Homeward Bound

Job CCLXXIII

2026-04-15T06:24:00.001-05:00

Job 27:8-12, “May my enemy be like the wicked, and he who rises up against me like the unrighteous. For what is the hope of the hypocrite, though he may gain much, if God takes away his life? Will God hear his cry when trouble comes upon him? Will he delight himself in the Almighty? Will he always call on God? I will teach you about the hand of God; what is with the Almighty I will not conceal. Surely all of you have seen it; why then do you behave with complete nonsense?”

Look for the differences between a righteous man and a hypocrite long enough, over a span and time horizon of more than an hour, a day, or a week, and they will be so obvious and glaring as to make one wonder why they didn’t spot them sooner.

Job doesn’t say that the hypocrite won’t succeed at putting on a believable performance, they may even be so good in their pretense as to gain much through their endeavor, but when it comes to it, when the rubber meets the road, the hypocrite has no hope, nothing to cling to, nothing to buoy him, and nothing to sustain him.

Since his friends had intimated that he was a hypocrite, a farceur, someone who pretended at righteousness and devotion rather than sincerely loving God for who He was, Job sets about dismantling their narrative and pointing out the differences between the hypocrite and the blameless.

The first question Job asks regarding the hypocrite is whether God will hear his cry when trouble comes upon him. This question and the way Job phrases it reveal the deep and abiding faith Job had not only in God but also in that when he cried out, God heard him, even though He had not answered or acted upon his pleas.

Trouble had surely come upon him. He had surely cried out to God, yet God had remained silent. This did not sway Job’s deeply rooted faith that, though He had not responded, God had nevertheless heard him.

Hebrews 11:1, “Now faith is the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen.”

While the passage in Hebrews defines faith, Job exemplified it, put it into practice, and acted upon it with conviction and assurity. There was no doubt in his mind or heart that God had not heard his cry when trouble came upon him. He understood that God has a purpose in all things, even in His silence, and the one thing Job wrestled with is not understanding that purpose himself.

I will trust God, I will trust that He hears my cry, even if He remains silent, even if the situation I’m pleading with Him for remains unchanged, because I know my God, I know whom I serve, and there is nothing that can sway me from this certainty. Though He slay me, yet I will trust Him!

Job’s second question was as revealing as his first, worded in such a way as to make his friends consider all that he’d said since they first came to comfort him, hoping that they would be able to see beyond their hastily drawn conclusions to the reality that stood before them.

While still referencing the hypocrite, Job asks, “Will he delight himself in the Almighty?”

A hypocrite by his very nature will attempt to use God to obtain what his heart truly desires. There is no delighting himself in Him, there is no yearning to spend time in His presence, there is no inclination toward faithful obedience, or worship. Everything is feigned, performative, well-calculated, and forced rather than sincere because the hypocrite is attempting to affect the perception of those in close proximity as to his own spirituality rather than serve God in spirit and in truth.

Do we find our delight in the Almighty or in the things the Almighty provides? If it’s the latter rather than the former, then when those things go away, when they are taken, stolen, lost, or burned in the fire, our hearts will grow bitter, and our instinct will be to shake our fist at the heavens and insist that God is unjust, unfair, or callous rather than loving, forgiving, and gracious. Herein lies the danger of finding delight in anything other than Him.

God is not interchangeable with anything or anyone. He must have singular prominence in our hearts, and our delight must be in Him. Yes, we thank Him for our daily bread, the roof over our heads, healthy children, and the ability to work, but the things He gives cannot replace Him, nor can we place equal value on them as we do on our relationship with Him.

To some, Job may seem cold or callous in that he did not react in a manner they would have given all the things he lost, but such individuals have never known intimacy with God on the level Job did. In his entire existence, there was only one thing he could not do without, and that was the presence of the God he’d served for countless years. It’s not that he didn’t feel loss or didn’t mourn, but for one such as Job, the presence of God was an existential need. He could not see himself continuing on; he could not see himself numbered among the living without God’s abiding presence.

The next question about the hypocrite is emblematic of the human condition, as Job asks, “Will he always call on God?” The adage that there are no atheists in a foxhole has proven true often enough. There comes a time in most men’s lives when they will call on God, when they have no other means of escape or recourse, as will the hypocrite for all the good it will do him.

Later on, as the New Testament was being divinely inspired, those who love God were instructed to pray always and pray without ceasing. We do not commune with God or open up the lines of communication only when we find ourselves buffeted, see no escape, or need Him to come through and save us from the mess we’ve gotten ourselves in. Being in fellowship with God is not a chore, a burden, or something we drag our feet in doing, but the single most important event on our calendar, every day of the year without fail.

Job knew how much time he spent in God’s presence. He knew how much time he spent calling on God, and his question was not intended to puff himself up or highlight his consistency in calling out to God, but to contrast what a hypocrite would do with what his friends knew him to have done.

With love in Christ,

Michael Boldea, Jr.

Job CCLXXII

2026-04-13T06:35:00.000-05:00

“Till I die I will not put away my integrity from me. My righteousness I hold fast, and will not let it go; my heart shall not reproach me as long as I live.”

There was no wiggle room in Job’s statement. There was no shadow of turning or doubt. He wasn’t saying he would hold to his integrity only when it was easy, comfortable, or cost him nothing, but until he died, he would not put his integrity away.

When we are established in the will, grace, peace, and Word of God, there is no pressure that can be brought to bear that would compel us to abandon our integrity or relinquish righteousness. Whatever men might say, whatever crashing waves of hardships, trials, and adversities may crash upon us, threatening to drag us under, we cling to the hope we have in Him, and dare not let go.

Job had already committed to his way; he had already established in his heart that, though God slew him, he would still trust Him. These were not mere words but a declaration of intent, a promise of faithfulness, and a sure-footed commitment to keep pressing on no matter how rocky the road or how steep the climb.

Our calling is to be no less committed than Job in our journey toward eternity, even if we might never be called to suffer to the extent that Job did. If we cannot remain loyal, faithful, and true in our seasons of peace, comfort, and plenty, how will we determine to be these things in the face of hardship, privation, and suffering?

From the instant one begins a journey, they commit to completing it. If I promised my daughters we would be driving to Florida, and somewhere past the Indiana border, I turned the car around, not only would I be breaking my promise to them, but I would have wasted the time it took us to drive the few hours only to come back to where we’d started.

Chronic false starts are not conducive to spiritual growth, maturity, or sanctification. By that, I mean the noticeable pattern where people reach out for Jesus only when they’ve dug themselves so deep that they need a miner’s lamp, and once by His mercy, they are pulled from the mire, they start digging another hole next to the one they’ve just been pulled out of. You can’t use Jesus as a life preserver every time you get tired of treading water, then discard Him when your strength is up to par.

Another term for this is chronic backsliding. If Jesus sets you free, washes you clean, and the next moment you cannonball into the mud pit He saved you from, that is not true repentance, no matter who insists otherwise.

So what’s so dangerous about these chronic false starts? They can quickly become a form of self-deception, wherein, although the individual is making no substantive progress but treads the same ground month after month, they convince themselves that it is well with their soul.

There is also Christ’s warning about a return to one’s former sins and vices that we must take to heart, because if anyone knew what he was talking about regarding the spiritual realm and how unclean spirits operate, it was Jesus. He wasn’t guessing at what may occur; He was outlining how unclean spirits operate.

Matthew 12:43-45, “When an unclean spirit goes out of a man, he goes through dry places, seeking rest, and finds none. Then he says, ‘I will return to my house from which I came.’ And when he comes, he finds it empty, swept, and put in order. Then he goes and takes with him seven other spirits more wicked than himself, and they enter and dwell there; and the last state of that man is worse than the first. So shall it also be with this wicked generation.”

For the evil spirit to be barred from access to the now empty, swept, and put-in-order house, the new owner must be present, moved in, and settled therein. If Jesus is present, the devil can’t get in. He might try to look through the windows, assess the situation, and see if there’s any way for him to slink back in to his former residence, but if the light of Jesus is present, if the once darkened heart is filled with His truth, the enemy knows it’s a fight he can’t win, and a heart he cannot conquer anew.

If a heart is not filled with the presence of Christ, not only will the squatter return but he will bring seven friends along, more wicked than himself, not because he has love for his fellow spirits but because he knows there is strength in numbers and there is less of a chance that he will be cast out again, or in the least that it will be more difficult to do so.

It is also worth noting that the last state of the man will be worse than the first if, after having his heart emptied, swept, and put in order, he assumes there is no need for surrender, obedience, and faithfulness to Jesus.

Not to be divisive, but Christ’s very words also put into question the once saved always saved, do as you will after you wave your hand at a crusade philosophy running rampant amid today’s generation. Jesus isn’t renting an Airbnb for the week; He is not signing a twelve-month lease, nor is He interested in renting your heart. The only way for the house to remain clean and put in order is for Him to take ownership of it, reside in it permanently, and do as He wills with it.

The former owner can’t come by for a visit and tell the new owner he doesn’t like all the changes he’s made to the property. It no longer belongs to him, and he has no say in the matter. You were bought at a price, and the new owner is not interested in roommates or in cohabitating with the previous tenants.

Job knew who the Lord of his heart was. He knew that God had ownership, was living and active in him, and so was able to declare, “My righteousness I hold fast, and will not let it go.” How many of us can say the same? We should be able to if He is Lord of all in our lives, not just in word but in deed.

Yes, when my righteousness is compared and contrasted with His, it is like a filthy rag, but that does not mean righteousness should not be pursued or that it cannot be attained. When God says “be holy,” it’s a command, not a suggestion, and if He commanded it of us, then it is not something unattainable.

With love in Christ,

Michael Boldea, Jr.

Job CCLXXI

2026-04-12T06:48:00.001-05:00

Job 27:1-6, “Moreover Job continued his discourse, and said: ‘As God lives, who has taken away my justice, and the Almighty, who has made my soul bitter, as long as my breath is in me, and the breath of God is in my nostrils, my lips will not speak wickedness, nor my tongue utter deceit. Far be it from me that I should say you are right; Till I die I will not put away my integrity from me. My righteousness I hold fast, and will not let it go; my heart shall not reproach me as long as I live.”

Integrity is not situational. If you can claim integrity and denounce it depending on the situation, like putting on and taking off a coat or a pair of socks, then you have no integrity. If integrity is absent in one’s life, then nothing is permanent, nothing is consistent, nothing is stable, and everything becomes fluid, negotiable, and flexible to the point that if God doesn’t give me what I want when I want it, I’ll find someone who will. Your love, loyalty, and affection are not hostages to be used as leverage against God to get what you want, nor are any of us in a position to demand ransom from Him in exchange for our fealty, fidelity, or devotion.

When we begin to place conditions on our obedience and faithfulness, when we begin demanding things in return for our service, we are proven to be nothing more than hirelings and mercenaries, selling our loyalty to the highest bidder for as long as the checks clear. If we are motivated by anything other than love and a sincere desire to serve God, whether money, fame, or the acceptance of the godless, the question isn’t if but rather when the offer to compromise and betray the truth will be made.

Men don’t unwittingly begin to teach another gospel. They choose to dismiss what the gospel says while attempting to rationalize their betrayal of truth. If I keep insisting on sanctification, righteousness, holiness, prayer, fasting, study of the Word, and intimacy with God, I will never grow my church or my ministry. Nowadays, people want something new, fresh, and instant. They’re unwilling to take the time to press in, to grow, or build up their most holy faith. They need something immediate, instantly gratifying, something that moves at the speed of their busy lives.

If I keep calling sin what it is and not attempt to soften the blow of what it means to be in rebellion toward God, the handful of people who have expressed displeasure at being convicted will end up leaving, then what will I have?

Either trust God or don’t. Either cling to your integrity and stand on the truth of Scripture or do as so many others have and take liberties where the Word offers none, and twist the gospel to suit men’s lukewarm state rather than admonishing them to awaken from their slumber and pursue God purposefully and with pure intentions. Just make sure you understand one thing: when God gives someone over to uncleanness, when men exchange the truth of God for the lie and worship and serve the creature rather than the Creator, it is no less than the manifest wrath of God upon them.

That’s what Paul tells the Romans within the first chapter of his epistle. The suppression of truth in unrighteousness isn’t liberty, or a new way of solving an old problem; it is the wrath of God being revealed against all unrighteousness and ungodliness of men. Judgment begins in the house of God for a reason. If you haven’t noticed, the house of God has been under His judgment for some time now.

In the physical Job had every reason to be angry, bitter, and disillusioned. It’s not as though he’d forgotten the man he’d been, the children he’d buried, or the fortune that had disappeared overnight. Even so, he declared with all the force he could muster that his lips would not speak wickedness, nor his tongue utter deceit. When we commit our ways to the Lord, what is happening around us, or even to us, cannot sway or affect our commitment to Him. The devil can’t make us be disloyal to God, nor can he make us speak wickedness or utter deceit. He facilitates the environment for us to make that choice, putting his finger on the scale as heavily as he is allowed to, but ultimately, the choice is still ours as individuals.

