If I had it handy, I’d slip on my hyper-spiritual mask and
insist that such suffering would be a breeze to go through, but I burnt my mask
along with my pride, goals, ambitions, and personal aspirations long ago. Like
you, I am daily working out my own salvation with fear and trembling. What I struggle
with isn’t the loss of material things. I don’t have many to begin with; it’s
never been an issue for me, nor do I place much value in them. I grew up poor -
seven people in a two-bedroom apartment dumpster diving for aluminum cans - kind
of poor, and although I am less poor, meaning I no longer dumpster dive,
private jets and luxury getaways are not in my immediate future. Although
there’s an entire conversation that should be had about supposed servants of
Christ living like rock stars off the backs of their congregants, this is
neither the time nor the place.
It’s not even the idea of my own personal suffering. It’s the
loss of family that wrings my heart over and over like a wet dish towel. Every
individual has a breaking point. There’s a reason the straw that broke the
camel’s back is an expression that’s been around for centuries. It’s not one
thing; it’s the accumulation of many things over time until that last and final
straw that finally does it, and your bowed back can’t endure another ounce of
pressure. Either Job was the strongest, most stoic man ever to live, or his
unshakeable faith in God and His sovereignty carried him beyond his breaking
point. You can’t get any lower than where Job ended up, and this is from such a
position of affluence as to make him the greatest of all the people of the East
as far as possessions were concerned.
It’s one thing to never know what it’s like to be wealthy
beyond any of your contemporaries, to have everything your heart could desire
and more besides, and never want for anything that you couldn’t get with the
wave of a hand and the exchange of some legal tender. It’s quite another to be
at the pinnacle of success, envied among your peers, then suddenly and without
warning, get the rug pulled out from under you and have nothing left.
Imagine Warren Buffet or Elon Musk suddenly losing everything
and ending up under a bridge trying to skewer a rat for their evening meal.
Job's fall is comparable, given his status before his testing. All this while,
God deemed him a blameless and upright man. Imagine the sort of faith one must
possess in the providence and sovereignty of God not to be swayed by such
circumstances. It cannot be a fleeting or situational faith but rather one that
is cemented, ingrained, all-encompassing, and unshakeable. Job believed in God
for everything, in everything, about everything, through everything, all the
time, without fail. The life of Job teaches us that such faith is attainable,
but the only way to attain it is to wholly surrender to the will, plan, and
purpose of God in the best of times as well as the worst of times.
Job also dispels the myth that one cannot fear God and shun
evil if one is wealthy. Money, in and of itself, isn’t evil; it’s the love of
money that is the root of all kinds of evil. Job was rich but did not love his
riches. He loved God, and the desire of his heart was to pleasing to the Lord. I’ve
known poor people who love money they don’t have and rich people who are
indifferent to the money they do have. It’s about the attitude of the heart and
who sits on the throne thereof.
The reason Jesus said it is easier for a camel to enter
through the eye of a needle than a rich man into the kingdom of God is that
unless a man is blameless and upright, his identity will always be wrapped up
in his riches, his desire will always be to increase them, and his purpose will
continually be focused on earthly things. When God looked upon Job, he did not
see a rich man; he saw an upright man who was blameless and feared the Lord. Being
rich does not exclude someone from entering the kingdom of God; worshipping
their riches, believing it is they and not God that can save them, and
surrendering their hearts to trinkets and baubles does. We will see how much
stock Job put in his possessions and how much he valued them shortly, and this
is why, although he was rich, God singled him out as blameless and upright.
It’s easy to pontificate and wax poetic. Some people take to
it like a duck to water, and they have no qualms about magnifying their
spirituality to absurd and cartoonish levels in the hopes of having others look
to them as though they were modern versions of Abraham, Job, and Paul all
wrapped up in one. Not only is it self-serving and hypocritical, but it is also
dangerous to beat one’s chest and say you would likewise endure what they did
without allowing either bitterness or resentment to worm its way into your
heart.
Serving God is easy when serving God is easy. When all you
see are blue skies and gentle breezes, even though the work might be labor
intensive, and what you are called to do may require exertion on your part, at
the end of the day, you have a family to go back to, a home, a hot meal and a
pillow to rest your head on.
Then the storm comes, and everything we take for granted, all
those little things we barely even notice day to day, disappear in an instant,
yet your duty to God remains the same. The calling doesn’t change, and the
amount of work God has set before you doesn’t lessen, but our attitude will if
we allow it to or if we’ve fallen into the snare of believing that being in
ministry is a guarantee to living an easy-going life, with a nice pension at
sixty-five, and a sweet condo on a golf course somewhere warm and sunny.
Anyone who thinks they can weather such storms on their own
without God's aid, comfort, and presence has already failed and will likely
fold like an origami crane at the first salvo. Some things men can’t get
through on their own, no matter how stiff-spined, resolute, and determined they
are. They require uttermost trust in the God they serve and an unshakeable
faith in His providence and sovereignty, no matter how bleak and hopeless
things may seem. Such virtues do not materialize overnight. They must be grown,
nurtured, and built up daily, with the tacit understanding that one day they
will be put to the test. Your tepid, on-again, off-again, situational faith
must transform into an enduring faith that it might abide.
Pride should be the last thing the life of Job should fan the
flames of in men’s hearts. Rather, it should illicit deep and profound
humility, bringing us face to face with our own shortcomings and to the
realization that in those seasons of trial, hardship, and suffering, it is full
and unwavering dependence upon God that will carry us through.
Had I known that a deep dive into this book would be akin to having a melon baller take chunks out of my heart every morning, perhaps I would have put this study off for a few more years, but alas, here we are.
With love in Christ,
Michael Boldea, Jr.
Posted on 22 September 2024 | 1:03 pm
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