandpa’s brother’s son, Ion, came to visit. That would make him a second uncle, but I’m unsure about family lineages beyond the immediate family. At the time, he pastored the church in our home village, and to the best of my knowledge, he still does. Since it was getting late, I offered to take him to dinner, and he graciously accepted. While waiting for our food to arrive, he shared a story about one of his parishioners, which changed my outlook on how much time I spent praying for others. Her name was Sister Aurica. She was well into her eighties, arthritic, with the bowed back emblematic of anyone who’s been working a field from the time they were old enough to hold a garden hoe.

Every time she came to prayer, she carried her Bible and a notebook under her arm, in which she had lists upon lists of names she would pray for every service. When Ion asked about the notebook and what it was for, she said she was getting on in age and didn’t want to risk forgetting any of the names on her list. When he inquired why she never prayed for herself and always for others, she shrugged and said, “Because I’m selfish, I guess. I’d rather be the one praying for others than be in the position of needing others to pray for me.”

Being called upon to pray for someone is neither a burden nor a chore. It is a grace. If you would have others pray for you in your time of need or testing, then as a fellow brother or sister in Christ, you must reciprocate the action.  

As I’ve said, I don’t know what it’s like to be so beaten down as to curse the day I was born, but I can sympathize. Taking the aggregate of these men’s lives into consideration and the trials they went through, I can’t bring myself to be so brazen or callous as to call them weak. Weakness is when you give up. It’s when you waive the white flag of surrender and stop fighting for what you know to be true and noble. Weakness is cowardice masquerading as tolerance, and rebellion masquerading as inclusion.

Job was not weak, and neither was Jeremiah. They were hurting, in pain, shattered, bruised, weary, and at the end of their tether, but they pressed on, pressed in, and clung to their abiding faith. It’s easy to judge from the outside looking in. Some among us relish the opportunity to do so because it makes us feel superior somehow. We tell ourselves we’d never go so far as to curse the day we were born, no matter what, having never had to endure what Job did. You never know until you know.

Peter thought he was stronger than he was, insisting that even if he had to die for Him, he would never deny Jesus, only to do it thrice a handful of hours later. We can either beat our chests or bow our knees. We can either pray for strength from above or trust in our own. What we come to realize is that our strength is insufficient in such circumstances, while His strength is more than enough.

The trials we could never hope to get through on our own are navigable with God beside us. It doesn’t mean they will be easy or that we won’t be hard-pressed, but by clinging to Him, we are able to make it to shore while others who trusted in themselves never make it through. Friends, family, acquaintances, or your next-door neighbor can only do so much; God can do all things. Men can offer words; God offers peace. Family can be a shoulder to cry on; God wipes away the tears. Make Him the refuge of your heart.

 Job 3:20-26, “Why is light given to him who is in misery, and lie to the bitter soul, who long for death, but it does not come, and search for it more than hidden treasures; Who rejoice exceedingly, and are glad when they can find the grave? Why is light given to a man whose way is hidden and whom God has hedged in? For my sighing comes before I eat, and my groanings pour out like water. For the thing I greatly feared has come upon me, and what I dreaded has happened to me. I am not at ease, nor am I quiet; I have no rest, for trouble comes.”

We’ve all had some version of the worst-case scenario play on a loop in the back of our minds. Some of us are better at controlling the impulse to freefall into the hypothetical landscape of what the worst day of our lives might look like, while others spend their lives mapping out ever more horrendous scenarios.

I do not live in fear of what may be tomorrow because the God I serve, the Lord and King of my life, is already there making a way for me. Some men are crippled by the fear of what may be or what could be, to the point that they remain static, unmoving, making no progress in their spiritual walk or growing their spiritual man.

I’ve been living with the reality of imminent judgment for forty years now. It is a truth the harbingers of which we are seeing play out before our eyes. Had I allowed fear to dictate my actions, I’d still be digging a spider hole in the backyard and making sure it’s well stocked and ready to be moved into. Fear of tomorrow has no place in the heart of a follower of Christ. Your life is forfeit; it is no longer yours to do as you will, but His to do with as He wills. I can no more control the course my life takes than I can control the course of the Mississippi River.

My singular priority is obedience. If by my obedience I incur the wrath of the godless, so be it. If by my obedience I suffer the loss of material things, so be it. My duty to God isn’t to navigate my way through life in such a way that I don’t ruffle the devil’s feathers or put a target on my back. It is to stand firm on the truth of Scripture, even if it means losing everything.

It’s a sad day indeed when men whose singular responsibility is to rightly divide the Word omit salvific truth for fear of reprisal. Had those of the early church shared this mindset, it never would have gotten off the ground. Rather than come together and pray for boldness, the disciples would have called a meeting to see how they could best appease the Pharisees so as not to be dragged into prison and beaten again.

Acknowledge, accept, and make your peace with the reality that there is a cost to speaking the truth. Understanding that there is a cost, your next step will be your willingness to pay it, full freight, the whole tab, no layaways, discounts, or twelve easy monthly payments. Some men commit to the way, never being told of the cost required but only about the benefits they will incur. If you get someone to raise a hand at a crusade or attend a church under false pretenses, making false promises that will never materialize, not only will they eventually relapse into their old ways, but there will be a layer of bitterness that wraps around their heart because even though they were paying their tithe, their acne didn’t clear, their truck didn’t stop making that weird noise, and their dog didn’t make it past the fifteen-year mark, as promised.

The road is hard, the way is narrow, the enemy is real, trials are ever present, temptations abound, hardships are a given, and being hated and maligned for His name’s sake is par for the course. There’s even a good chance you will be martyred for the sake of Christ at some point in the near future. That’s what you’re signing up for, and anyone who tells you differently is trying to soften the blow in the hope of getting you to sign on.

You can’t trick people into heaven. This isn’t like selling a timeshare where you fail to inform the buyer that their children and their children’s children will be on the hook forevermore and that the low cost is just an introductory offer that expires in six months.

But we need new blood. Most of our attendees won’t be around in ten years, and we have more funerals than baby dedications in our church in a given month. We need to do something to get the numbers up. Lying to people about what they should expect once they receive their membership packet isn’t the way to do it, though.

Rather than try to bait and switch someone into coming to church, why not try something that’s been proven every time it was implemented? Fast and pray as a body, cry out to God for more of Him, stand on the truth of the Gospel without being swayed by sentiment or shifting cultural norms, and declare the name of Jesus as the only way, the only truth, and the only life. Jesus should never be relegated to the position of an extra or someone with a walk-on role whenever we need to pump up the offering numbers. He must be the message, the focus, the one individual whose presence is indispensable every time you come together in fellowship. The permanence of Christ as the head of the body, the chief cornerstone, the Good Shepherd, the risen Lord, and the soon-coming King is non-negotiable.

A congregation can lack talented praise and worship teams, comfortable seating, children’s programs, and even a charismatic preacher, but if they have Jesus, they have everything they need. If, however, Jesus is absent, no matter how structured, well-organized, stylized, and glamorous, they are, by Christ’s own words, wretched, miserable, poor, blind, and naked. Those in the latter category can pretend to be something other than empty and hollow, but when the rubber meets the road, their true nature is exposed for all to see.  

With love in Christ,

Michael Boldea, Jr. 

 If life has no meaning beyond the present, beyond what one can consume, amass, and feel physically, no matter how much time one devotes to the fleeting pleasures of this world, hoping they will suffice as a substitute for the hollowness within, then we should all be equally miserable, despondent, and unhinged from reality. If there is no hope beyond the now and no meaning to life other than to glut ourselves and drown ourselves in wine, then nothing would matter enough to animate us in any fashion or bring us any semblance of joy. It’s why I believe atheists to be the most pitiable, saddest people walking the earth, because to them, this is all there is, and it’s not that grand, and when it’s over, lights out, you’re done, adios and arrivederci. Make sure you have enough in your bank account to cover cremation, and hope some distant relative will take time out of their busy day to spread your ashes somewhere other than the drain.