Adversity tests integrity. Seeing the dreams, plans, and aspirations you’ve worked toward your entire life implode within the blink of an eye isn’t easy; it’s not something one receives with a smile on their lips and gladness in their eyes, but it’s those moments that define us, mature us, and grow us in ways nothing else can.

More often than not, integrity comes at a price. There is a cost attached to it, whether that cost is losing friends, being shunned by family, or being seen in a negative light by those around you. It’s far easier to capitulate, to give in, to go with the flow, and be just another face in the crowd than it is to stand firm in your convictions and refuse to be swayed.

Job knew full well he could put an end to this entire drama by acquiescing and telling his friends they were right, or at least that they’d made some valid points. He could have been the peacemaker, but doing so would have come at the cost of his integrity, and admitting to something he knew himself to be innocent of, and that was something he was unwilling to do, and rightly so.

The sad reality is that the squeaky wheel often gets the grease. It’s those who are loud, brash, and hyperbolic who often get their way because they’re willing to talk over anyone trying to make a valid point or insist upon facts and evidence rather than feelings or emotions. Yes, we should always strive to reason together, but for that to occur, both parties must be reasonable and willing to consider the possibility that they are wrong. Job’s friends would not. They would rather believe that their friend was a man of such wickedness as to deserve worse than he was experiencing than allow for the possibility that they’d erred in their judgment.

Job’s integrity was built upon the foundation of having had a protracted relationship with God. Our integrity, likewise, must be rooted in God’s Word, and what it says, rather than our own machinations or vain imaginings. It is the only sort of integrity that will weather the storms, that will remain steadfast and unmoved, because it is tethered in the truth of He who abides.

With love in Christ,

Michael Boldea, Jr.

Job CCLXX

2026-04-08T05:48:27.914-05:00

Yes, we should be in awe of the God we serve. Yes, we should be humbled by the beauty that surrounds us, a beauty that He spoke into existence, a beauty that makes the greatest works of Michelangelo, Rembrandt, Monet, DaVinci, and Vermeer seem like nothing more than a toddler’s finger-paint art in comparison. Yes, there should be wonder and a humbling delight in the knowledge that we were fearfully and wonderfully made by His hand.

If one were so inclined, they could spend a lifetime plumbing the depths of this one chapter in the book of Job. Every God-inspired revelation regarding His nature, character, and all-encompassing power is so layered in profundity and wide-reaching in its implications that one could readily be stunned into silence as to how a man who lived four thousand years ago could grasp wisdom on this level. The icing on the cake, however, comes toward the latter part of the chapter, wherein, after numerous mind-expanding and reality-shattering revelations, Job says, “these are the mere edges of His ways.”

We haven’t even scratched the surface, never mind plumb the depths. These are the peripheral attributes, the mere edges of His ways. Stunning. Humbling. For a man to so poetically and beautifully encapsulate the attributes, nature, and sovereignty of God, then acknowledge that this was far from a complete rendering of His might, power, and wonder, can do nothing less than humble us into the dust and show us how little we truly know.

Tell me again about the pet dinosaurs and body part rooms in heaven, or perhaps about the bottomless ice cream sundaes. God forgive us!

When taking into account the historical context of Job’s timing, his insights into everything are deeper still. Men used to believe that the earth was supported by four elephants standing on the back of a turtle, yet here comes this man who says that God hung the earth on nothing. Revolutionary statement for its time, to be sure, but much of what Job said about the universe God created has been proven out by science in our modern era. Such things could not have been conceived by the mind of man, but by a God-breathed revelation into the inner workings of the world, the seen and unseen realms alike.

How could Job know that God drew a circular horizon on the face of the waters at the boundary of light and darkness unless God revealed it to him? It’s not as though he could pick up a telephone and call the other side of the world to determine that while it was light where he stood, darkness was all-encompassing beyond what his eyes could see.

When we view the things Job said through the prism of modern invention and understanding, perhaps his statements aren’t quite that impressive. When we acknowledge that he spoke these things four thousand odd years ago, it takes on a whole new level of astonishment.

Some of the things he spoke of remain a mystery to us to this day. Did you know heaven had pillars, and they tremble and are astonished at God’s rebuke? Science can neither prove nor disprove this, but we know it is true not only because the Word of God says it is, but because many of the other statements Job made have been proven factually true in our modern era.

God has both power and authority over all of creation. Can we even fathom what sort of power is required to stir up the sea, or to break up the storm by will alone? Can we even begin to guess at what it implies that God’s hand pierced the fleeing serpent?

All these things, the fathomless, wondrous, glorious things, and yet these are the mere edges of His ways, and how small a whisper we hear of Him.

But sure, let’s bicker endlessly about whether wearing a necktie is a sure sign that you’re headed for hell because it’s pointing down, or if wearing a wedding band is evidence that you have not purged your heart of the desire for silver and gold. Let’s beat each other over the head and denounce each other over tertiary issues that hold no salvific weight, while ignoring the majesty of the God we serve, which is on full display every single day.

Depending on how one views Job’s statement, we either know and understand so little of God as to perceive the mere edges of His ways, or man’s capacity and ability to understand Him are so small and stunted as to make a greater understanding of Him impossible to the human mind. Either way serves to deflate our bloated sense of self, wisdom, and understanding, but one thing is certain: if you seek God, you will find Him. If you knock, He will open. If you desire to know more of Him, He will reveal Himself to you on a deeper and more profound level.

If a man whom God deemed blameless and upright can conclude that what he knows of God are the mere edges of His ways, then no man living or dead can claim that they know God fully, completely, in all His fathomless glory. It may sound good to the ears of the easily impressed when men boast of being all-knowing, but they are empty, baseless boasts that have no anchor to reality.

We hear a small whisper of Him, and some wrongly assume that’s all there is to know of Him. Job insists that there is much beyond the small whisper, all the way to the thunder of His power, and concludes his soliloquy with a rhetorical question: But the thunder of His power, who can understand?

We can understand His love because it was personified in Jesus, we can understand His grace because He plucked us from the darkness and brought us into the light, we can understand His mercy because, as faithless as we are, He still contends with us, but the thunder of His power, who can understand?

With love in Christ,

Michael Boldea, Jr.

Job CCLXIX

2026-04-07T06:34:27.808-05:00

All of creation, and every created thing, tremble before the Almighty, whether seen or unseen, whether known by the minds of men or kept a mystery to them, because they know the fathomless power of the Alpha and Omega, the One who was, and is, and is to come. All are fully aware of His all-encompassing authority, that by His Word He spoke the universe into existence, that to this day He speaks and it is done, commands and it stands fast, except for mankind; dull-witted, self-important, prideful, arrogant, disobedient, rebellious, mankind.

We think nothing of dismissing His omnipotence, being flippant about His glory, elevating ourselves while diminishing His attributes to the point of thinking we are on equal footing, ignoring all that He has done, and mocking His lovingkindness, because all we’ve ever been taught of the God we purport to serve is that He is love, and love alone.

We have stripped Him of His majesty, His power, His glory, His might, and His supremacy, because we’ve convinced ourselves into believing that the smaller we make Him, the less likely it is that He has the power to judge the living and the dead. If it is so, then it’s less likely He will hold us to account for our willful disobedience, less likely that He sees, hears, and knows all, and we convince ourselves that we can get away with being duplicitous, half-hearted, and faithless servants.

The dead, the living, the very pillars of heaven tremble, but not us. Is it because we do not have a right understanding of who the God of the universe is, or because we refuse to acknowledge His power in all things?

God sits upon His throne, not a rocking chair! He is supreme, Most High, and sovereign, not some age-spotted, sickly figure bowed by the passage of time, so desperate for a game of checkers that once in a while He plucks random individuals out of porta-potties and translates them to the halls of heaven to alleviate His loneliness.

All one needs to do to see how thoroughly we’ve abandoned the fear of the Lord is juxtapose Job’s description of God with any one of a dozen descriptions gleefully regurgitated by modern-day fable tellers.

Job 26:10-14, “He drew a circular horizon on the face of the waters, and the boundary of light and darkness. The pillars of heaven tremble, and are astonished at His rebuke. He stirs up the sea with His power, and by His understanding He breaks up the storm. By His Spirit He adorned the heavens; His hands pierced the fleeing serpent. Indeed these are the mere edges of His ways, and how small a whisper we hear of Him! But the thunder of His power who can understand?”

One can’t help but notice that Job paints a very different picture of God from the one we hear described today. Omniscient, omnipotent, sovereign, and supreme sounds nothing like what some insist God is like in our modern era.

Well, you see, God misplaced His beard comb, so I got to sit on His lap and braid His beard, and I did such a good job that He thought I should have a crack at running the universe while He went fishing! Right. Got it. Thanks for playing, and here’s your parting gift. If you don’t like white, the strait jacket also comes in black and fuchsia.

What’s troubling isn’t that people have the gall to say such things, take such liberties, and be so presumptuous in their self-aggrandizing; it’s that others believe them, take them at their word, and don’t bother to search the Scriptures and see how true men and women of God reacted to getting a glimpse of God’s glory.

When was the last time you trembled before God? When was the last time you were overcome with His presence? These are questions we would do well to ask ourselves, because if all creation trembles at His presence, yet we do not, can we honestly say we have a true understanding of the God we serve?

There are those who claim to come in the name of the Lord, and then those who come in the name of the Lord. You can tell the real from the fake because those who come in the name of the Lord and don’t simply claim to, walk in the fear of Him. A king is still a king even if he is familial with you. You don’t stop showing deference, reverence, respect, allegiance, or loyalty because He has drawn you close, or has tasked you with a particular duty. Serving at the King’s pleasure does not make us de facto kings.

If you come in the name of the King, you deliver His edicts, His commands, and His messages. They originate from Him, and are not to be interpreted, redacted, countermanded, or dismissed.

Imagine if a messenger were sent with a message from the king, and, rather than deliver it, they stood before their audience and declared, “The King has sent me to inform you that I am now your new king.” At some point, someone would inquire of the true King whether He had indeed abdicated His throne and chosen this individual as His successor. They wouldn’t just take the messenger’s word for it because the message would be incongruent with what they knew of the King they served.

Galatians 1:8-9, “But even if we, or an angel from heaven, preach any other gospel to you than what we have preached to you, let him be accursed. As we have said before, so now I say again, if anyone preaches any other gospel to you than what you have received, let him be accursed.”

We serve a God of wonder, power, majesty, and glory. It is a truth revealed to us throughout Scripture each and every time without fail. That any man or woman would take it upon themselves to diminish the wondrous majesty of God, insisting He is anything less than the Word tells us He is, isn’t just telling a fanciful tale, but preaching another gospel.

Beware of those who claim to come in the name of the Lord while doing everything they can to elevate themselves to positions of equal authority with Him. Beware of those who claim to be preachers of the Word, but the word they preach is starkly different than the Word of God. The times are perilous, and the devil is on the prowl.

With love in Christ,

Michael Boldea, Jr.

Job CCLXVIII

2026-04-06T06:40:28.816-05:00

What do you know of God? He judges the wicked! That was what Bildad, as well as his other two friends, kept circling back to. There were variations on the theme, but the theme itself remained immovably consistent. God sees the wicked, He judges the wicked, He punishes the wicked, and if you’re being sifted, you too must be wicked. They were so focused on one facet of God’s nature that they failed to see or acknowledge anything else about Him beyond that.

After attempting to exhort his friend to look inward and see whose spirit had come from him, Job gives a masterclass on the multi-faceted nature of God, which, given his condition and the time he lived in, is nothing short of inspired, God-breathed, and beyond the scope of human understanding.

It’s riveting, awe-inspiring, epic in its scope, transcendent in its blending of the seen and unseen, and so layered with profundity as to make one wonder why God had not singled out Job’s wisdom along with his blamelessness and uprightness.

Long before telescopes, microscopes, understanding of cumulus, stratus, and cirrus clouds, or even a rough outline of the spiritual realm, Sheol, or the deep, Job laid out the majesty of God and His all-encompassing sovereignty with such brilliance as to make Rhode’s scholars blush with shame and seethe with envy.

It proves that Job did not possess simply a rhetorical understanding of who God was, but had spent his life in awe of the Lord of his heart, knowing Him more and more with each passing day as He revealed Himself. You don’t come to understand God the way Job did, tangentially, or through infrequent contemplation of Him.

You can tell when someone has been in the presence of God, walked with Him, and grown in Him, and when they’re regurgitating things they’ve heard or appropriating experiences others have had in hopes of impressing strangers. Job was not boasting about his understanding of God, nor pointing to it as a means of validating his righteousness. He just laid out the thesis of who the God he served was, and how far His powers stretched. He didn’t make it about himself, nor draw attention to himself. In his mind, he was simply stating a fact.

Job 26:5-9, “The dead tremble, those under the waters and those inhabiting them. Sheol is naked before Him, and Destruction has no covering. He stretches out the north over empty space; He hangs the earth on nothing. He binds up the water in His thick clouds, yet the clouds are not broken under it. He covers the face of His throne, and spreads His cloud over it.”

It is a dangerous thing to attempt to place limitations on God or to dictate what He can and cannot do. It is likewise folly to insist that God must do a certain thing in the manner we see fit, at the time of our choosing, for the purposes we define, and within the parameters of what we determine as acceptable.

Men taking liberties with imposing their will on the omnipotent God of all that is isn’t something new. Many have tried throughout the ages, and all have failed in spectacular fashion because God does as He wills, not as man demands.

What Job had started to describe regarding the God he served was not a rough outline. It was not one facet of a multifaceted God, but a deep and profound rendering of the One at whom the dead tremble, as well as those under the waters and those inhabiting them.

Job lived in the desert. He was well versed in sand, sandstorms, blistering heat, and ever-present water shortages. The things he begins to enumerate regarding the omnipotence of God are so far removed from his lived experience that they could only have been divinely inspired; a revelation rather than a retelling of what he’d seen or witnessed.

The presence of God is transformative. The knowledge of Him stretches us beyond our mental or intellectual capacities to perceive the divine, because the things Job spoke of God were beyond man’s ability to reason or understand. How exactly could Job intuit that Sheol is naked before God, and Destruction has no covering, or that He hangs the earth on nothing all on his own? The short answer is he couldn’t have. None of the things he describes in his opening salvo could have been gleaned organically.

When Jesus asked His disciples who men said that He was, the answers varied from John the Baptist, to Elijah, to Jeremiah, or one of the prophets. He then focused in on the group of men before Him, and asked, “Who do you say that I am?”

That’s when Simon Peter took up the charge and answered, “You are the Christ, the Son of the living God.”

Rather than praise his intuitiveness or ability to logically conclude who He was, Jesus answered Peter and said, “Blessed are you, Simon Bar-Jonah, for flesh and blood has not revealed this to you, but My Father who is in heaven.”

Some things can only be perceived by divine revelation. Even after all the teaching they’d heard from the lips of Christ, and after having witnessed numerous miracles at His hands, it was God who revealed the reality of who Jesus was to Peter.

Job could not have known the things he was speaking save by divine revelation. This was God’s curriculum vitae, and He used Job as a means of delivering it at a time when most of what he mentioned could not have been revealed by flesh and blood.

Even broken and bleeding, bereft and stripped of all his earthly possessions, God chose Job as the vessel by which He described Himself because He found him worthy of this great honor.

On a broader theme, and one that is relatable to each of us, it doesn’t matter who others think or say Jesus is; what matters is who you believe Him to be. If it has been revealed to you, and you believe, that He is the Christ, the Son of the living God, then your life must reflect that reality in the good fruit that you bear. One cannot come to the knowledge of the truth of who Jesus is and remain unchanged, indifferent, or aloof. A good tree bears good fruit; a bad tree deflects and accuses others of the selfsame wickedness it’s rooted in that prohibits it from producing good fruit.

With love in Christ,

Michael Boldea, Jr.

Job CCLXVII

2026-04-05T07:17:00.002-05:00

Proverbs 29:20, “Do you see a man hasty in his words? There is more hope for a fool than for him.”

That was the synopsis given by Solomon, a king whom God deemed the wisest of his generation, excelling all the men of the East and all the wisdom of Egypt. Solomon prayed to God for wisdom and an understanding mind, and by God’s own assessment, he got it in spades. When weighing a pronouncement, it’s always wise to determine the source, who said it, and where it’s coming from. Yes, even a fool can say something profound once in a while, but it’s more likely that wise words will come from the lips of a wise man rather than a fool.

Fools try hard to sound wise and fail miserably. One blessed with wisdom speaks words of wisdom without looking as though they’d been harried, composing word salads that have nothing to do with the topic at hand. A former Vice President who recently ran for the presidency comes to mind.

Once in a while, I enjoy watching debates. Not political ones, mind you, since I find them trite and obnoxious on the best of days, but ones between Christian scholars and atheists. There is a man by the name of John Lennox who, among other things, is a lay theologian. The ease with which he dismantles his opponents and pokes holes in their theories is a joy to behold. You can tell he’s not trying to be brilliant; he simply is, and he doesn’t have to use big words to prove big ideas. He is a calm, thoughtful, grandfatherly type who doesn’t react in the heat of the moment, but even when his opponents grow belligerent and aggressive, he keeps his cool and thinks before he speaks.

We all know that one individual in our sphere who tends to fly off the handle. It’s inevitable that we know such a person, someone whose words spill from their mouth without ever taking a pause to consider what they’re saying, or even if it makes sense, and if we can’t think of anyone, it’s probably us.

Job’s answer to Bildad could have been far harsher than it was, but in his quest to open the eyes of his friends to the possibility that they were wrong in their assessment of him, Job, once again, attempted to compel his friends to think, to ponder, to take the time and think the situation through rather than hastily say the first thing that came to their mind.

We’ve all had those moments when, in hindsight, we would have said something different than we did had we taken the time to consider it more thoroughly. Whether with friends, family, brothers, sisters, wives, or children, there are bound to be those moments when rather than being logical, reasonable, even keeled, and not reacting out of emotion or frustration, we say something we wish we could take back, something we know we shouldn’t have said, and the reason this occurs is because we speak in haste.

If ever this becomes a pattern, it’s time to consider Solomon’s words, and rather than continue down the path of speaking before we think, learn the gift of bridling our tongues, and weigh every word that pours from our lips, ensuring that they are spoken with grace and seasoned with salt.

That should be the aim, always, and without fail. Some try to season their words with honey, likely because they have an ulterior motive for doing so; others with vinegar, because they have heart issues that compel them to be bitter, but the aim should always be salt. Speak the truth, but speak it in love. Even when the need arises that we must speak rebuke or correction, it must be with grace.

Modern convenience being what it is, we’ve forgotten the value of salt, something those who came before us were keenly aware of. In the days before electricity, refrigeration, and the ever-present Piggly Wiggly, salt was valuable enough that it could be used as money, a value of exchange, and something highly prized.

A few weeks back, I was at the grocery store picking up some things for the house, and while walking the aisles, my wife texted that we needed salt. Trying to be a bit cheeky, as is my inclination, I texted back: “What kind of salt? There’s pink, black, coarse, flaky, kosher, sea salt, Himalayan, smoked, seasoned, and pickling; you need to be more specific.”

Evidently, she wasn’t in the mood for my elevated sense of humor because all she texted back was, just salt!

Thankfully, there was a generic box on the shelf that just said SALT, and since I aim to please, I bought it. It didn’t hurt that it was also the cheapest salt product in the store.

Although I pleaded ignorance in jest, knowing full well what type of salt my wife wanted, there are those who plead ignorance in earnest regarding what it is to speak our words with grace and seasoned with salt, not because they don’t know what this means, but because they prefer to speak hastily.

You can tell the difference in the exchange between Bildad and Job. While Bildad was focused on accusing Job of wickedness, Job was focused on compelling Bildad to some much-needed self-reflection, not attacking him personally but pleading with him to look inward and determine where he was in his walk with God.

Perhaps the most poignant question of the six that Job asked Bildad was the last, because it goes beyond the words that were spoken to something deeper: Whose spirit came from you?

Whenever we open our mouths to speak, before we utter a word, it would be wise indeed to determine whose spirit is animating us and insisting that we speak the words that are on the tip of our tongue. It can only be one of two sources: God’s spirit or the spirit of the god of this age. Only one of the two is proper, seasoned with salt, and should be verbalized. It is our duty as sons and daughters of God to hold every thought captive, to bridle our tongue, and to speak only the things He would have us speak with His spirit as the source. My feelings don’t count, my powers of deduction are irrelevant, and precedent is inconsequential.

Is what I am saying coming from God, or my flesh? Is what I am speaking in harmony with God’s Word or with the musings and machinations of the spirit of the god of this age? Is the prism through which I filter my thoughts before they get past my lips godliness, grace, wisdom, temperance, and Christ's likeness, or does the filter short-circuit altogether if we get overheated or our pride is bruised?

With love in Christ,

Michael Boldea, Jr.

Job CCLXVI

2026-04-01T06:22:27.848-05:00

Job 26:1-4, “But Job answered and said: ‘How have you helped him who is without power? How have you saved the arm that has no strength? How have you counseled one who has no wisdom? And how have you declared sound advice to many? To whom have you uttered words? And whose spirit came from you?’”

You can push a man farther than you thought you could, but eventually, if you keep pushing, you will push a man too far. Everyone’s got their limits; everyone has a point beyond which they can no longer remain silent, unperturbed, or calm.

If ever there was an apt analogy, this was the straw that broke the camel’s back when it came to Job’s patience, and rather than answer Bildad, he turned the microscope on him and gave him a taste of his own medicine.

Although it seems Zophar had already given up trying to persuade Job and convince him of the wickedness he knew himself to be innocent of, this was Bildad’s third attempt at bat, and not only had he swung and missed, but he’d gotten enough of a rise out of Job where he was no longer on the defense, but went on the offense.

It’s a lot easier to lob unsubstantiated accusations, draw conclusions based on no evidence, and stand rigidly upon the self-righteous soapbox we all carry around in the hope that we can put it to good use than it is to be the object of the selfsame scrutiny we gleefully foist upon others.

Contrary to his three friends, Job did not level ad hominem attacks against Bildad, or accuse him of wickedness, but asked him a series of poignant questions that demanded answers, answers which could not be honestly given unless some soul searching and introspection took place.

Let’s set aside the unfounded accusations of wickedness, let’s overlook your digs at my integrity, let’s gloss over your unwillingness to take me at my word, and pretend as though you never called me a liar to my face. What have you done, exactly? How have you helped him who is without power? How have you saved the arm that has no strength? How have you counseled one who has no wisdom?

These are questions we would do well to ask ourselves any time we have the inclination to demand that others do more.

I’ve been in ministry for thirty-nine years. I started at age 12 and am now eligible to join AARP. No, I’m not of retirement age, not quite yet, but the AARP is dedicated to persons over the age of fifty, and I qualify.

Throughout these almost four decades, I’ve seen a lot. Some things I remember fondly, others I wish I could forget, but the one thing that broke my heart every time was seeing decent, well-meaning men and women burn out not because of something God demanded of them, but because they gave in to the voices and the pressure within their respective circles to do more.

By all means, walk in the calling to which you have been called. Do what God commands you to do, but don’t take it upon yourself to try and speed up the process, accelerate growth, expand, diversify, or any of the other buzzwords being bandied about in ministerial circles nowadays.

It’s not your place to have a five-year plan, target demographics, increase your visibility, market share, or digital footprint. Walk in obedience to God, and He will grow you at the pace He decides, in the manner He decides, and by the means He decides.

If God called you to preach the Word, then preach the Word. It shouldn’t matter if it’s to five people or five thousand. You’re doing the thing God called you to do.

When we give in to the pressure of trying to please people rather than pleasing God, it never ends well. From broken marriages to wayward children to once prominent leaders walking away from the faith, this was never God’s plan or purpose.

It was men who decided to draw outside the lines, to stretch beyond their calling, to get ahead of God, and they paid dearly for it.

Every couple of weeks, I get an email from someone that, although varying in tonality, has the same underlying premise: if I were you, I’d be traveling and preaching nonstop! If I were you, I’d release all the dreams and visions for public consumption. If I were you, I’d focus on deliverance, prophecy, preaching, teaching, impartation, and a handful of other things that to the individuals in question seem more pertinent and important than what I am currently doing.

Rarely is there someone who says just do what the Lord told you to do, because that’s just the nature of modern discourse.

We are all called to serve, follow, and obey Jesus. That’s the baseline for every individual calling themselves a son or daughter of God. What He calls us to do beyond that, in whatever capacity, for whatever length of time, is intimate and personal, between the individual and God, and no man has the right to impose his will on that individual's calling.

I get that most people are well-meaning, but there are a handful who would rather judge another’s garden than tend to their own because it requires less effort to do so. Rather than focus on what someone is or isn’t doing, or insist that they should be doing more of what they already are, perhaps our time would be better spent asking ourselves the questions that Job asked Bildad: How have I helped? How have I counseled? How have I declared sound advice to many?

We all will stand before God one day, and we will not be judged by men or the opinions of men, but by the sovereign, omniscient Creator of all that is, and in His righteous judgment He will determine whether we were faithful servants, doing what He commanded, or faithless, double tongued, rebellious goats who exploited the people of God and supposed that godliness was a means of gain.

Just remember, it’s binary: left or right, sheep or goat, beloved or cast out, obedient or faithless; there is no in-between.

With love in Christ,

Michael Boldea, Jr.

Job CCLXV

2026-03-31T06:27:36.507-05:00

It takes humility to acknowledge how little we know, and for Bildad, humility was in short supply. Only God can rightfully claim the title of omniscient. All others may claim full knowledge of their particular field, or a topic they’ve studied and researched ad nauseam, but as far as omniscience goes, it’s defined as all knowing, or knowing everything about everything. It’s not guessing, assuming, gauging probabilities, or calculating the odds; it’s full and complete knowledge of all things, whether hidden, secret, or out in the open.

Bildad and his friends were big on assumptions, correlations, and by all accounts worshiped at the altar of causality with such rigidity as to make a monk seem flighty and erratic. To them, the simplest explanation was always the right one, but what made it worse was that no other reason for Job’s suffering would be entertained or considered.