I get it; if all someone’s got to show for a lived life is a handful of STDs, a once shiny, now rusty convertible, and that one story about when they think they ate blowfish in Japan but suspect it was tuna, the regret they feel is justified. What isn’t justified is their insistence that their life is as good as it gets rather than being the vapid thing it was. It may be the only way they have of coping with their reality, but I don’t have to be party to it. Sorry, Sparky, your life story isn’t aspirational; it’s a cautionary tale. You wasted the life you were gifted pursuing things that left you just as empty after acquiring them as before, and now the end is near, and you’re starting to rethink all the snarky things you said and the mockery you heaped upon those who tried to tell you about a Savior that forgives and restores. Who needs Jesus when you’ve got Jim Beam? Remember that one? You came up with that zinger it all by yourself.

The truth is that people have tried to drown out the still, small voice whispering memento mori, mute it, or smother it with every sin and vice under the sun, but eventually, they lose their appeal and their ability to distract from the ever-present reality of the individual’s mortality. Save for the Lord returning, one day I will die, as will you, and each of us will have to contend with the eternity that follows.

Some have come to terms with their eventual demise. Even so, they try to convince others of their happiness by insisting that they should eat, drink, and be merry, for tomorrow they will die, not realizing that at some point, there will be no tomorrow and that judgment awaits beyond the veil. If money were a valid substitute for meaning and purpose, then no rich people would have a double portion of buckshot for lunch, ever. Yet, they do. Either that, or they leap from bridges and buildings, walk into traffic, take a fistful of pills, hoping it’s the last thing they’ll do, and the list goes on because we grow ever more inventive regarding the means of our own destruction. While some struggle to survive and claw at the dirt in the hope they don’t starve, others who’ve made money their defacto god and surrogate purpose in life can’t wait to leave it all behind and be done with it.

If the things the grinning faces on television telling you will make you happy really did, why are they all so miserable? If there is genuine contentment in fame or fortune, why are they constantly in rehab, on suicide watch, or descending into such debauchery or hedonism as to make a Roman senator during the peak of the empire blush? That fake, plastic smile does nothing to take away from their dead eyes, and you can tell without really trying that the depth of their misery knows no bounds.

It’s not working anymore. The playbook is tattered and worn from overuse, and the minions the enemy employs to drive the narrative that hedonism is the only true joy in life can no longer bring themselves to fake sincerity. We’ve seen previous iterations of Satan’s ambassadors spiral into despair too often to believe anything that comes out of their mouths anymore. Their influence is waning; they’ve lost their grip on being able to construct a believable narrative, and they know it. Those insisting most stringently that they’re happy, they really are, are, in point of fact, the most miserable souls among us.

Money can’t buy you love or sincere affection. It can’t crawl up on your lap and kiss you on the cheek even though your beard is scruffy, and they scrunch up their nose because it tickles. Fancy as it may be, a car can’t crawl into bed next to you for a snuggle and a bedtime story.

The things that matter most in life, the things that bring purpose and joy, meaning and fulfillment, are free not because they’re worthless but because they’re priceless. You can’t put a price on holding your newborn or growing old with the person you love. Conversely, you can’t put a price on salvation either. That’s why God offers it for free to those who receive His Son, believe in Him, and surrender their lives.

When people with no hope mock your hope, all you can do is shrug your shoulders and move on. There are only so many times someone can slap your hand away as you’re trying to pull them from the mire before you realize they don’t want out. They just want to be told the quicksand they find themselves in will not be harmful to their existence, and they get angry when you insist that it will kill them. I’ve been called unloving more times than I can count for doing nothing more untoward than calling sin by name and pointing to the Scriptures as proof and validation of my assertions.

We cannot discount the Word of God just to appease someone’s bruised ego or feelings, just as we can’t call light dark because it’s too bright and makes another squint. The truth of Scripture will win out, and those who trust in the God of the Bible have a sure foundation upon which they can build their spiritual man.

With love in Christ,

Michael Boldea, Jr.  

 There is a purpose, and there is a plan, even when our human intellect cannot perceive them. If God Himself said that our ways are not His ways, and our thoughts are not His thoughts, then we have to allow for the reality that He will not go about accomplishing something the way we would have, by the same route, or in the same manner.

I keep returning to the idea that we must have absolute trust in the God we serve, and that level of trust can only come about if we know Him. A superficial understanding of the nature and character of God cannot bring you to a place of fully trusting Him. It’s easy to trust when all is well, and things are running smoothly. It’s far more challenging to do it when everything seems to be falling apart, and every avenue you take ends up being a dead-end road.

Sometimes, we ask questions to which we get no answer because we already know the answer; we’re just hoping for a different one. Last year, we got to do something I’d dreamt of doing since the girls were still in diapers. We got to go on a road trip. I know my dreams are simpler than other men’s, but it’s the way I’ve always been. I never dreamt of a Lamborghini, a gold-plated toilet, a palatial estate, or a private jet, but that road trip was something I wanted to do before the good Lord called me home, and it came together quite unexpectedly.

One of my wife’s clients has a condo in Florida, and on a whim, she asked if we wanted to go and spend a week there. Not one to turn down a free week on the beach, even if it was in December, we made the necessary plans, and when discussion of how we’d get there inevitably ensued, I told my wife I wanted to drive. She agreed, albeit grudgingly, and that was the end of that.

I should have known better than to expect my dream of a road trip to match the reality of it, but I was so enthusiastic about the prospect that I didn’t really think it through. Since we left at a little past midnight, the first few hours were everything I’d imagined: Me driving, my kids sleeping in their car seats, and my wife nodding off in the front.

Then the girls woke up, and the constant chorus of “Are we there yet?” started in earnest. Obviously, we weren’t there yet. We’d just gotten into Kentucky, and we had a way to go, but even after I explained it to them, it was as though they were stuck on replay, and every couple of minutes, they’d take turns asking the dreaded question.

At some point, I stopped answering because they already knew the answer. No, we weren’t there yet, and we wouldn’t be for at least another ten hours. If you already know the answer to the question you’re asking God but don’t want to acknowledge it in the hope that you’ll get a different answer, stop asking or be honest enough to tell Him you don’t like the answer He already gave you. However, instead of courting rebellion, my counsel would be to say, Lord, your will be done, and continue your journey of faith.

It’s disingenuous of us to think that God will change His mind on a given issue just because we make a nuisance of ourselves and keep asking the same thing over and over again. The way is the way, and the journey will last for as long as it must because the whole point of a journey is to reach your destination.

We can choose to be soldiers of the cross or temperamental children. We either put on the whole armor of God and defend the truth of the gospel against enemies from without and within or sit in the dust complaining that our piece of cake wasn’t big enough or that we didn’t get the special job we wanted, and let others fight the battle and reap the corresponding rewards.

No, it is not a sin to ask questions. It borders on sin, however, when having already received an answer, we keep asking the same question because we don’t like the answer we got. Either obey or don’t, but tempting God never ends well.

There are plenty of individuals within the contemporary church who’ve talked themselves into believing that they can do as they will and still be pleasing in the sight of God. In modern-day parlance, they believe they can have their cake and eat it too. Such individuals give certain Scriptures a wide berth because they contradict their fallacious beliefs, pretending as though they don’t exist.

One of the most damning passages regarding this mindset is found in the first chapter of Romans, where Paul warns that there are those among the brethren who exchanged the truth of God for the lie and worshipped the creature rather than the Creator.

Last week, I had to go back to the store and exchange a winter jacket I’d bought for my eldest daughter for a larger size. In order to receive the other jacket, I had to be in possession of the jacket I’d already purchased in order to exchange it. Paul isn’t referring to individuals who never knew the truth or were never in possession of it but who willingly exchanged the truth of God for the lie because they preferred the lie over the truth. It fit them better, and that mattered more to them than whether or not it was godly, truthful, or in line with Scripture.