The sad reality is that Bildad was not the exception to the rule. We, each, in our own way, adopt this mindset whether frequently or infrequently, and conclude that if something hasn’t happened to us personally, if we’ve not experienced something ourselves, then it can’t be true for anyone else, no matter how different our circumstances or situations.

Whether the issue is prophecy, dreams, visions, or the gifts of the Holy Spirit, they are dismissed by a large swath of the contemporary church for the simple fact that they’ve never experienced them themselves. It’s like saying that just because I never jumped out of an airplane, anyone who insists they have must be lying.

When you insist that they, too, can have the same experience, that it’s not secret or hidden, and a drive to their closest small airport will likely give them all the proof they need, they will deflect, citing time constraints, a busy life, or some other arbitrary reason for not getting to the truth of the matter for themselves.

The gifts of the Holy Spirit are no longer acquirable!

Have you asked God? Have you gone before Him and sincerely desired the spiritual gifts of which Paul speaks?

No, why should I? They aren’t available, so why should I waste my time?

But who said they’re no longer among us?

My denomination, of course, and our doctrine of covenants are sacrosanct.

That’s usually the way the conversation goes, and it’s no less myopic than Bildad’s stance that righteousness cannot be attained by anyone born of a woman, even though God Himself may have declared him as such.

Make sure the hill you’re willing to die on is a hill worth dying on. Make sure the person, institution, or doctrine you’re defending is one worth defending. Men and women throughout history have gone to their deaths with praise on their lips, not for some arbitrary, tertiary issue concerning some vague interpretation of a verse conveniently taken out of context, but for the sake of Christ Jesus their Lord.

It’s not only off-putting but downright suspect when anyone chooses to defend a theological position with more fervor, passion, and determination than they would the lordship of Christ.

What about Jesus? We’ll get to Jesus eventually, but first, you have to agree with me on this one issue, whether that issue happens to be the timing of the Lord’s return or that a particular denomination is superior to another.

We get so wrapped up in the minutiae that have nothing to do with salvation, regeneration, sanctification, or rebirth that, at some point, it becomes our de facto identity. We are no longer bondservants of Christ or followers of the Way, but Baptists, Pentecostals, Lutherans, Methodists, pre-tribbers, and post-tribbers. We insulate ourselves to the point of existing in an echo chamber, where everyone we come in contact with agrees with us on that one issue, never once concerning ourselves with whether or not they are serving and following Christ. They must be pure of heart and righteous beyond measure; they agree with me on my pet doctrine after all.

It’s one of the reasons so many wolves stand behind pulpits victimizing the sheep today. We are more concerned with whether they graduated from the right seminary than we are with whether they are above reproach. We are more concerned with how they dress and how much gel they use in their hair than with whether the Spirit of God resides in them and the words they speak are spoken in power.

We focus on the superficial, the irrelevant, the tertiary and secondary issues, while ignoring the things that matter because were we to hold our leaders to a biblical standard, we too would be called upon to live up to the same.

Bildad could not allow for the possibility of a man being righteous before God, because if he did, it would mean it was attainable, and something he knew himself not to be.

God doesn’t do that anymore, not because He can’t, not because He’s changed, but because He’s not doing it through me, and if He’s not doing it through me, He can’t be doing it through anyone, anywhere, at any time.

That type of self-importance is galling, but it also goes a long way into revealing how such individuals view themselves compared to their fellow brothers and sisters in Christ. It’s never said outright, but always implied, that they are by far the most righteous people they know, and if they have not experienced the power and presence of the Holy Spirit, then what hope do the rest of us have? It’s in God’s best interest to pick the best, and if He hasn’t picked me, He likely hasn’t picked anyone.

Luke 18:10-14, “Two men went up to the temple to pray, one a Pharisee and the other a tax collector. The Pharisee stood and prayed thus with himself, ‘God, I thank You that I am not like other men – extortioners, unjust, adulterers, or even as this tax collector. I fast twice a week; I give tithes of all that I possess.’ And the tax collector, standing afar off, would not so much as raise his eyes to heaven, but beat his breast, saying, ‘God, be merciful to me a sinner!’ I tell you, this man went down to his house justified rather than the other; for everyone who exalts himself will be humbled, and he who humbles himself will be exalted.”

With love in Christ,

Michael Boldea, Jr.

Job CCLXIV

2026-03-30T06:35:11.310-05:00

There is no end to human ignorance, and as you look around, it’s sobering to realize that it’s not getting better, but worse. I think it has a lot to do with people equating their access to knowledge and possessing knowledge as one and the same, believing themselves to be wise in their own eyes simply because a device in their hand can tell them what Tutankhamun named his pet cat.

If anything, the constant availability and easy accessibility to knowledge and wisdom have created a generation of superficial illiterates who fancy themselves miniature Einsteins and Teslas because they can tell you the square root of pi, not because they know it offhand, but because they can ask Siri.

There no longer remains a sense of wonder or the willingness to dig deeper than surface level, because if something can’t be learned within the span of a TikTok reel, then it’s not worth learning. If you think there’s a deficit in attention spans now, give it ten years. It’ll make the youth of today look downright scholarly in hindsight.

We’ve already whittled down church services to forty minutes from start to finish, and even that seems too long for some. I’m waiting for some intrepid soul to either start a drive-thru church, where the congregants can hand the bishop their tithe and get a special blessing while sitting in their car, or someone to start advertising the condensed fifteen-minute service because time is precious, don’t you know.

True enough, time is precious, but isn’t the best use of one’s time being in God’s presence? Would my time or yours, for that matter, not be better served in fellowship and prayer rather than endlessly doom-scrolling and going down rabbit trails so far removed from truth that we start sounding like a less talented version of H.G. Wells? We say we want eternity with Him, but can bear to be in His presence for longer than it takes to microwave a burrito. How does that make any logical sense?

In a nutshell, this was Bildad’s problem. He thought he knew more than he actually did, and his words betrayed his ignorance. It’s evident that Bildad knew of God. It’s likewise evident that he did not know God on a personal, intimate level.

Take any prominent figure today, and you can likely know a lot about them if you are so inclined. From what school they went to, to their net worth, to what they prefer to eat for breakfast, to the type of cologne they use. No matter how much you can know about them, however, their sons or daughters will always have a deeper insight and know things about them that you could never be privy to.

That was the difference between Job and Bildad and how they viewed, perceived, and understood God. Bildad had amassed knowledge of God, rightly concluding that dominion and fear belong to Him, and that He made peace in the high places. Job had a relationship with God that went beyond itemizing His attributes, to knowing His presence, feeling His love, and walking in His way.

James 2:19, “You believe that there is one God. You do well. Even the demons believe – and tremble!”

Awareness of God, belief in God, even fear of God, must be coupled with active obedience of His will, submission to His purpose, and walking in His way in order to get beyond the superficial knowledge of Him and into a relationship and fellowship with Him.

If you’re so smart, how many angels can dance on the head of a pin? If you are the righteous man you claim to be, is there any number to His armies? Intimacy with God does not require answering trivia questions, nor do you need to pass man-made purity tests in order to have fellowship with Him.

The one thing God requires is your heart, not in part but in full. Whether you pray standing up, kneeling, or sitting down won’t make a bit of difference if your heart is not His to do as He wills, mold as He wills, prune as He wills, clean as He wills, and fill as He wills.

Even if Job had an answer to Bildad’s question, it would not have sufficed. Had he come up with some arbitrary number and said, “This is the number of His armies”, Bildad would have insisted that Job was just guessing.

The same can be said with the purity tests we like to put others to, wherein if they say they pray while kneeling, there’s always the follow up of how long, what name they use to address God, is it in the morning or evening, eyes closed or eyes open, and on and on until they find that thing that does not harmonize with their canned answers, and that’s all it takes. Nope, you’re not doing it right. It was a trick question. One eye must be open and the other closed; that’s the only way to pray, and anything less than checking every box and jumping through every hoop I’ve concocted means you’re not really a believer.

Job 2:13, “So rend your heart, and not your garments; return to the Lord your God, for He is gracious and merciful, slow to anger, and of great kindness; and He relents from doing harm.”

While the rending of one’s garments can be performative, nothing deeper or more profound than emotive theater, the rending of one’s heart cannot be faked, and doing it is something seen by God rather than by men. Yes, there are times when the rending of one’s heart is obvious to those present, replete with tears of repentance, groaning, and heart cries to the Almighty, but when it occurs, it’s not for the sake or benefit of others, but a sincere outpouring of one’s repentant heart to God alone.

Job had experienced the rending of his heart on multiple occasions by now, but Bildad not once, and so he could not relate to Job. His pride refused to allow for the possibility that Job knew God on a deeper level than he did, and so, rather than approach his friend with humility, his arrogance is on full display.

With love in Christ,

Michael Boldea, Jr.

Job CCLXIII

2026-03-27T06:41:07.389-05:00

In his short and concise answer to Job, so short in fact that theologians of the past have surmised that it was truncated, or that the rest of his speech was somehow lost to time, Bildad epitomizes the danger of perceiving God as one-dimensional, and putting Him in a theological box of one’s own design.

All Bildad saw was justice without grace, wrath without mercy, a God just waiting in the shadows, ready to unleash His judgment at the smallest deviation, who would think nothing of crushing His creation underfoot, regardless of his uprightness.

To Bildad, the only answer that made sense for why Job was suffering as he was was karmic reciprocity. If you’d done well, you’d be okay; since you’re not okay, you must be wicked. It’s a theory that doesn’t stand up to scrutiny, but one currently adopted by a large swath of the contemporary church. God is prospering me; therefore, I must be righteous. If prosperity were the metric by which righteousness is ascertained, then by that logic, Elon Musk must be the most righteous man walking the earth today.

That God would see a man as righteous was something Bildad could not wrap his mind around, especially Job and the condition he was in. It was an idea he would not allow himself to entertain, and so built a defense around his preconceived notion, insisting that there was no way man can be righteous before God, or that one who is born of a woman can be pure.

There must be something; we just haven’t figured out what that something is. To him, that Job had committed wickedness was a foregone conclusion. It wasn’t just a possibility or a probability; it was a certainty.

There is great danger in assuming that we know the mind of God and judging others based on those assumptions. Just because some things are as they seem, it doesn’t mean that they’re always as they seem.

As soon as she turned five, our oldest daughter got it in her head that she was a big girl. Whenever we’d go to the grocery store, she didn’t want to ride in the cart anymore and would walk beside it, usually picking out random items and throwing them in the cart as though they were free, gleefully selecting the most colorful boxes, whether we needed them or not, or whether she even knew what was inside.

One day we were in the cookie isle, and Victoria had already put three boxes of cookies into the cart, two of which I’d managed to put back on the shelf when she wasn’t looking, when she took another box off the shelf, ready to fling into the cart when with the stern voice employed by mothers the world over when their frustration level reaches a fevered pitch my wife said, “Victoria, no, that’s enough.”

An older lady happened to be pushing her cart within earshot, and the look she gave my wife was so fierce that one would think my wife was actively whipping the child rather than sternly telling her she needed to behave.

What the lady didn’t know was that we already had three untouched boxes of cookies at home that we were planning to donate to the local homeless shelter before they expired. Our daughter was doing what she was doing not because she was hungry or because she’d been deprived of cookies all her young life, but because she thought it was a game, fun, and she liked the colors on the boxes rather than what was inside. She assumed my wife was a bad mom just because she’d told our daughter no, when in reality she is the most attentive, caring, nurturing, and loving mother I’ve ever known, including my own.

It’s not that my mother wasn’t all of those things, but she was from the old school, and she had zero tolerance for foolishness. Couple that with the constant stress of making sure we had enough to eat, and working the handful of jobs she did in order to make it happen, and she didn’t have what one might call a long fuse.

Whenever we feel the compulsion to judge based on the information readily available to us, it would be wise to consider that we don’t have the full picture of the situation, and there are always unknown variables only God is privy to.

Bildad and his two friends had no such inclinations. They assumed they knew everything there was to know about Job’s situation and judged it accordingly. We’re all maggots and worms, but you’re wicked to boot because if you weren’t, then you wouldn’t be in the pickle you’re in.

All they saw was the severity of God, without acknowledging His goodness. They saw the rod of correction without acknowledging the possibility of the fires of testing, which would, once they’d run their course, produce a more refined Job.

Although the words Bildad spoke regarding the dominion, supremacy, and sovereignty of God were true, the purpose for which he spoke them was not to encourage, build up, or comfort Job, but rather to undergird and justify the verbal attacks he would shortly level against him.

There is a difference between speaking the truth with the intent to savage another’s hope, and speaking the truth in love with the purpose of edifying, encouraging, and building up. Over the years, I’ve had the displeasure of hearing some of the most ruthless, heartless, mean-spirited things come from the lips of believers, and their only defense would be, well, it’s the truth, isn’t it? True enough, but what was your purpose in speaking that truth in that moment, with that tone, and in the manner in which you spoke it?

Is the truth you choose to speak at the time you choose to speak it in service of binding up wounds, or pouring salt on them? Is it to edify, and comfort, or dispirit someone so thoroughly as to push them over the edge into despondency? If we were shown the same cruelty and indifference we so gleefully mete out to others, we would think those individuals monsters, yet have no qualms about doing it ourselves. Sometimes silence is a gift, and saying nothing is a surer sign of wisdom than anything we could have said.