When we are unwilling to allow the word of God to transform us, and when we bristle at the idea of being molded into a vessel of honor because we prefer to have it our way and reject the truth of Scripture due to its being inconvenient or offensive to the flesh, we choose to shrug off the truth and walk away from it to the cold embrace of the lie. You already know God disapproves; why try to stir His anger by asking if He’s willing to make an exception for you? He is not, and if a voice whispers in your ear that He is, it wasn’t His voice!

With love in Christ,

Michael Boldea, Jr. 

 Job 3:11-19, “Why did I not die at birth? Why did I not perish when I came from the womb? Why did the knees receive me? Or why the breasts, that I should nurse? For now I would have lain still and been quiet, I would have been asleep; Then I would have been at rest with kings and counselors of the earth, who built ruins for themselves, or with princes who had gold, who filled their houses with silver; Or why was I not hidden like a stillborn child, like infants who never saw light? There the wicked cease from troubling, and there the weary are at rest. There the prisoners rest together; they do not hear the voice of the oppressor. The small and great are there, and the servant is free from his master.”

We are all made equal in death. It doesn’t matter how we started, where we started, how far we got, how high we climbed, what we amassed, what we built, how famous we were, or how infamous; eventually, the grave beckons, the spark of life leaves the body, and we return to the earth from which we came. It takes a lot of pain to conclude that this would have been the best-case scenario for you as a person, wherein you query why it was that you didn’t die at birth.

It’s dark, to be sure, perhaps even unbearably bleak, but it just goes to show that Job was human. He felt pain like you and me, he felt joy like you and me, he felt loss like you and me, and in every way, he was as human as anyone walking the face of the earth today, yet it was within his ability to draw close enough to God and surrender himself to the point that God saw him as blameless and upright, fearing God and shunning evil.

Having been wealthy, Job saw the vanity of it, concluding that the best kings could manage was to build ruins for themselves and hoard and amass gold and silver they would never enjoy. If anything, Job’s discourse puts flesh on the statement Solomon would later make wherein he wrote, vanity of vanities, all is vanity.

It shouldn’t go unnoticed that two of the wealthiest men of their generation came to the same conclusion about material things and how impermanent they are. We can either take their counsel to heart or ignore it and go through the trauma of discovering the truth of their assertions on our own. Most people are stubborn and stiff-necked, thinking they can have a different outcome than those who came before them by doing the exact same thing. They won’t, but it will be years before they realize it. Then, rather than admit they were wrong, they’ll double down and keep pressing on to try to acquire things that bring them neither joy nor fulfillment.

Job’s grief followed its natural course. It’s not as though the inflection point of his life was delayed; his reaction to it was. After the shock of an unforeseen disaster wears off, the laments and lamentations begin, and once those are no more, the questions begin in earnest. The difference between Job’s questions and the questions of others in similar, if not comparable, situations is that while Job wondered out loud why he had not died at birth or perished when he came from the womb, most people walking about today would ask why tragedy had befallen them.

Job’s questions were of an existential nature rather than why a good God would allow evil to befall him, a man who had done his all to be upright in his conduct. This is not a distinction without a difference. We were told in the previous chapter that Job did not sin with his lips or charge God with wrong.

His stated position was that whether good or adversity, we must accept all things from God. That doesn’t mean he didn’t feel the pain or the loss, nor does it mean he was expected to be cheerful in his adversity and do cartwheels when the painful boils covered his entire body, but that he had settled in his heart that whatever came from the hand of God must be accepted without finding fault with Him.

It’s a tall order. Yes, I can sit here and pontificate, perhaps even wax poetic, but the reality is that while I’ve never gone through a season of trial wherein I found fault with God, I did wonder why He allowed it in my life. I had to determine whether it was a blessing, a test, or a correction and proceed accordingly.

The hardest one to wrap my mind around by far is a trial that, in the long run, turns out to be a blessing. You can’t see it when you’re in it. It’s near impossible to make sense of it, and while your mind is racing to find explanations, your spiritual man is insisting that you be still and know peace.

Before I met my wife, I was betrothed to another. For those of you not familiar with Shakespearean English, that means engaged. She was a pastor’s daughter, seemingly upstanding and of virtuous moral fiber, and wedding plans were well on their way before her cousin, of all people, called me while I was in the US, warning me that she’d been stepping out and had gotten serious with someone while I’d been away. It devastated me utterly. It was the only time in my life when I came close to having a panic attack. All the well-laid plans, dreams of a future with her as my wife, the conversations we’d had about how many children we wanted, and all the minutia that went along with courting someone went up in smoke and became as bitterness on my tongue in an instant.

I went to my grandfather, the only man I sought counsel from when things went sideways unexpectedly, and after telling him the story, he shrugged his shoulders and said, “Sometimes blessings don’t seem like blessings until you realize how much of a blessing they were.”

I respected him too much to give a flippant answer, but I had a few on deck in the back of my mind. I was heartbroken and near to despondent, and he was giving me fortune cookie anecdotes. Yes, I know, you can either curse the rain or buy an umbrella. If the sun is too bright, find a shady spot. You can’t drink water from a strainer. Got it, thanks. I thought it, but I didn’t say it.

During my next trip to Romania, I met the girl who would become my wife. In hindsight, twenty-five years in, with two beautiful daughters to show for it, I realize how much of a blessing my heartbreak was, and I thank God every day for it. Just because there is pain attached to an event or experience, it doesn’t mean it’s not a blessing in disguise or that it will not work together for good. Trust God. He knows what He’s doing.

With love in Christ, 

Michael Boldea, Jr.  

 The potter not only determines the shape or form the clay will take, but he also determines the timing of when the vessel is put into the fire and how long it remains there. None of those things are within my purview or yours. The only thing incumbent upon us, the only thing we have control over, is to not resist the molding process and give God free reign of our lives in all things. Whatever it is we attempt to hold back will be an ever-present hindrance in our relationship with God. All things means all things, even those things your flesh pines over or feels entitled to.

If you’ve ever watched a potter mold a piece of clay, you know it’s not a gentle process. Even before he begins to work the clay into some discernable shape, the potter kneads it, flattens it, folds it over on itself, and kneads it anew until it has the desired consistency. Only then does he begin to form the clay into a vessel of his choosing. All the while, the clay remains silent. The clay does not resist the kneading of the potter in any way but submits wholly to the process required for it to be transformed into something more than just a piece of clay.

I am neither the captain of my own ship nor am I the master of my destiny. You cannot possess such a grandiose mindset and still humble yourself to the point of submitting to the authority of God in all things. I am a servant called to serve. That’s the extent of my titles. I have a Master and I defer to Him, obey Him, and follow Him, knowing that obedience is worth eminently more than any sacrifice I may bring before Him. He does as He wills with my life, and I can rest in that knowledge because I know Him to be a good and gracious Master. The road may not always be easy, and at certain points, it can get downright treacherous, but the knowledge of who He is keeps me surefooted and at peace.

You cannot serve God without trusting Him. You cannot commit your way unto the Lord unless you love the Lord of the way. We’re constantly bombarded with new and inventive ways to get things from God, to twist His arm to do our bidding, without having established true intimacy with Him and without having a proper understanding of our relationship with Him. Save your fifty bucks for the online course on how to fast your way to wealth and buy someone hungry a hot meal instead. At least you’ll be storing up treasures in heaven and not subsidizing the lifestyle of an ignominious ghoul who sees you as nothing more than a piggy bank.

In case you were wondering, no, it doesn’t work. You can’t trick God into doing something contrary to His nature or something detrimental to your spiritual man even though your flesh really wants it. Some people get bitter because they want boatloads of money and never get it, never once, considering that in having acquired the wealth, their desire for God will fizzle out altogether. We don’t like to acknowledge the reality that perhaps God is doing us a favor by not giving us what we desire since it would dampen and diminish our desire for Him.