With love in Christ,

Michael Boldea, Jr.

Job CCLXII

2026-03-25T06:08:00.000-05:00

Job 25:1-6, “Then Bildad the Shuhite answered and said: ‘Dominion and fear belong to Him; He makes peace in His high places. Is there any number to His armies? Upon whom does His light not rise? How then can man be righteous before God? Or how can he be pure who is born of a woman? If even the moon does not shine, and the stars are not pure in His sight, how much less man, who is a maggot, and a son of man who is a worm?”’

Not only is this the shortest chapter in the book of Job, but it’s also the most disjointed, where about halfway through, Bildad seems to lose his composure and go off on a rant that would make every proponent of the self-esteem, positive affirmation crowd blush with indignity. Not that I’m a proponent of lying to yourself in the mirror, but there should be a happy medium between calling oneself brave, beautiful, capable, and fit when one knows themselves not to be at least half of those things, and screeching you’re a maggot and a worm at one’s reflection.

Perhaps say nothing at all, and just make sure you don’t have yellow discharge drying at the corners of your eyes and that your shirt is buttoned right before setting forth to brave the day.

There’s a park in our neck of the woods, at least where we used to live before the girls came along, called Riverside Park. For those in the area, it’s in the city known for opportunity running through it, and never stopping to catch its breath. Whether you call it Watertown or Watertucky, it’s the quintessential middle America town, with this particular park being a major draw, especially during the summer months.

The park is divided by a creek, with a bridge connecting the two sides, and because there is abundant water, there are always ducks. The ducks draw families, families bring bread, and the ducks get so many frequent meals as to think someone was fattening them up with an eye for preparing them for the dinner table.

There are park benches and picnic tables, and it’s nice enough that it was an oft-visited spot in the early years of our marriage. Walks in the park are free. They’re far gentler on the pocketbook than walking through a mall, and the extra vitamin D is an added bonus. One day, we were walking by the creek, hand in hand, and stopped to watch a little girl holding a slice of bread, tearing off small pieces and throwing them near her feet for the ducks to snatch up.

It was idyllic. We stood there smiling, watching the little girl throw small crumbs of bread closer and closer to her feet until one brave duck got too close, and the little girl, quick as lightning, grabbed the duck by the neck and started dragging it away from the creek bank.

In an instant, the picturesque scene turned into something more akin to a horror movie, as the duck started quacking, flapping its wings, trying to pull away in vain, the girl’s mother began yelling for her to let it go, and with a determined look on her face, the little girl just kept pulling.

I get the same whiplash of emotions when I read Bildad’s brief and final answer to Job’s words. He starts out well enough, reiterating that dominion and fear belong to God. He acknowledges that God makes peace in the high places, is in awe of God’s grandeur, wondering if there is any number to His armies, and concludes that He is ever present, everywhere, for upon whom does His light not shine, but then something changes. There is a not-so-subtle narrative shift, and it’s as though two different people are focusing on two opposing sides of the same issue. It usually takes two to tango, and two differing viewpoints to have a heated debate or a disagreement, but not so with Bildad.

The same man who enumerated God’s power, omnipotence, sovereignty, and glory, comes out of left field and asks, how then can man be righteous before God? Well, because God declares him righteous. One would think the answer would be obvious enough, given that the same man who asked the question insisted upon God’s dominion a few seconds prior.

Rather than argue endlessly whether a glass is half empty or half full, perhaps we can come together and agree that there is a glass, and there is liquid in the glass, and whether it’s half full or half empty really doesn’t matter. If the way you interpret how you measure the fullness of the glass matters more to you than the reality that it exists and there is substance in it to the halfway mark, the issue is more about you being right in the way you view the glass than the existence thereof.

We engage in endless quarrels, hurt each other, wound each other, and speak ill of each other, not because we are defending the truth or defending the Gospel, but because we want to be right. We want the prism through which we see something to be the only viable option, and we can’t bring ourselves to admit that the glass is both half full and half empty.

No man is righteous simply because he declares himself to be. However, a man is righteous if God declares him righteous. It’s a simple solution to Bildad’s problem, but one he is unwilling to entertain because that would mean rethinking his entire framework regarding God, man, authority, and sovereignty.

Either you see yourself as a maggot and a worm, or one who has been bought with a price, redeemed, reborn, washed clean, and set upon the path of righteousness. However, what is imperative is that you see yourself as God sees you, and not as others see you.

To his friends, Job was a wicked man deserving of all that had befallen him and worse besides. To God, Job was a blameless and upright man who feared Him and shunned evil. Whose report he would believe was Job’s choice, and knowing himself to desire nothing more than the presence of God, he rejected the condemnation of his friends and their assessment of him.

Yes, only God can judge you, and that is either a reason for great rejoicing or great dread, depending on whether you belong to Him or only claim to. Job had searched his heart repeatedly and found nothing he needed to repent of, not because he ignored the things he knew were wicked in his life, but because there was no wickedness in his life. If you stood before God today, could you say the same?

With love in Christ,

Michael Boldea, Jr.

Job CCLXI

2026-03-24T06:35:00.001-05:00

Job 24:22-25, “But God draws the mighty away with His power; he rises up, but no man is sure of life. He gives them security, and they rely on it; yet His eyes are on their ways. They are exalted for a little while, then they are gone. They are brought low; they are taken out of the way like all others; they dry out like the heads of grain. Now if it is not so, who will prove me a liar, and make my speech worth nothing?”

Any power, might, or ability to bend the universe to their will that someone might think they have is illusory. It is imagined, deceptive, and misleading, and by the time they figure out that the might they thought they possessed was nothing more than mist and illusion, a construct of their own id, a byproduct of pride and the pretense of authority, the grave beckons and try as they might to avoid it, or keep from taking that one-way journey back to the earth from which they came, it’s too late.

No matter what heights they reach, no matter how much wealth they amass, no matter how indelible the mark they leave on the world, though he rises up, no man is sure of life. Man is born, and man dies. The length of one’s days is in God’s hand alone, and though they may think they can outrun the clock, that by sheer force of will they can continue to be among the living once the sand in their hourglass runs out, vanity is all it ends up being.

Yes, they may be exalted for a little while, rely on the security He’s given them, insisting that it was of their own doing, but God’s eyes are on their ways, and His accounting is impeccable. No matter how high they rise, no matter how much power they wield, all men are brought low and taken out of the way. One’s station will not shield them from the eyes of God, one’s office will not make them bypass the grave, and in a world of uncertainty where everything has an expiration date and a limited shelf life, it is no less than wisdom itself to cling to and humble ourselves before the eternal One, the maker of all that is seen and unseen.

Prince or pauper, a man is just a man. Wise or fool, we all share the same end, the moment of which is known only by the One who created us and knew us from before He formed us in our mothers’ womb.

From the very first verse of the book of Job, we are told of his priorities and what he dedicated his life to. We were likewise shown a glimpse into the mind of God and made to understand what He deems worthy of note, what draws His eyes, and what He counts as a life well lived. We were not told Job was a shrewd businessman, a great orator, or a poet, but rather that he feared God and shunned evil.

All his other successes were secondary issues to the primary one, which was that he dedicated his life to having a deep and meaningful relationship with God. He dedicated his life to the pursuit of growing his spiritual man first, and the sheep, camels, oxen, donkeys, and very large household were secondary concerns.

Had his priorities been inverted, had he dedicated himself to amassing more of the things he already possessed, when they were stripped from him, it would have broken him. He would have surely been brought to ruin, a broken man with a broken spirit, because his identity would have been wrapped up in his possessions rather than in the God he served.

The uniqueness of Job was that he not only understood what mattered most in life but also lived in such a way as to exemplify the practical application of that understanding. I know that all things come from God, I know my Redeemer lives, I know there is something beyond this mortal coil and sagging flesh, and knowing these things, I strive to live accordingly, and in light of that reality. I shun evil because it is evil. I fear God because He is supreme and sovereign.

You can live your life chasing after things the world deems worthwhile, or laying hold of what God deems worthwhile. One must take precedence over the other; one will be sought after with greater aplomb than the other, because it’s clear that no man can serve two masters, and you will defer to one over the other depending on the desire and yearning of your heart.

Job yearned for God, and in his final response to Eliphaz, he drew the comparison between the mighty who lean on their might and those who lean on God, depend upon Him, and trust Him to carry them through the dark times. Your trust is only as unshakeable as what you put your trust in.

Psalm 20:7-8, “Some trust in chariots, and some in horses; but we will remember the name of the Lord our God. They have bowed down and fallen; but we have risen and stand upright.”

Job outlined the way of the world, not from the outside looking in, not as someone who never had possessions, but as one who was once the greatest of all the people of the East. His final analysis was as simple as it was profound: God is the only thing that matters. Knowing God, serving God, fearing God, loving God, worshipping God, and obeying God are the only things that will set you apart, give you hope, and give you purpose.

If it is not so, who will prove me a liar? If you can poke holes in my analysis, feel free to do so, but I know you can’t. The truth is the truth whether men reject it, bristle at it, or rage against it. Do you know Jesus as your Lord and Savior? Does He sit on the throne of your heart? These are not questions we can get around to answering when we have a bit of downtime, but the most important questions we will ever have to contend with on this side of eternity. Job knew. He knew that his Redeemer lived, and one day he would see Him face to face. Do you?

With love in Christ,

Michael Boldea, Jr.

Job CCLX

2026-03-23T06:29:29.040-05:00

You’ll know you’re over the target when the response to your quoting Scripture is an ad hominem personal attack that has nothing to do with the initial discussion. When men can’t defend their positions because they are contrary to what the Word says, it becomes personal, and whatever they can do to deflect from their error, they will do with gusto.

It’s no less than what Eliphaz, Bildad, and Zophar attempted to do to Job, with an added layer of unsubstantiated accusations leveled against him, because he’d exposed the one thing they couldn’t admit to: not everything is black and white, not every situation is clear-cut, and anyone who insists they know the truth of every matter, regardless of how nuanced, complicated, or shrouded in mystery, is doing it to feed their ego. For some, the hardest words they will ever utter are “I don’t know” and “I was wrong.” They are so difficult to pass our lips that we would rather drag someone through the mud, accuse them of wickedness, attack their character, and latch onto things that were never part of the initial conversation, all in the hope of avoiding saying them.

“The Word of God says to resist the devil, strive to enter through the narrow gate, and walk circumspectly because the days are evil.”

“You’re fat!”

“Thanks for the reminder. I do own a mirror. Now what about the thing the Bible says?”

“You’re still fat!”

So much for reasoning together and allowing the Spirit of God to bring clarity. So much for iron sharpening iron and allowing the Word of God to have the final say on the matter.

When all we’re told repeatedly from various pulpits of various denominations that the only thing for us to do is wait for the catching away, perhaps picking some belly button lint just to pass the time, but nothing more aggressive than that, it’s no wonder the world is still lost and the devil is making headway into places and institutions once considered sacrosanct and beyond his reach. We have become warriors without armor, sojourners without a destination, leaders without vision, followers without purpose, shepherds without integrity, and servants in open rebellion to their Master. But sure, tell me more about how we’ll rule the nations, how justice will run down like water, and righteousness like a mighty river.

The household of faith has a purpose on this earth, and it’s not being ineffective, indifferent, and unconcerned. Neither is our purpose to build up our earthly kingdoms or promote ourselves as individuals as though we were a viable replacement for the King of Kings, or on equal footing with Him and His authority. Any authority we have was given to us by Him, and if we boast in anything, may it be in Christ Jesus our Lord and Savior.

When we start seeking celebrity rather than obedience, the enemy will be more than happy to facilitate it, because he understands human nature and knows that if the heart yearns for name recognition rather than faithful submission to the will and purpose of God, compromises will be made to attain that goal. Oddly enough, the compromise never errs on the side of truth, righteousness, or sanctification, but always toward permissiveness, duplicity, and more worldly-minded pursuits.

When a wicked man points to other wicked men attempting to highlight their wickedness, it’s not from a sense of justice, but rather a means of deflection. Sure, I’m rotten to the core, but look at those guys over there, they’re as rotten as me just in other areas of life.

When God calls us to righteousness, holiness, and sanctification, it’s not so we can boast about them or perceive ourselves as spiritually superior to others, but to draw nearer to Him and feel His presence in greater and greater measure. God’s closeness should inspire greater humility in the heart of man, rather than boastful buffoonery. The clearer we see His righteousness and holiness, the more evident the insignificance of our own righteousness becomes. Any man who boasts of his righteousness or holiness has not been in close enough proximity to God to understand the folly of their boast.

It would be both refreshing and jarring to see a self-titled spiritual leader today have the self-awareness of Isaiah, and declare that all our righteousnesses are like filthy rags, and it’s because of our iniquity that God has hidden His face from us and consumed us. That would not play well with a modern audience, I fear.