There is only one thing in this life that we can desire that God is ever willing to give us more of, and that’s Himself. But that’s not fair! Look at all these heathens burning through money as though it had an expiration date. Some guy just spent over six million dollars for a banana duct taped to a wall, which he then ate, and I’m having to sift through my car, hoping to find enough pocket change to get a gallon of gas for my Pinto. How’s that fair?

If life were about our time here on earth rather than eternity, it wouldn’t be. It’s not, though. That the contemporary church has managed to shift its focus from the things above to the things of this earth is not only detrimental and destructive but also the genesis of much bitterness in the hearts of those who ought not to be troubled or concerned about tomorrow. Say it with me: It’s not about this life, but the life to come.

It doesn’t matter how many bananas someone buys for millions of dollars; at the end of the day, we all end up in a box, in the dirt, nevermore to take a lungful of air or see another sunrise. Prince or pauper, the only difference between the two is how nice the box is. That’s when this flicker of a life ends, and eternity begins, and as is most often the case, once eternity begins to unwind, location is everything. Obsessing over things you can’t take with you is a wasted life without any purpose beyond the handful of years you’re given to walk this earth. Eternity and where we will spend it should be at the forefront of our thoughts and actions, knowing that the time we have here is finite and fleeting, and once it’s done, there is no rewind button.

There are no redos; you can’t start over again and wish as we may to go back and redeem the time we wasted in pursuit of something other than eternity; it’s impossible. We tend to dwell on the things we can’t change as an excuse and delaying tactic to put off the things we can. It’s not a natural byproduct of human nature. It’s the enemy’s way of trying to run out the clock because he knows there is no hope of redress after we have gone from this earth. What we do with the handful of years we’ve been given while we are here will determine where we spend eternity. For some, this is a reason for rejoicing; for others, it is a source of constant dread.

No one has looked back on their lives and wished they’d served God less, obeyed Him less or trusted Him less. Even when faced with their imminent demise at the hands of their executioners, those who established the Lord in their hearts and surrendered their will to His did so joyfully, knowing the reward which awaited them. Things that matter, matter, and nothing matters more than knowing that you’ve been bought with a price, saved and sanctified, redeemed by the blood of the Lamb, born again in Him, through Him, and by Him.

When we lay hold of this truth, the things of this earth, the trials of this present life, the testings, and the hardships will grow strangely dim in the light of His glory and grace. This is why we can retain the joy of the Lord amid sorrow and the peace that surpasses all understanding amid chaos.

With love in Christ,

Michael Boldea, Jr.  

 Unless you’ve gone through it, the best any of us can hope for is an abstract understanding of what the sifting is. The reality of it, its crushing weight, and the constant buffeting with seemingly no end in sight must be experienced in order to be understood. It’s like someone explaining the difficulties of crossing the Atlantic on a single-passenger sailboat. Sure, you can get an idea of the level of difficulty with being alone on the stormy seas for weeks on end, but unless you’ve experienced the sunburn, cracked lips, anxiousness, isolation, seasickness, and privation, you only know the half of it.

There’s a reason ‘you had to be there to understand’ is a saying. Some things cannot be adequately explained unless they are experienced, and nothing less than the experience will suffice.

The notion of being sifted is not exclusive to Job or even to the Old Testament. It’s not a practice God decided to do away with or no longer allow because the idea of it didn’t poll well when it was peer-reviewed. The misconception that God is somehow subject to our feelings and emotions is ludicrous on its face but ever popular in the modern-day church. We’ve talked ourselves into believing that since we have no appetite for suffering, sifting, or testing, God’s just going to eliminate those things from our lives.

Luke 22:31-32, “Simon, Simon, Satan has asked to sift all of you as wheat. But I have prayed for you, Simon, that your faith may not fail. And when you have turned back, strengthen your brothers.”

Okay, fine, so two guys. One in the Old Testament and one in the New. That doesn’t make it a common practice, does it? Read those two verses carefully, and you’ll realize it’s not just two guys. It wasn’t just Job and Simon, who would later be known as Peter. Satan had asked to sift all of them as wheat. Jesus singled out Simon in telling him that he’d been praying for him that his faith would not fail, yet as far as the sifting goes, Satan had asked to sift all of them.

Being sifted and having Satan ask to sift the servants of God is not an exception but the rule. These were the guys, Christ’s inner circle, those whom He called by name and spent the last three years of His life ministering with, yet when Satan asked that they be sifted, his request was not denied. Jesus didn’t say Satan asked to sift all of you as wheat, but I got your back and told him no.

Knowing what the future held for Peter, knowing he would deny Jesus three times before the rooster crowed that day, knowing how wrecked he would be once that happened, Jesus encouraged him the only way He could: by telling him, He’d prayed that his faith might not fail.

God determines how far He will let Satan go and the lengths to which he will sift a given individual, but at some point in life, most of us go through it. Are there exceptions? I’m sure there are, but I haven’t met one yet. The firing process makes clay stronger. Without it, it remains fragile and porous. If you are determined to serve God, if Jesus is established on the throne of your heart, the day will come when Satan will ask to sift you.

In that moment, all you have is the faith and trust you’ve built up over the course of your spiritual walk and nothing more. When the sifting begins, it’s too late to grow, press in, mature, or deepen your understanding of the God you serve. Peter already possessed faith; Jesus prayed that his faith would not fail.

We put off the important things, thinking we have forever to implement them, nurture them, and grow them. We know having a prayer life is necessary for the health of our spiritual man, but something always comes up, and we delay the consistent practice of going before God and having fellowship with Him until something happens, and all the distractions melt away, and we find ourselves with nothing but time to sit in our prayer closets, weep and groan and call out to Him pleading for an intervention of some sort. Where were you before the storm clouds? Where were you before the thing that made your world turn on its ear happened in an instant?

Situational relationships are nothing more than usury. If the only time I approach God is when I need something from Him, it’s neither love nor the desire to know Him fueling my pursuit but rather desperation. Seek to know God, make time for Him, and fellowship with Him with as much enthusiasm and desire during your days of plenty as you would in your time of famine, and when the time of famine arrives, He will be present without having been called.

If we think we can ignore God for six days out of the week and pay Him lip service on the seventh, and that’s all it takes to have a firmly rooted relationship with Him, we’re fooling ourselves. I have a friend who’s a bit on the chunky side and doesn’t take care of himself at all until the week before he’s due for his annual physical. That’s when he gets serious, cuts out the sugar and the carbs, starts to move beyond his front door, and gets a little exercise in the hope that he can fool the blood analysts into giving him a clean bill of health. I keep telling him that’s not the way it works, but my counsel falls on deaf ears because he insists it’s worked in the past, and so it will again. That level of self-delusion will eventually be shattered, but by then, it will be too late.

You don’t get on a flight and only then consider packing a bag. By the time the doors on the plane close and you’re taxiing for takeoff, it’s already too late. You must possess faith, know the character of the God you serve, learn to trust Him and establish your heart to be faithful to the end long before you find yourself on a proverbial ash heap scratching at yourself with a potsherd. Your spiritual man needs something to tap into as he is being buffeted. He needs a strong foundation from which he will not be moved, and the onus is on us to redeem the time and do what we must in order to ensure that we have done all to stand.   

With love in Christ,

Michael Boldea, Jr. 

 Recent studies have shown that the loneliest people on the planet live in the biggest cities. The more skyscrapers, apartment buildings, businesses, restaurants, subways, and the hustle and bustle of everyday life one is surrounded by, the lonelier and more detached they seem to be. It’s counterintuitive to the point of being illogical when you think about it. One would expect that the more they’re surrounded by other people, the less lonely they’ll be because the opportunity to make new friends is compounded with every hundred or so individuals within a certain radius.

Evidently, this is not the case. You’re more likely to make friends in a small, out-of-the-way town in the middle of South Dakota than you are living in Manhattan surrounded by all the other worker bees trying to get ahead and living in a world of their own. The one word that came up over and over again when people who participated in these studies were asked why they thought this was the case was community. The smaller the town you live in, the likelier it is that there is a strong sense of community, with neighbors helping neighbors rather than trying to set their cat on fire because it relieved itself on their lawn.