The faux-shepherds can’t risk telling the truth, the pretend sheep don’t want to hear it, and they’ve come to an unspoken, tacit agreement that as long as the preacher keeps preaching lies, the sheep will continue to pretend it’s the truth because the gravy train needs to keep chugging along, and the congregation just wants some fire insurance rather than true transformation.

The farmer already knows which is wheat and which is chaff. The threshing facilitates the separation of the two. God, likewise, already knows those who are His in word and in deed, and those who pretend to be. It’s not a mystery to Him; He doesn’t have to guess at it, but the trials, uncertainty, and persecution on the horizon will separate the sheep from the goats just as surely as the threshing separates the wheat from the chaff.

What some of the more obstinate among us fail to realize is that you can’t fool God into believing you belong to Him when you don’t. God singled out one man and declared him blameless and upright, even though there were doubtless others who pretended to be. To paraphrase Abraham Lincoln, you can fool all the people some of the time, and some of the people all the time, but you can never fool God. Not even once, not even a little bit, because He knows the hearts of men and nothing is hidden from His sight.

Saying we love God and loving God are two different things. One is performative, self-serving, and self-aggrandizing; the other is authentic, active, and perpetual. If men claim to love God only when they need something from Him, and fall out of love the minute they get what they wanted, it was never love; it was usury. We love God not for what He might do for our career, our net worth, or our romantic endeavors, but for what He has already done, giving His only begotten Son, that whoever believes in Him should not perish but have everlasting life.

With love in Christ,

Michael Boldea, Jr.

Job CCLIX

2026-03-22T06:23:00.000-05:00

Job 24:18-21, “They should be swift on the face of the waters, their portion should be cursed in the earth, so that no one would turn into the way of their vineyards. As drought and heat consume the snow waters, so the grave consumes those who have sinned. The womb should forget him, the worm should feed sweetly on him; He should be remembered no more, and wickedness should be broken like a tree. For he preys on the barren who do not bear, and does no good for the widow.”

The rise of the perma-passive, non-confrontational, non-offensive Christian is something I’ve been noticing for some time. We don’t challenge, we don’t push back, we don’t present a logical counterpoint even to the most heretical, destructive, and unbiblical proclamations, either out of a desire to overcorrect from the fire and brimstone preachers of old, or sheer cowardice, all the while insisting that letting anyone who is so inclined walk all over us and use us as a doormat equating it with righteousness itself.

If someone is speaking a lie and you confront them with the truth, you’re not being a jerk for Jesus; you’re defending the truth. If someone is attempting to bring in destructive heresies and you see them for what they are, keeping silent doesn’t make you brave; it makes you complicit.

The words spoken by the man whom God deemed blameless and upright regarding the wicked were neither conciliatory nor filled with empathy. No matter how much one may attempt to twist scripture, it’s impossible to conclude that when Job said the womb should forget him, and the worm should feed on him sweetly, he meant it in a nice way.

There is a time and place for righteous anger. There is a time and place for righteous indignation, and when it comes to wickedness, as Job stated, it should be broken like a tree, and not ignored, placated, validated, or celebrated.

The selfsame people who rebel against the light, whose consciences are seared, and who see the household of faith as nothing more than sheep to be sheared, exploited, and feasted upon, are the first to insist that we shouldn’t judge, and by no means should we touch God’s anointed. In order for someone to touch God’s anointed, they must be anointed by God, not claim to be so. That men would try to deflect from their wickedness by insisting that God’s anointed are a protected class, all the while inferring that they number among them, and therefore must be allowed to continue in their wickedness without being called out, aren’t rightly dividing the Word but rather using the ignorance of the Word among God’s sheep to shield themselves from criticism.

1 Thessalonians 5:21, “Test all things; hold fast what is good.”

Another word for test is judge. The metric by which we test, or judge all things isn’t our feelings, emotions, or traditions, but by the Word of God. It is the standard, the plumbline, and the final authority in all things, and if the Word deems it detrimental, unwise, sinful, or wrong, then we reject it, avoid it, and mark it as such.

Just as a boat without an anchor will get carried away by the storm, a believer not rooted in the Word of God will be swayed to and from by every wind, every doctrine, and every heresy that makes its way to the fore. Repackaged deception is still deception, and we know it for what it is because the Scriptures say as much.

It’s gotten as bad as it has because many have been deceived into believing that, rather than being the light that pushes back the darkness, we should try to understand it, have empathy for it, and come to some sort of armistice. You do your thing, we’ll do ours, we won’t interfere in your machinations, and you pinky swear to do likewise. The problem is that while the household of faith was more than happy to leave the devil alone because it meant less exertion on their part, the devil never had any intention of leaving the church alone. From tirelessly deploying his minions to secretly bring in destructive heresies, even denying the Lord who bought them, to insisting that courage, boldness, steadfastness, and faithfulness aren’t virtues but rather practices to be avoided, to raising up wolves while demeaning true shepherds, the devil has been hard at work.

All the while, we sit cloistered in our little bubbles, gravitating toward echo chambers that place tertiary issues above the Lordship of Christ, trying to pray the darkness away when Jesus said what we should be doing is letting our light so shine before men.

Darkness must be resisted. Wickedness must be called out. The wolves must be chased away, and the sheep must decide whether they’re really sheep or goats pretending to be sheep. Save the customer is always right for McDonald’s or Burger King. When it comes to spiritual matters, our attitude must be that God is always right, even if in Him being right, our pride gets wounded, our ego gets humbled, and our flesh gets mortified.

Job had a natural disdain for wickedness because he understood that light and darkness would always be at odds, perpetually at enmity, and either the light shines bright enough to dispel the darkness, or the darkness would continue its smothering of the light until no light remained.

It’s been so long since the church has been on a war footing that we’ve come to think of it as being something unnatural. Golf was more appealing than warcraft, prosperity more tempting than battle, passivity more comfortable than the active, unrelenting furthering of God’s kingdom, and here we are, lame men, skinny jeans and all, teaching other lame men to be at ease in their lameness.

We have so thoroughly removed the principles of personal accountability and personal responsibility from the conversation that anything past trying to be first in line at the Sunday buffet is deemed works, and readily labeled as such. Of course, I want eternity in paradise, who wouldn’t, but Ichabod on anyone who says I need to lift a finger to attain it. I’m too busy golfing; maybe you can sell that whole denying yourself, picking up your cross, and following after Jesus to another sucker. Who needs brave, bold, and courageous when you have gluttonous, greedy, and gullible?

With love in Christ,

Michael Boldea, Jr.

Job CCLVIII

2026-03-20T06:40:00.001-05:00

Job 24:13-17, “There are those who rebel against the light; they do not know its ways nor abide in its paths. The murderer rises with the light; he kills the poor and needy; and in the night he is like a thief. The eye of the adulterer waits for the twilight, saying, ‘No eye will see me’; and he disguises his face. In the dark they break into houses which they marked for themselves in the daytime; they do not know the light. For the morning is the same to them as the shadow of death; if someone recognizes them, they are in the terrors of the shadow of death.”

Even a blind man can feel the warmth of the sun on his face and know the difference between day and night. It’s not that those who rebel against the light don’t know of its existence. In order to rebel against something, whether an institution, a government, or an individual, you must be aware that it exists, it is real and tangible, yet you choose to rise in opposition to it. Although they know of its existence, they neither know its ways nor abide in its paths. The rejection of the light and rebellion against it is a purposeful, willful choice, and not some accident or mistake.

The wicked know an alternative exists to the darkness, but they are wholly opposed to it and have no desire to know it or abide in its paths. The wicked will not be able to claim ignorance of the light’s existence when standing before God’s throne on that day of days. None will be able to insist that they didn’t know of it, but rather knowing that it existed, they chose to walk in darkness, doing the things they knew to be evil and debased because their flesh reveled in it.

Things haven’t gotten better over the four thousand years since the book of Job was written. Try as we might to tell ourselves that we are wiser, more aware, civilized, and evolved, the same issues that plagued the wicked then plague the wicked now, only magnified and multiplied in frequency. Ignorance of the light’s existence was never the issue, but rejection of it and rebellion toward it.

What we deem the pinnacle of civilization and civility doesn’t look any different from the times Job lived in, except for conveniences such as electricity, infrastructure, indoor plumbing, and automobiles. As far as human nature goes, it’s eerily similar. Wicked men still do wicked things, murderers still murder, adulterers still commit adultery, the powerful still exploit the weak, and though things might have changed outwardly in relation to the world and its progress, inwardly, when it comes to the heart of man, they’ve remained the same.

The awareness that light exists and that God is real is not something humanity has happened upon in the last few centuries. It has been evident since the beginning of creation, so that men are without excuse in their rejection of Him. When men reject God, it’s knowingly, willingly, and purposefully.

Just as no man can stumble his way into heaven, or make it there accidentally, no man can stumble his way into hell. It will be by choice. Men choose to reject the light. Men choose to reject the Christ. Men choose to reject the narrow path. Men choose to reject the truth and instead embrace a lie. Every day, men and women, young and old, make a multitude of choices, and the wicked are consistent in choosing rebellion against the light. Is it a choice they will regret? Most assuredly, but for now, they ease their conscience by insisting that no one sees, no one hears, God is busy, and He has bigger fish to fry than to take note of one man’s sin and rebellion.

Romans 1:18-21, “For the wrath of God is revealed from heaven against all ungodliness and unrighteousness of men, who suppress the truth in unrighteousness, because what may be known of God is manifest in them, for God has shown it to them. For since the creation of the world His invisible attributes are clearly seen, being understood by the things that are made, even His eternal power and Godhead, so that they are without excuse, because, although they knew God, they did not glorify Him as God, nor were thankful, but became futile in their thoughts, and their foolish hearts were darkened.”

Two thousand years later, Paul undergirds the truth Job was trying to convey, wherein it’s not the absence of the awareness of light, but that men willfully reject it. Since the creation of the world, His invisible attributes are clearly seen, being understood by the things that are made. Rather than acknowledge this obvious truth, man would rather insist that it was all one serendipitous accident, without the aid of intelligent design, without the molding of God’s eternal hand. Everything was thrown in a cosmic blender, and wouldn’t you know it, a perfectly cooked, perfectly seasoned turducken magically appeared on your plate. As the adage goes, it takes more faith to believe that everything came from nothing than to believe God created it.

But it takes countless things to be perfectly proportioned for life to be possible on this rock, never mind the almost infinite plantlife, animals, microorganisms, and man himself. Too much heat, we all fry. Too much cold, we all freeze. Too much water, we all drown. Not enough, and the parched desert consumes everything. Yep, all a happy accident.

Just because men refuse to acknowledge God, it doesn’t mean He isn’t there. Just because they come up with fanciful, illogical, irrational, and specious tales about how the world came to be rather than acknowledge His eternal power and Godhead, it doesn’t make Him any less real. Just because they ignore their mortality, it doesn’t make them immortal, and just because they refuse to acknowledge that one day they will stand before God’s throne of judgment, it doesn’t mean they will bypass it.

With love in Christ,

Michael Boldea, Jr.

Job CCLVII

2026-03-18T06:35:00.000-05:00

Job 24:9-12, “Some snatch the fatherless from the breast, and take a pledge from the poor. They cause the poor to go naked, without clothing; and they take away the sheaves from the hungry. They press out oil within their walls, and tread winepresses, yet suffer thirst. The dying groan in the city, and the souls of the wounded cry out; yet God does not charge them with wrong.”

The actions of the wicked do not occur in a vacuum. They cannot be done in secret forever. Eventually, the effects of their wickedness are readily visible to anyone with intellectual honesty who does not see the world through the prism of some allegiance, whether to a particular man, a denomination, or a political party, but as it is, warts and all.

Some demand perfection from everyone within their sphere and live in perpetual disappointment. If the microscope were turned on them, they would fail to meet their own standard, but that either doesn’t register or doesn’t bother them to the point of dialing back the rhetoric of calling everyone Ichabod until they’re left alone on their island, praising their own self-righteousness.

That said, there should be a standard and a well-defined separation between the wicked and the righteous. Yes, I expect more from pastors, preachers, teachers, and elders than I do from politicians, athletes, or television personalities, and so does God. To excuse the behaviors of spiritual leaders that are on par with the most hedonistic, deviant, and off-putting practices of the wicked, while demanding righteousness of men who never claimed nor pretended to be spiritual pillars of God’s kingdom, is hypocritical on its face.

Luke 12:47-48, “And that servant who knew his master’s will, and did not prepare himself or do according to his will, shall be beaten with many stripes. But he who did not know, yet committed things deserving of stripes, shall be beaten with few. For everyone to whom much is given, from him much will be required; and to whom much has been committed, of him they will ask the more.”

We cannot invert expectations and expect more of a babe in Christ, or one who has never professed Him, than one who is supposed to be seasoned and mature. A general has a far greater responsibility than does the private, and more is expected of him by the King due to the level of authority committed to him.

Job knew there was a difference between the wicked and the righteous. Job knew what the wicked did, and that he didn’t do likewise. A man can boast of his righteousness yet do as the wicked, proving his boasts to be nothing more than empty words. Likewise, a righteous man can remain silent, speak nothing of his righteousness, yet his consistent, daily actions will reveal his integrity and the content of his character to all those with whom he comes in contact.