One of the devil’s biggest goals is to separate and discombobulate the body of Christ to the point that we are no longer one body but a tub full of body parts independent of each other, trying to do on our own only what an entire body can accomplish. A healthy body is interdependent upon all its members. Although the head may think itself of paramount importance, it needs the fingers and the hand to feed it in order to survive. The hands and fingers need the feet to take them to where the food is, the hands and feet need the eyes and the nose to tell them where the food is and if it’s edible, and once the food is masticated, making use of the mouth, the teeth and the throat, the digestive system has to work properly for the body to extract the necessary nutrients, and eliminate the rest.

Every time we touch upon this subject, there is bound to be someone who writes in insisting that no church body is good enough for them or that they have a hard time finding a fellowship, but lest we forget, where two or three are gathered in His name, He is there. I’ve been to church meetings in barns, garages, living rooms, and someone’s basement, where the presence of God was more evident than in any multi-million-dollar sanctuary I’ve ever come across. Just as the clothes don’t make the man, and I know that’s contrary to the modern adage but is nevertheless true, the opulence of the building or the size thereof doesn’t make the body.

Some of the scummiest, most disingenuous, duplicitous, underhanded, self-serving, callous people I’ve ever encountered were very well dressed, replete with the mandatory silk tie and the matching pocket square. Lawyers come to mind, and unfortunately, I’ve had to deal with a handful of those throughout my life.

Conversely, some of the most honest, down-to-earth, empathetic people I’ve been graced to know likely had one suit hanging in their closet, and that was there just in case they went to the great beyond and needed something to be buried in. When I get around to writing my will, I will specify that I want to be buried in shorts and the raggedy shirt I wear most mornings as I sit and write. No, clothes don’t make a man; his character and the content thereof, his principles, his honesty, and his consistency are what make a man.

We get taken in by the packaging and never bother to check what’s inside the box. Sure, the wrapping paper and the bows are nice to look at, but when it comes down to it, it’s what’s inside that gives it value.

Shortly after the revolution in Romania, we began traveling back to the homeland to help where we could and as we were able. My grandfather’s first trip back was in the early part of 1990, and we paid the extra cost for ten suitcases worth of Bibles to be shipped along on his flight. Those Bibles had been sitting in the suitcases for close to a year, taking up a corner of our already cramped apartment’s living room because God had told him he’d be going back and he’d be bringing Bibles along.

One of the many things I respected about my grandfather was his absolute and unwavering trust in God. If God told him to do something, he set his hand to the plow, not wondering how what he was told would come about or fretting about the impossibility of it in the present moment. Our entire family had been deported with specific orders never to return on pain of death. When he purchased the Bibles and the suitcases, the communists were still in power, and there wasn’t even a stirring among the populace, never mind a full-blown revolution.

After his first trip back, the day he arrived in Fullerton, he sat the family down and told us we’d be building churches in Romania. Although, at the time, we didn’t have the money, the money came in, and the next hurdle was getting it to Romania. This was before wire transfers were available since the country was still in upheaval and years before international banks hungry for profit opened up branches in-country. The only way to get the money into the country to buy the materials we would need for the churches God had told him to build was to carry cash.

To look at him, in his plaid shirt and baggy wool pants, no one would have thought this man was carrying six figures in US legal tender on his person, yet he was. If clothes made the man and hinted at his value, one would likelier hand him a dollar to buy himself a cup of tea than conclude he was carrying enough coin to buy an entire apartment building with money to spare in those days. We ended up building close to sixty churches throughout Romania in the early years after the revolution because the dollar went a long way back then, and the labor force was plentiful.

God sees what men cannot, and He judges by His standard rather than men’s standards. Never allow someone’s appearance to determine how you view them or the sort of value you assign to them. Whether scruffy, unkempt, well-dressed, or otherwise, we are all children of God. Too often, we let the wrapping dictate our reaction to someone long before what’s inside can come to the fore and present itself.

No one walking by, likely giving him a wide berth, would have thought that Job was a blameless and upright man whom God favored; it would have been the furthest thought from their mind. If they’d known of him before his testing, when he was the greatest people of the East, their likely reaction would have been to wonder what he had done to displease God so that he had come to such ruin. It’s not so much not trusting what your eyes see; it’s passing judgment based on what your eyes alone see that’s the problem.   

With love in Christ,

Michael Boldea, Jr. 

 Job 3:4-10, “May that day be darkness; may God above not seek it, nor the light shine upon it. May darkness and the shadow of death claim it; may a cloud settle on it; may the blackness of the day terrify it. As for that night, may darkness seize it; may it not rejoice among the days of the year, may it not come into the number of the months. Oh, may that night be barren! May no joyful shout come into it! May those curse it who curse the day, those who are ready to arouse Leviathan. May the stars of its morning be dark; may it look for light, but have none, and not see the dawning of the day; because it did not shut up the doors of my mother’s womb, nor hide sorrow from my eyes.”

The invocation of death continues for the first ten verses of the third chapter. It is not an easy, lighthearted read, and the only way to perceive it is to weigh Job’s words against the pain he is currently feeling. It’s one thing to say, “Lord, the road is hard, and I am weary,” it’s quite another to curse the day you were born and wish that it were darkness and no light shine upon it.

Although you couldn’t get any lower than Job’s current state, Satan still didn’t get what he was after, which was Job cursing God and finding fault with Him. Satan did not consider Job’s words a victory, even though they are the groans and heart cry of a man who sees no spark of joy in his existence, because his objective wasn’t to make Job sad or depressed but to disavow himself of God altogether, and deem Him unworthy of the faithfulness and devotion he showed throughout the years.

The devil’s goal isn’t to separate you from your material possessions or your health; to him, they are a means to an end, the end being you turning your back on God. If your joy, peace, purpose, and outlook on life are tethered in the temporal, in the material, or even in your own physical wellbeing, when these things are shaken, and they begin to crumble before your eyes, you will likewise be shaken in your resolve and devotion to God. If, however, you are tethered in God and draw your strength and fulfillment from Him, then nothing will shake your faithfulness when the things of this earth are no more.

Where your treasure is, there your heart will be also. It is one of those immutable and absolute realities that prove themselves, and no matter how often men say otherwise, it is nevertheless true. If your heart yearns for God alone, then by that very act, you’ve neutralized close to all of the enemy’s fiery arrows and means of attack. There are still a handful to contend with after you’ve directed the desire of your heart toward the heavenly things, but far less than if you were still pining for the material, the fool’s gold of the here and now that has no permanence or place in the eternal.

When all is stripped away, yet God remains, and you discover He is sufficient, you cling to Him all the more. In order for God to remain, He had to have been present. He will meet you where you are, in your grief, in your loss, in your shame, as long as you’re not busy chasing after the things that have slipped through your fingers and ignoring His presence.

Some men insist that they can’t find God, even though they’ve never actively searched for Him. The pursuit of their entire existence has always been something other than discovering the majesty of God’s presence, yet, somehow, they lay the blame at God’s feet for never having encountered Him.

Matthew 7:7-11, “Ask, and it will be given to you; seek, and you will find; knock, and it will be opened to you. For everyone who asks receives, and he who seeks finds, and to him who knocks it will be opened. Or what man is there among you who, if his son asks for bread, will give him a stone? Or if he asks for a fish, will give him a serpent? If you then, being evil, know how to give good gifts to your children, how much more will your Father who is in heaven give good things to those who ask Him!”

When we sincerely desire something or someone, we pursue it with abandon. When we desire God and not the things that men tell us will be bestowed to us as a result of knowing Him, everything falls by the wayside, and He becomes our singular goal and object of affection. The beauty of desiring to know God is that He doesn’t play hard to get. God is not coy, demure, or coquettish; He’s not dragging us along until a better opportunity presents itself. He promised that if we seek Him, we will find Him, and if we knock, the door will be opened to us. It is because of this promise that we can approach Him with confidence, knowing that if we ask Him for truth, He will not give us a lie, and if we ask Him for life, He will not give us death.

We tend to overthink the dynamics of our relationship with God, and plenty of individuals are willing to needlessly complicate it and insist it couldn’t be so simple because it serves their ends. All of you for all of Him. That’s the contract. There aren’t fifty pages of fine print you have to wade through; there are no clauses for preexisting conditions or mitigating circumstances that would make the contract null and void. God is faithful. He keeps His word. He will not renege nor walk away when the going gets tough. He is an ever-present help in times of trouble and a comfort in times of heartache. Run to Him. Cling to Him. Trust in Him, and you will never be alone again.  

With love in Christ,

Michael Boldea, Jr. 

 A lighthouse will always remain in a permanent fixed position. Depending on where the sailor is upon the roaring sea, however, it may seem farther or closer, off to the left or the right, but as far as the lighthouse itself, there is an unwavering permanence to it, no matter the time of year, how bad the weather, or how dark the night. The darker the night, the brighter the lights of the lighthouse, acting as a beacon and a point of reference to all upon the seas. The same goes for God and our individual relationships with Him. He is a fixed point, permanent and unwavering, yet depending on where we are in our journey, He may seem nearer or far. If He seems far, it is our duty and responsibility to draw closer to Him, and if the desire of our heart is that nearness, He will facilitate it because He is a good God.

Once they see the light of His love, wise men make their way toward Him, understanding that there is peace and joy in the light, there is wholeness and fulfillment, and comfort only He can provide. The light is never far from those who seek it. It does not hide itself; it does not dim in its intensity, nor does it attempt to conceal its illumination. Those who insist they cannot see it need only to open their eyes. The light of God is ever-present, but men choose to avert their gaze, pretend as though it’s not there, or insist that it’s something other than what it is because once you come to the light, it not only exposes the darkness of the heart but demands that the darkness be cast aside. Both cannot coexist in a closed space. Light and darkness are sworn enemies, and neither will relent until one is wholly subdued.

Job didn’t start out lightheartedly and escalated from there. There was no lightheartedness left in him, and all he knew in his current state was pain and grief. From the moment he opened his mouth, he poured out his grief, leaving no room for doubt or debate about how he currently felt. Because most of us have never been in such a dire state as to wish for death, it’s hard to relate to one such as Job on a personal level. I’ve sat alone with my thoughts for more than one entire morning trying to imagine what I would have to endure to come to that point in life, and it’s not an exercise I would recommend. Just thinking about what it would take is soul-crushing, never mind having to go through it.

We can view Job’s monologue from a position of spiritual superiority, looking down on the man and his declaration of cursing the day he was born, writing it off as weakness and lack of spiritual fortitude, or sympathizing with his state of mind taking into account all that he’d endured up to this point.

When you know someone’s going through the fire, make allowances for their grief. It’s the best advice I can give, especially when considering that your time in the fire may be just around the corner, and when you switch places with the individual contending with the pain of loss and hardship, you’d prefer that they show empathy rather than belittle you for not being so strong as to be unaffected by your current circumstance.

Doing unto others as we would have them do to us extends beyond being charitable, giving a glass of water, or buying a meal for someone. When we consider how we would like others to react to situations had we been the ones going through them, it tends to take the self-righteous air out of our quick temper or inclination to pour salt on their already painful wound.

Keep in mind Job did not sin. It wasn’t about calling out sin or bringing someone who had strayed back on the path; it was about pain and loss and grief. There are times when we must be direct and call someone out for the choices they’ve made, and there are times when we should be there for them, grieve with them, and be a shoulder upon which they can cry. It is wisdom itself to know which is which and act accordingly.

Some years back, I had a friend who would say the most hurtful things at the most inappropriate of times, and he would always follow up by saying, “I’m just being honest.” When a mutual friend showed up to lunch with a cast on his leg, after asking what had happened and being informed they’d fallen off their bike, rather than show empathy or compassion, his response was, “You should have known you’re too fat to ride a bike, I’m just being honest.” Granted, the friend who’d broken his leg was on the heavier side, but nothing so close as to render him incapable of riding a bicycle. I could see the hurt in his eyes when the comment was made, but the conversation transitioned to other topics, so nobody said anything.

A few days passed, and I got a call from my rude friend, asking if I could give him a ride from the hospital. I asked what had happened, and he told me he’d broken his ankle. I informed him I’d be there in ten minutes. After getting him situated in the car and making sure he was comfortable, I asked how it had happened. He sheepishly informed me that he was stepping off a sidewalk and didn’t notice the pothole in the street, to which I said, “You should probably watch where you’re going; I’m just being honest.”

I said it in gest, with a smile on my face, but his face turned ashen, and he remained silent for the rest of the drive. Most people who dish it out can’t take it, but sometimes, it’s good to give them a taste of their own medicine just to show them how their words affect others when they’re in the midst of hardship or struggle. It’s offputting when someone justifies being mean-spirited and hurtful by insisting it’s what their honesty demands. You chose to speak the words you spoke in the manner you spoke them. It wasn’t honesty that compelled you to do it but some latent bitterness with which you must contend.

With love in Christ,

Michael Boldea, Jr.  

 The entirety of the third chapter of Job is divided between laments and lamentations and questions Job continues to ask, to which he receives no answers. It’s hard to reconcile what we hear passing for Scripture nowadays, wherein men insist that God becomes more of a permanent butler and wish granter than Lord and King of your life, and what we see His servants and ones such as Job whom He considered blameless and upright had to endure in their lives.

For most people, the difference between what they hear from the pulpit as to what their expectations should be as believers and the lives of those who came before them isn’t a contradiction; it’s an oversight.

Telling people that pain and loss, grief and tears, are part of the human experience and cannot be avoided unless you’re permanently attached to a tank of nitrous oxide isn’t quite as inviting as telling them that from this day forward, they’ll be blessed coming and going, sleeping and waking, regardless of whether it’s beneficial to their spiritual man or not. The flesh has become a de facto god, and the priests thereof are quick to serve it and make it feel at ease whenever called upon to do so.

When anyone dares to bring up the point that Jesus Himself said that in this world, we would have tribulation, they’re quick to insist that He meant it exclusively for His disciples, sort of like the Holy Spirit, who He likewise said would be with us and in us until the end of time.

If love for God and the presence of God is not indwelling in the heart of man, then man will seek to serve his heart rather than God. Knowing that the heart is deceitful above all things and desperately wicked, it’s likely that you may not want to go where it leads or give in to its desire because it will ultimately end in destruction.

I don’t mean to spoil it for anyone, but the Bible never says to follow your heart. I know, it’s a game changer. So many arguments within the household of faith could have been averted altogether if the parties in contention had agreed to let the Word of God have the final say.

I believe I have a decent enough poker face. By that, I mean I don’t wear my heart on my sleeve, nor do I foreshadow my emotions. There is perhaps one person in the world who knows what I’m thinking at any given moment, and that’s my wife. We’ve been together long enough that I don’t have to emote or have any outward reaction to anything in order for her to know exactly what’s going through my mind. That said, whenever I hear someone begin their argument with the ever-irrelevant “I Feel,” especially when it comes to heretofore-established biblical matters, I can’t help but roll my eyes. It’s instinctual, and I’ve been in conferences where it’s been noticed.

There is a difference between feeling your hurt, feeling your pain, feeling your loss, and allowing those feelings to dictate how you react toward God and your fellow man. God did not create man to be an unfeeling robot. He created man with the ability to connect, to love, to laugh, to cry, to mourn, to feel triumph and loss, to cheer on the accomplishments of their progeny when they progress, and their cello and violin playing no longer sounds like someone is abusing a cat, and feel disappointment when they choose to eat an entire bag of fun size Snicker’s in one sitting even though they knew better.

Job was verbalizing his feelings, his pain, and his grief, but he did not allow them to overtake his senses and use them as a justification to sin against God, whether in word or deed.