If wickedness does not occur in a vacuum, neither does righteousness. One’s actions will speak louder than words, whether their own or the words of others about them, because actions are tangible while words are just that. I can tell my wife and daughters I love them every day, but if my actions belie my words, if everything I do contradicts my declaration of love to them, at some point, they will doubt my sincerity or the veracity of my proclamations.

I love you, Lord, but I don’t want to spend any time in your presence. I love you, Lord, but I want nothing to do with your Word. I love you, Lord, but unless I’m in a pickle and I need some miracle-level intervention, I’d rather not be bothered with anything having to do with anything pertaining to Your kingdom. I love you, Lord, but not to the extent of caring for the widow and orphan, or feeding the hungry. I love you, Lord, but I’d prefer not to deny myself or pick up my cross since I have an aversion to splinters.

When referring to the wicked, Job makes a statement that could also be seen as an open-ended question: why does God not charge the wicked with wrong when the dying groan in the city and the souls of the wounded cry out? The short answer is, He does. Just not in the timeframe we would see as equitable, some not even while here on earth, but judgment is established for the wicked, and none will escape God’s justice, whether here, in eternity, or both.

The big idea in Job’s last response to Eliphaz is that one cannot remain steeped in wickedness, committing wicked deeds, having a heart of stone, and preying and exploiting the poor, the widow, or the orphan if God is the center of their lives. One’s close proximity to the righteousness of God transforms the heart of stone into a heart of flesh; it compels transformation from the inward parts, which is visible in the outward actions.

If no such transformation is forthcoming, if no such change is visible, if the things you sought, desired, or hungered for remain unchanged after your encounter with God, then it was a momentary experience rather than a transformative event that changed the entirety of one’s life trajectory.

Our encounter with God must be no less life-altering than Saul’s encounter on the road to Damascus. We may not see a bright light or hear a voice from heaven as Saul did, but the transformation must be no less life-defining. From that moment, Saul was no longer the man he had once been. He went from being the persecutor of the brethren to the staunchest defender of Jesus throughout the nations. Salvation is transformation, it is rebirth, it is being given a new mind and a new heart that no longer yearns for the things of this world but for the presence of Christ alone.

This is the one thing Job couldn’t get his mind around. How could his friends paint him out to be a man wholly given to wickedness, a man who exploited the poor, and had no empathy for the widow or the orphan, when the singular desire of his heart was to feel God’s presence, and when he knew himself to have treasured the words of His mouth more than necessary food.

Job had never taken to pretending to be something he wasn’t, but by the same token, he wasn’t about to admit to being something he knew himself not to be. There is a time to be silent, then there is a time to speak, but in all his defense, Job did not make it about himself, but rather the juxtaposition of the wicked and the righteous, appealing to God rather than man to vindicate him, and give him justice.

With love in Christ,

Michael Boldea, Jr.

Job CCLVI

2026-03-17T06:22:00.000-05:00

Do you not possess enough discernment to know the difference between the wicked and the righteous? Do you not possess enough understanding of God, His will, and His purposes, that you would confuse those who hunger and thirst after Him with those who despise and reject Him? Can you not see the difference between those who feed the hungry, shelter the fatherless, comfort the widow, and those who shun them, exploit them, and hurt them? He did not say it quite as poignantly or directly, but this is what Job was asking his friends.

You know what the wicked do, and it should come as no surprise when they do it. They seize flocks violently and feed on them. They drive away the donkey of the fatherless. They push the needy off the road. They do abhorrent, repugnant, inhuman things and justify them every day, but the children of God do not!

This is why it comes as such a shock to the system when you hear of men who claim to be godly, who are in positions of authority requiring godliness, doing the selfsame things they condemned those of the world for doing. It’s because, while they claimed to be different, were expected to be different, and were commanded by God to be different, they were only pretending when others were watching, but in their hearts wickedness abounded.

Yes, there is a difference between the godly and the ungodly. Yes, there is a difference between those who know Him and those who do not. The difference must be clear, discernible, unambiguous, and well-defined. They do those things; those who know God do not. At least that’s the way it should be, biblically speaking, morally speaking, and logically speaking. It goes beyond projecting an image, and since I’m a jaded sort of soul, people who try too hard to project a certain image are suspect from the jump, but to the core of one’s nature, to what they have been transformed into by the salvific power of Christ.

Why so jaded? Because I’ve seen enough, heard enough, witnessed the aftermaths, and helped pick up the pieces one too many times to allow for the childish notion that every guy in a suit with gel in his hair is what he claims to be. You will know them by their fruit. If there is no fruit, there is no power. If there is no fruit, there is no righteousness. If there is no fruit, there is no authority. You can claim all these things, but the absence of fruit is proof enough that your goals are something other than furthering the Kingdom of God or rightly dividing the Word.

The difference between the wicked and the godly should be so vividly evident as to be undeniable. We are not of the dark; we are of the light, but if we are of the light, why are so many of those claiming to be of the light so comfortable in the dark?

If you can’t tell the difference between the two, you’re still in the dark. One keeps you blind, the other illuminates everything, including the corners, nooks, and crannies of one’s heart, exposing everything and leaving nothing in the shadows. When the light of the gospel shines in the heart of man, it exposes everything and reveals it for what it is. You don’t get to pick and choose what stays and what goes. Everything goes! The carpets get ripped out, the cupboards get replaced, a new coat of paint is applied because a new tenant is moving in, and He will not abide the filth, dirt, and cobwebs left by the previous tenant.

If your new life is no different than your old life, if you are still doing all the things the wicked are known for doing, then your new life is a lie. If you are in Christ, you are a new creation. Old things have passed away. You no longer identify with they, or them, those who would gladly starve widows if it meant a little extra coin in their pocket, or needlessly burden the poor in exchange for an easier life.

Job makes it very clear that wicked men existed in his day, and this is what they did, but he could stand before both God and man and adamantly declare that he had never done such things.

We were once like them, but they were never like us. We, too, were once dead in our sins and trespasses, but no longer. It’s why we have compassion on the lost and go out of our way to consistently point the way to Jesus. Anyone who exudes spiritual elitism rather than compassion when it comes to those yet in darkness forget that they too were once slaves to sin. They forget that they, too, were once shackled with chains of their own making, and it took Jesus to set them free. They didn’t do it on their own; they didn’t discover the key to their prison in a corner somewhere, but another who had once worn similar shackles took the time to tell them that there is freedom, there is light, there is life, and there is hope in Christ.

But you don’t get it, preacher man. I dug my way out of my prison Shawshank Redemption style. I pulled myself up by my bootstraps, poured all the booze down the drain, joined AA, and took a shower. All that did for you was transfer you from solitary confinement to the general population. Unless Jesus sets you free, you’re still in prison. Unless He washed you and made you clean, you still reek of death and despair.

John 8:34-36, “Jesus answered them, ‘Most assuredly, I say to you, whoever commits sin is a slave of sin. And a slave does not abide in the house forever, but a son abides forever. Therefore if the Son makes you free, you shall be free indeed.’”

Only Jesus gives true freedom. Anything else is either an illusion of freedom or a temporary pause on one’s journey to destruction. One may stop their self-destructive ways for a season, but they will never truly be set free until Jesus makes them free.

With love in Christ,

Michael Boldea, Jr.

Job CCLV

2026-03-16T06:40:00.001-05:00

Job 24:1-8, “Since times are not hidden from the Almighty, why do those who know Him see not His days? Some remove landmarks; they seize flocks violently and feed on them; they drive away the donkey of the fatherless; they take the widow’s ox as a pledge. They push the needy off the road; all the poor of the land are forced to hide. Indeed, like wild donkeys in the desert, they go out to their work searching for food. The wilderness yields food for them and for their children. They gather their fodder in the field and glean in the vineyard of the wicked. They spend the night naked, without clothing, and have no covering in the cold. They are wet in the showers of the mountains, and huddle around the rock for want of shelter.”

Job continues his discourse with a question that has wide-ranging and thought-provoking implications. Since times are not hidden from the Almighty, why do those who know Him see not His days? The first thing that stands out is Job’s acknowledgement of God’s omniscience. Nothing catches God by surprise. He is never blindsided, nor has He ever thought to Himself, “I didn’t see that coming.”

Times are not hidden from the Almighty. He is not reactionary, nor is there the constant push and pull of action, reaction, for He knows the entirety of human history, from beginning to end, and nothing is hidden from His sight. As wanderers and travelers on this earth, we operate with limited understanding. Not so with God.

He tells Jeremiah that even before He formed him in the womb, He knew him. If this was the case with Jeremiah, it was the case with Job, Paul, Peter, you, and me. There are no accidents, no coincidences, and no mistakes when it comes to the order of the universe, or the course of human history. God is not solely concerned about big events that shape and reshape the world, but is aware of how many hairs you currently have sprouting on your head. Each one, to the last, is numbered.

Yes, some of us try to make it easier on the Almighty and shave our heads so He doesn’t have to count every morning, but even if I had a glorious mane of lustrous hair, it would not bother God in the least to keep count. The one unanswered question I have, which will go in the rolodex of unanswered questions I’ve amassed over the years, is: Does God count transplanted hair? Does the hair someone had removed from their back and reattached to their scalp count as the hair on one’s head? Try unraveling that mystery! You’re welcome.

All kidding aside, if the very hairs of your head are all numbered, does anyone honestly believe that God would have made such a glaring mistake as to place someone in the wrong body, or assign them the wrong gender in the womb? It is and always has been about rebellion, about Satan trying to prove God wrong, or insisting that He made a mistake. Given that He is incapable of making mistakes, it’s a reach, but just because he failed every other time he tried, it doesn’t mean the devil will give up trying.

The second part of the question is another one of those gut checks that Job is fond of delivering, whether intentionally or otherwise, because it turns the spotlight on the children of God, those who know Him, and simply asks: why do those who know Him not see His days? Since times are not hidden from the Almighty, why are those who know Him unable to discern them? Why are we groping about in the darkness as those of the world, terrified at whispers and rumors, reacting to everything when we possess a clear roadmap of where the world is headed?

If, as those who know Him, we are as ignorant as those of the world regarding the times and seasons we are living in, what does that say about us and the manner in which we spend our days? Knowing God gives us access to understanding tomorrow just as clearly as today, and in knowing that He knows what tomorrow will bring, we are at peace, fully assured that He has made a way for His own.

That God would number every hair on your head yet be indifferent toward your survival, protection, and provision is incongruent with His nature. A God so meticulous as to know something so trivial would not accidentally lump in His children with the wicked when He pours out His judgment. It’s inconceivable and ludicrous on its face to insist that this is even a possibility.

The other day, I was picking my daughters up from school, and it was raining. It wasn’t anything cataclysmic, just a sheet of rain coming down steadily. While all the kids were running helter-skelter trying to avoid the rain and get to their parents’ cars as quickly as possible, one little girl was taking her time, walking slowly because her mother had brought an umbrella, walked into the school, and was holding it over her head.

The little girl was not bothered by the rain, nor did she do what all the other children whose parents hadn’t brought umbrellas were doing, because she knew she wouldn’t get wet. She was safe, and her mother would keep pace, holding the umbrella over her head. God’s got the umbrella; He knew the storm was coming, and He will be faithful to hold it over the heads of those who are His own.

We may only see in part, but we see enough to be fully assured that God is good, He is just, He is loving, and He is faithful. We may not know the ins and outs of every event from now until the return of Jesus, but we know that He is returning. We also know that when He returns, He will send His angels and they will gather His elect from the four winds, from one end of heaven to the other.

Is it not wisdom itself to focus on being one of those elect who will be gathered rather than endlessly ruminating on the power plays and machinations of the power-hungry? Am I His in word and in deed? Do I know His voice well enough to pick it out from a sea of other voices? Is my focus on the things above rather than the things of this earth? These are the questions we must contend with before anything else, because they are the questions that matter. The answers to these all-important questions set us apart, single us out, mark us, and on that day of days when He appears, we will be gathered unto Him.

There will be no squatters in God’s kingdom. No one will be able to sneak in, bribe their way in, or trick their way in. His elect will be gathered, and since He said narrow is the gate and difficult is the way which leads to life, and there are few who find it, it would behoove us to know clearly and unequivocally that we number among them.

With love in Christ,

Michael Boldea, Jr.

Job CCLIV

2026-03-15T06:12:18.426-05:00

There is enough aggregate data available to conclude that, save for divine intervention or some miraculous event, no individual could withstand physical or psychological torture indefinitely. Everyone has a breaking point. Given enough time, eventually, everyone breaks. The outliers, those that did not break, the exceptions to the rules, if one were so inclined to phrase it, were either those who expired while in the midst of their torture, or those whose purpose went beyond self-preservation, the defense of a nation or a state to something deeper, more profound, and all-defining. The big one was God, faith, a purpose beyond their mortal flesh they were willing to die for; family came in a distant second.

What few talk about is that even those who survive prolonged torture and, for whatever reason, do not break and retain their mental faculties, have to deal with the trauma for the rest of their lives.