1 Corinthians 10:13, “No temptation has overtaken you except such as is common to man; but God is faithful, who will not allow you to be tempted beyond what you are able, but with the temptation will also make the way of escape, that you may be able to bear it.”

Temptation comes in many forms. It’s not just that leftover piece of chocolate cake in the fridge that’s tempting you in the wee hours of the morning. Such temptations are easy to resist because you just close the refrigerator door and go on with your day. The more nefarious temptations are the ones you can’t walk away from, those stewing in the back of your mind, whether it’s resisting the will and purpose of God for the struggles of life or questioning His sovereignty when the unexpected and unplanned happens, and everything around you seems to fall apart.

There have been moments in life where the urge to try and solve a problem on my own rather than waiting patiently upon the Lord was near to overwhelming. It’s a battle of the mind and one that is taxing beyond belief because the flesh is essentially at war with the will of God, and one must win out.

With every act of submission, with every heart cry of “Your will be done,” it becomes easier to trust God in all things because hindsight will make it clear that had you tried to do it on your own, it would have had disastrous results. Had I tried on my own, I would have failed. Even though my plan was logical, well-reasoned, and, at the moment, seemed like a viable remedy, looking back and seeing how God went about solving it humbled me and made me trust Him all the more.

A man’s way may seem right to him, but unless it’s God’s way, no matter how well thought out his way may be, that man is courting disaster and destruction. When we are humble enough to submit to God’s authority in all things and allow Him to guide us, He will make the crooked ways straight, and the trials that once seemed insurmountable will become a reason to glorify Him.  

With love in Christ,

Michael Boldea, Jr. 

 There is bound to be someone in everyone’s life who is quick to remind them of who they were before they encountered Christ. Whether it’s a misguided attempt to keep you humble or they’re just trying to bring you down a peg, when someone insists on dragging up who you were and inferring that it’s still who you are, your only reaction should be to continue picking up your cross, walking humbly with your Lord, and working out your salvation with fear and trembling.

Trying to convince someone that you’re a different person when they’re set on remembering you as you were, without allowing for the possibility that you are a new creature, is an exercise in futility. They will not see you as God sees you, as having been reconciled to Him, because they don’t want to.

In the early 90s, our ministry funded, participated in, and put on a lot of crusades in Romania. Communism had fallen, the gospel was free to be preached wherever someone would rent you a hall, and it didn’t take a genius to see that the harvest field was plentiful. Since it was not about an individual person but rather about preaching the gospel to the lost and highlighting Jesus, we made use of local pastors and preachers whenever possible. More often than not, my grandfather was there as an auxiliary, either praying for people or passing out Bibles, but as far as the preaching went, he was happy to let the local brethren do the heavy lifting.

On one such night, we were in Tirgu Frumos, back before they fixed the roads a good hour’s drive from Botosani, and we’d just gotten done with a crusade where the local church pastor had preached. He was a man well into his fifties, and just by the look of him, you could tell he had a past. His nose had been broken at some point and hadn’t been set right, likely more than once, since it was ridged and flattened, giving him the look of a bulldog. He was broad-chested, with that hunched-over appearance guys who wrestle tend to adopt, and if not for the light in his eyes, one would be hard-pressed to stay on the same side of the sidewalk if they saw him coming from the opposite direction.

As we were shaking hands and saying our goodbyes, getting ready to go back home, a man walked up to the pastor and poked a finger into his chest.

“What makes you better than me? I remember when we used to get drunk together, and I couldn’t even hold a candle to you; what gives you the right? How do I know this isn’t all a farse? Are we just supposed to take your word that you’ve changed?”

Every couple of words, as if to emphasize his point, the man would poke the pastor in the chest. His voice got progressively louder, and his jabs more violent, but the pastor didn’t move; he didn’t back away or try to constrain the man and his stabbing finger in any way.

 When the man stopped long enough to catch his breath, the pastor looked into his eyes and, in a soft voice, said, “You and I both know that if I were still the man I used to be, you’d have a broken finger and a few less teeth. Now do you want to have a conversation, or do you want to keep poking me in the chest?”

I could see the wheels spinning, the man’s realization that had this now pastor been the man he’d known before, he likely wouldn’t be standing. taking a step back and arching his brows, he said, “I’ll take the conversation if you don’t mind.”

When we surrender, submit, repent, and begin the journey of denying ourselves and picking up our crosses, we’re not simply identifying as Christians; we are becoming Christ-like in every area of our lives. We are being transformed from glory to glory into the image of Christ. If the extent of our Christianity is claiming that we are Christian, while none of the transformation is taking place within and without, we will be counted among those who say Lord, Lord, but whom He never knew.

There is no sin in remembering where we once were and acknowledging how far God has brought us. Every journey has a starting point, even the journey of faith. We don’t look back at the starting line with longing or a desire to return to it but merely to gauge how far we’ve come while keeping our eyes firmly affixed to the finish line.

Even one such as Paul wasn’t shy about owning up to what he had been, admitting in his letter to the Galatians that he once persecuted without mercy the church of God and did his best to destroy it. He could have obfuscated or whitewashed his past, but what would be the point? He was no longer the man he had been, and now, rather than seek to destroy it, he made it his life’s mission to grow the church and comfort the brethren. That’s what God does. That is the transformative power of His presence in the heart of man, and to take that glorious transformation and say it’s no longer required, but that all we need do is say a few words and raise a hand at a crusade is not only foolhardy but unbiblical.

Matthew 7:21-23, “Not everyone who says to me ‘Lord, Lord,’ shall enter the kingdom of heaven, but he who does the will of My Father in heaven. Many will say to Me in that day, ‘Lord, Lord, have we not prophesied in Your name, cast out demons in Your name, and done many wonders in Your name?’ And then I will declare to them, ‘I never knew you; depart from Me, you who practice lawlessness!’”

What does this have to do with Job? Only that his relationship with God and the faith that he’d built up over the years aided him in weathering the storm when it would have utterly broken any other man and brought them to the point of sinning against God with their lips. It’s who you are in Christ that will give you the strength to abide, endure, and persevere, not who you are in yourself.

It doesn’t matter how tough and strong we think we are in our constitution, how high of a pain threshold we have, or how unaffected we are by the circumstances of life; without God, everyone breaks at some point. With God, however, all things are possible.

With love in Christ,

Michael Boldea, Jr.  

I can’t say I’ve ever been so low as to curse the day I was born. Job was. It’s easy to sit in judgment and find reasons to look down on the man or say he was being overly dramatic, but if you’ve never walked a mile in someone’s shoes, then your judgment is unfounded. I can’t quantify another’s pain, nor can you quantify mine. It is relational to me alone, and only God knows it fully. Each of us carries a unique burden of pain, a weight only we and God can truly understand.

Sometimes, a man’s countenance and what’s going on in his heart are two wholly different things. It’s guaranteed that you’ve run across someone who put on a brave face and smiled at you while their heart was in turmoil, a vortex of grief and pain that had you seen, you would have recoiled from. On occasion, you get the sense of it, whether it’s a look in their eyes or the fact that the smile is contrary to their overall countenance, but more often than not, we ignore it because we all have our own problems, our own grief, our own disappointments in life, and we’ve been conditioned to turn off our empathy for those around us while expecting them to show it at the slightest need.

No man is an island, but those who deem themselves the overlords of molding society would love nothing more. It’s easier to control someone who has no tribe, no friends, no one they can rely upon, confide in, or pour their hearts out to. They want to be the ones you run to, and they’re quick to offer you the drug cocktail du jour to numb you to the point of indifference toward everything that’s going on around you. Take this fistful of pills, and you won’t feel the grief anymore. Will it make it go away? No, it will still be there, but rather than dealing with it, going through it, letting time heal the wound, we’ll just numb all of you, and you’ll feel nothing at all. Of course, there’s a cost; there always is, and in this case, the cost is your lucidity, your self-awareness, your sense of purpose, and your peace.

Counterfeit peace or counterfeit joy are just that, counterfeit. They’re fake, they’re not real, and as soon as you run out of your prescription, the grief returns fivefold because it’s been building up with no pressure valve to release it and no true comfort to lessen it. What the world offers is not a cure but a way to manage it. The only one who can deliver on the promise of healing a broken heart is God, even if it takes time to do it. Wounds take time to heal. When you cut your finger, even if you wash out the wound, lather it in Neosporin, and bandage it, it won’t heal overnight, even though the healing process has already begun. You don’t go back to the wound, open it up, squeeze the sides, and make it bleed every few hours, wondering why it’s not healing. You do what you can do to keep it from getting infected, then let time do its thing and scab it over, then let it heal altogether, then when it’s done, you’ll have the scar to remind you of it for the rest of your days. Healing takes time, but it does come.

Scars remind us of the wounds we’ve suffered and the valleys God has carried us through. They’re a permanent reminder that God can bind up the wound and heal the broken heart because He’s already done it, and we carry the evidence of it with us throughout.

We tend to hide our scars, not realizing they make us who we are. Our scars are a testament to all that God has delivered us from, and they are not something to be ashamed or embarrassed of but rather something to showcase as evidence of His unwavering faithfulness.

Every scar I have directly correlates to an event in my life, whether for good or ill, depending on how I look at it, and each one is a constant reminder that though it wasn’t easy, God got me through it when everyone looking from the outside in had written me off already. This goes for spiritual scars as well as physical ones. Life is a tapestry of joy and pain, victories and defeats, times of plenty and times of famine, and each thread makes up a whole, a complete picture that, looking back on, one can clearly see the hand and providence of God throughout.

When you’re in the middle of the ocean, bobbing along on the waves, doing everything you can just to keep your head above water, it’s difficult to be introspective. You’re in survival mode, and everything you do is solely focused on staying alive. Eventually, after the lifeboat arrives and throws you a life preserver after you’re dragged on board, have a moment to catch your breath and know that you are safe, you get a chance to reflect and consider how much worse it could have been had the lifeboat not arrived when it did.

It’s only in our day and age that people turn around and sue individuals who save them from drowning or burning, citing that they were too rough in their efforts, but any rightly thinking, reasonable, logical individual would only show gratitude for having been saved, even if they got a bruise on their hip from being dragged into a boat, or out of a burning building.

Whenever God delivers you from a situation or a predicament you know full well you could have never delivered yourself from, the only attitude you should have is one of gratitude and thankfulness for His intervention. When I know that of my own accord, through my own strength, and by my own wisdom, I could not have navigated a situation satisfactorily, yet God intervened and made a way when there seemed to be none, anything less than me falling to my knees and thanking Him for His intervention is unseemly and less than He deserves. Gratitude is not just a feeling; it’s a way of acknowledging the divine intervention in our lives.

With love in Christ,

Michael Boldea, Jr.  

 Tomorrow, my youngest is turning seven. It puts a lot into perspective. It’s not that you don’t notice you’re getting older if you don’t have children. There will always be the odd gray hair or the rickety back to let you know you’re getting on in years, but when you have children, it’s a direct and constant reminder of the passing of time. Tempus Fugit, indeed, like it was doing industrial strength speed and washing it down with a six-pack of Red Bull.

The more they grow, the older you get because nothing stops time except for a dirt nap, and in that case, time stops only for the one in the ground. It goes on for everyone else.

It’s odd that while generally speaking, life is a short and fleeting thing, there are moments in life that seem to transpire in slow motion, wherein an hour feels like a day and a day feels like a year. It’s never when we’re laughing, smiling, enjoying the sun on our faces and the breeze in our hair, or in my case, my shaven scalp. Those days seem to zip by, and you look back on that five-day trip four days in and realize that it’s almost over, done with, and you’ll have to get back on that plane, likely with the same people, because most of them bought the same five-day package, and return to packing lunches, school drop off lines, dentist appointments, violin and cello practice, working your first job, then your second job, wondering if you could fit in a third job but just part-time because you want the kids to remember who you are and not call the police when you wander into the house exhausted.

The coo-coo clock doesn’t go any faster or any slower; it keeps perfect time, yet depending on what we’re going through at the time, you wonder where the time went or can’t believe it’s only been three minutes since the last time you looked at your watch. Yes, I know most people don’t have watches anymore, except for those thrall collars that tell them they need to walk three thousand more steps, go to the bathroom, drink more water, and breathe; that last one’s important. Don’t forget to breathe.

How did we manage before we were so laden with gadgets that we emanate low-frequency radiation even when we’re not around them? Don’t get me wrong, I like the convenience of not having to trek to an outhouse in the middle of the night or empty a chamber pot every morning, but what was meant to be a convenience has now become an obsession, an addiction, a prison cell without bars, to the point that if we wind up in an area without bars for more than thirty seconds, we start to sweat, and think it’s the end of the world. You’re three minutes from home, and you’ve driven the same road a thousand times, you’ll be okay. When what was sold as a tool to make your life easier turns into an albatross around your neck, without which you don’t feel normal or at ease, you are no longer mastering the tool; the tool is mastering you.

Job had none of the distractions we’ve become accustomed to. He was alone with his grief, with his pain, with the ever-present reality of his loss, and it’s very likely the days dragged on at a snail’s pace for him. It’s unlikely that time flies by when all you have is a potsherd with which to scratch at yourself and a heap of ashes upon which to lay your head.

Even when his friends showed up, they could do nothing more than sit with him in silence, seeing that his grief was very great. How do you console a man who was on top of the world one day, then the next, all he has left is the pain with which he has to contend?

There’s pain, then there’s pain. Physical pain is one thing; the pain of the heart is something wholly different. If your joints ache on a given morning, you can pop a couple of aspirin or lather yourself in icy hot and make it through the day, but when your heart is broken and shattered, there is no remedy for it but God.

Men try to find other ways to mute or numb the pain of the heart, as they have since the beginning of time, whether giving themselves over to wine, crawling into a bottle, taking pills and powders that are likelier to kill them than make them feel better because that soul-crushing pain of the heart is so unbearable as to make any physical pain pale in comparison.

For many, just having one of the things that happened to Job happen to them would be enough to throw them into an endless spiral of self-destruction, never mind loss upon loss, grief upon grief, and pain upon pain.

Job was within his rights to lament. He was within his rights to grieve and pour out what he’d been holding in for so many days.

Oftentimes, we have unrealistic expectations of those whom God has called to service. We expect them to be superhuman, beyond feeling or emotion, always rising above the circumstances of their existence, and when they do show emotion, when they mourn, and weep, and cry out, we think less of them.  

God never called anyone to be unfeeling, emotionless, or robotic; He called them to be obedient. Rather than look down on a brother who is grieving a loss while continuing to walk in obedience, we should encourage them, be there for them, and comfort them because even in their pain, they’re doing what God called them to do.

My grandfather took my grandmother’s passing hard. She’d been the love of his life, and when she died, a piece of him died with her. While still in mourning, even before we had the wake, a lady from Kansas came to visit because she’d heard about the ministry and she was in the area. We honored her request and gave her our apartment address; even in the midst of all the tumult, my grandfather and I made time for her, and we spent a good thirty minutes talking; we said a prayer, and she left. We thought nothing of it, busy making the arrangements to ship my grandmother back to Romania, which in itself required jumping through so many hoops you’d think you were in the circus. A month or so later, we got a letter in the mail from the aforementioned lady informing us that she was underwhelmed by the experience, didn’t feel welcome when she visited, and that we could have been more hospitable.

If she hadn’t known of the situation and that my grandmother was lying in a casket at a funeral home, I would have seen my way to being more gracious in my response, but she did; it was the first thing I informed her of when she walked into our apartment.

I understand that this may come as a shock to some, but it’s not always about you. The world doesn’t revolve around your happiness, and sometimes, the people you interact with who seem distant or distracted are going through their own version of hell and doing their best to just keep it together.

With love in Christ,

Michael Boldea, Jr.