I’ve been in conversation with enough people who spent months and years in prison, who suffered privation, humiliation rituals, beatings, tortures, and all manner of degrading and demeaning things, and they all had their scars. They all had their bruises. Some of the most stoic men I’ve ever met in my life would tense up at a particular sound, or begin to unconsciously clench their fists as they retold the stories of the horrors they’d had to endure.

It changes you. It leaves an indelible mark, no matter how resilient and strong-willed one might be. The best one can hope for is that it doesn’t become the defining event of their existence, but something they acknowledge they endured, lived through, and survived. The beauty in the retelling of the stories of those who suffered for the sake of Christ is that not only was God present during their trial, giving them strength they themselves knew they did not possess, but comfort and peace in the aftermath. Do they still bear the scars? Most assuredly, but not the open wounds.

It’s similar to those who’ve been to war, seen the brutality and horrors thereof, and return home trying to relate to family and friends who’ve never had to witness such things, who’ve never had a friend die in their arms, or suffer wounds that would be lifelong reminders of what they’d survived.

How does this relate to Job? Only insofar as understanding that intact as his integrity remained, strong and resilient as he was, the constant barrage by those closest to him, whether his wife or his three friends, left a mark. He was not unaffected; he was not indifferent. Their words connected, and they wounded and dispirited him, not to the point of his denouncing God or cursing Him and dying, but enough that the Almighty terrified him.

If he were the man Eliphaz painted him to be, and God had indeed remained silent because he had sinned, then Job had every right to be terrified. Standing before an omniscient God, standing before His throne of judgment, without having repented, without having been born again, without having been washed clean by the blood of Jesus, should be a terrifying prospect for every sinner, and every soul that delays humbling themselves and coming to the foot of the cross in repentance.

Those who know, know. Those who don’t know assume the best of themselves and their strength, until faced with the reality that when it comes to physical or psychological torture, it’s an open-ended proposition. It’s not like a prison sentence where you get to count down the months, days, and hours. There is no finality to the pain except by death, and the idea of it becomes a hoped-for relief after a while, as it did for Job.

You have a group of well-fed, well-rested, determined individuals whose singular purpose is to break you, break your will, and obtain the information they require that you have determined not to disclose. It’s not a fair fight, it’s not one against one, it’s not a battle of wills but a war of attrition in which you are outnumbered. The Geneva Convention does not apply; human decency is nonexistent, and there is no one to plead your case to or seek redress from. I paint this picture for a purpose: lest we judge Job too harshly for confessing that the Almighty terrified him, this is what he was currently going through, and had been for some time. No, his friends were not beating him with sticks and clubs; the enemy had seen to his physical torment well enough, but they were bombarding his mind with all manner of accusations and contrived presuppositions intended to cause him to lose hope.

It’s easy to sit in judgment of others when you don’t have to walk a mile in their shoes. It’s easy to insist that we would have been better men, had done greater things, and figured out what was still a mystery to Job, the why of his suffering, knowing himself to be innocent of all the accusations leveled against him.

At least if you’re in an interrogation room with someone beating you to a pulp, you know why they’re doing it. By the time it gets around to the torture portion of your incarceration, your persecutors have made it abundantly clear what you must do in order to make it stop. Job had no such clarity. He was suffering in ways we could hardly imagine, all the while not knowing why these things had befallen him.

It’s undeniable that Job was a tortured soul hanging on by a fraying thread. If the three men attempting to convince him of wickedness were given another three rounds each, his hope would have likely continued to fray incrementally, and the story would have ended very differently.

Even though Job had concluded that though he had not been cut off from the presence of darkness he had been cut off from the presence of God, it was not an accurate conclusion. God knew the limitations of what Job could endure, and though he allowed Satan to take him to the edge of despair and despondency, He would not allow Satan to push him over.

With love in Christ,

Michael Boldea, Jr.

Job CLIII

2026-03-13T05:56:00.001-05:00

Job 23:13-17, “But He is unique, and who can make Him change? And whatever His soul desires, that He does. For He performs what is appointed for me, and many such things are with Him. Therefore I am terrified at His presence; when I consider this, I am afraid of Him. For God made my heart weak, and the Almighty terrifies me; because I was not cut off from the presence of darkness, and He did not hide deep darkness from my face.”

It’s interesting to note that a man who lived thousands of years ago, who did not have the benefit of the interwebs, commentaries, or even the Pentateuch, which are the first five books of the Bible, could have a better grasp on the reality of who God is than most seminarians or even seminary professors.

The closer we get to the end of all things, the more we try to convince ourselves that we can make God bend to our will, that He will do our bidding and act in accordance with our wants rather than His sovereign will.

Job had a profound understanding of God. He understood that God does whatever His soul desires and performs what is appointed for each person as an individual, because He is sovereign and omnipotent. He also understood that God was just, and His justice would prevail in the end.

Currently, Job’s consternation centered around the idea that although he had not been cut off from the presence of darkness, he had been cut off from the presence of God. If the presence of God were still tangible, if Job could still hear His voice and feel His embrace, not having deep darkness hidden from his face would have been an easier trial to overcome.

It’s not the presence of darkness, nor the trials of life that should vex us; it’s the absence of God’s presence that should trouble us to no end. For those not fully surrendered, for those insisting that they can have one foot planted in the world and the other in the Kingdom, the absence of God’s presence isn’t worrisome or troublesome, but a welcome occurrence. They know that their duplicity and feigned commitment are off-putting to God, and if He were near, if He were present, if they heard His voice, they know with absolute certainty He would speak correction and rebuke.

If God isn’t saying anything, I can pretend I am in right standing with Him. If He is not correcting or rebuking me, then I can keep doing what I’m doing, appeasing the flesh, and walking uncircumspect, while clinging to the illusion that He is well pleased with me, that He will abide and overlook my lukewarmness and divided heart.

James 1:22-25, “But be doers of the word, and not hearers only, deceiving yourselves. For if anyone is a hearer of the word and not a doer, he is like a man observing his natural face in a mirror; for he observes himself, goes away, and immediately forgets what kind of man he was. But he who looks into the perfect law of liberty and continues in it, and is not a forgetful hearer but a doer of the work, this one will be blessed in what he does.”

Any man who feels relief when God is silent, equating His silence with validation of his choices, is doing what James said men do when they are not doers of the word but hearers only: deceiving themselves.

Job was troubled in his soul by God’s silence more than anything else his flesh had endured thus far. It was the voice of God he desired to hear, the presence of God he yearned to feel, and having endured the silence and absence for so long, Job was simultaneously terrified of God’s presence, as well as His absence.

The reason God’s presence now terrified him is that although he knew himself to be innocent of the accusations leveled against him by his friends, he now wondered if there had been something he had done to displease the Lord.

I cannot abide His absence, I cannot bear His silence, but I am terrified of His presence. That is not an enviable position to be in, but here Job was, having been affected by the words of his three friends to enough of a degree that the fear of what the Almighty might say terrified him.

When we allow ourselves to be affected by the words of men, whether they be praise or criticism, and don’t have the sure foundation of being a hearer and doer of the word, eventually the cracks will start to show, and there will be moments of indecision, hesitation, delay, and second-guessing.

Are you doing what the Word commanded you to do? If so, the words of men should be of no consequence. They do not determine how God views you; only He determines how He views you, and although Job was in this tug of war with himself, wherein he both feared and desired the presence of God, in the end, he had to acquiesce and submit to the reality that God does as He wills, whether men approve of it or not.

It’s easy to sit in judgment of Job and insist he should not have been terrified, especially when we fail to realize that you and I have countless privileges not afforded to Job. We have the written Word, we have numerous examples of faith, obedience, servitude, and steadfastness, but most of all, we have the Mediator between God and men, the Man Jesus Christ. Job had none of these things, yet God declared him to be both blameless and upright, a rarity among rarities, yet still a man ill at ease in the silence, yet fearful of hearing His voice.

There is an endearing quality to Job’s honesty, wherein he does not portray himself as superhuman, or having attained such spiritual heights as to not be affected by frailty and pain. Be wary of the man who says he’s never been hurt, bruised, or scarred. Either he stood at the back of the army, watching others do the fighting, never seeing the whites of the enemy’s eyes, or he was never on the battlefield to begin with.

With love in Christ,

Michael Boldea, Jr.

Job CCLII

2026-03-11T06:25:04.236-05:00

“I have treasured the words of His mouth more than my necessary food.” That’s the one sentence that resonated to the degree that it kept me up half the night. Job’s words not only challenge, but to a certain extent admonish, because they put the way we should view the Word of God into perspective, and looking back, I can pinpoint times, and even seasons, when I fell short of that ideal. It’s the passion and hunger with which Job describes the way he viewed the words of His mouth that are humbling more than anything else. It’s the value and worth, the rightful place of prominence that he assigns the words of God’s mouth that causes me to search my heart and realize that there have been times when the issues of life took precedent, if only for a short while, and I did not view the Word through the same prism Job viewed the words of God’s mouth.

We take the Word of God for granted as though we were owed it, deserved it, and everyone else throughout the history of mankind had the same ease of access and abundance of it as we do today. Perhaps it’s because our present generation has adopted the mindset that scarcity equals value, and if the Word is in such abundance here in the West, its worth must diminish in proportion to its availability.

My grandfather was a Bible smuggler. I understand better than most that in certain parts of the world, even to this day, the Word of God is rare, treasured, sought after, and sacrificed for. I also understand that it is hated by both the enemy and his minions, and above all, his other machinations, the enemy’s paramount purpose is to keep God’s Word from reaching the hands, hearts, and minds of men.

That we would have the complete canon of scripture within easy reach, readily accessible and available, and still turn aside to fables is not only telling but damning. It’s not ignorance that is making men embrace a different gospel; it’s not scarcity or lack of availability; it’s willful rebellion. They don’t like what the Bible has to say, so they either make up their own version or gravitate toward those who’ve done the legwork of producing heresy and made up their versions already.

Rather than obsessing over things we can’t control, and becoming overnight experts about everything from CERN to dwarf planets, to black holes, aliens, inter-dimensional flight, or alternate realities, our time might be better spent asking ourselves one question before resting our head on our pillows every night: Did I treasure the words of His mouth more than my necessary food today?

What does this mean? In essence, it’s whether I prioritized the spiritual man over the physical, not so much the flesh but rather the basic necessities of this present life. That the flesh must be crucified is a given, but this is not what Job was referring to. What he was saying is that the words of His mouth, the presence of God, and intimacy with Him must take precedent over everything, including what is deemed necessary for survival, such as food. As Jesus would later expound, seek first the kingdom of God and His righteousness, and all these things shall be added to you.

It’s about priorities and what we place at the top of our hierarchy of needs. As children of God, our hierarchical need structure must differ from that of the world. While the world is focused on psychological needs, security and safety, love, belonging, or esteem, our top priority must be seeking God’s kingdom and His righteousness. Our spiritual man, spiritual needs, and spiritual growth take priority, no matter how busy we get or how many responsibilities we have.

This must be an active, consistent, and purposeful pursuit, not something we hope will come about, but rather something we are actively working toward. If it isn’t, if we do not prioritize God in our day-to-day lives, there will always be something pressing that demands our attention, some new issue only we can solve, and we end up putting off the eternally consequential for the trivial matters of life that, looking back, will seem irrelevant.

God knows we need to eat, keep a roof over our heads, and clothes on our backs, and He promises that if we seek Him first, the things He knows we need will be provided for. Trusting in the promises of God eliminates fear about tomorrow and anxiousness about today. I am doing what Jesus said I must, which is to seek first God’s kingdom and His righteousness. Everything else, God has well in hand.

The choice before us is a simple one: Either we double down and keep pace with the ever-accelerating hamster wheel, working twice as hard to have half as much of the things of this world, or we rest in Him, knowing He is a good Father who keeps His promises to His children. Are you saying we should stop going to work? No, because ever since Adam, it is with the sweat of our brow that we must earn our daily bread. What I am saying is that if we consistently prioritize God, whether it’s over the promotion we’re vying for, the five-cent bump in hourly pay, or the shiny new car we’ve been eyeing, we will come to realize that He satisfies far more than any of those things combined.

Mark 8:36, “For what will it profit a man if he gains the whole world, and loses his soul?”

Know what matters most and pursue it with abandon. As Jesus asked, what will it profit anyone if he gains the whole world, not just a mansion on a beach, a Rolex, a Bentley, or a Learjet, but the whole world, lock, stock, and barrel, yet they lose their soul? Nothing. Nothing at all, because one day, though they may have gained the world, they will return to the dust of the earth, then judgment.

When offering a summary of life, the once greatest of all the people of the East said, “Naked I came from my mother’s womb, and naked shall I return there. The Lord gave, and the Lord has taken away; Blessed be the name of the Lord.”

In case you’re wondering, yes, it was the same man who said: “I have treasured the words of His mouth more than my necessary food.” Priorities, indeed.

With love in Christ,

Michael Boldea, Jr.

Job CCLI

2026-03-10T06:15:00.003-05:00

Job 23:8-12, “Look, I go forward, but He is not there, and backward, but I cannot perceive Him; When He works on he left hand, I cannot behold Him; when He turns to the right hand, I cannot see Him. But He knows the way that I take; when He has tested me, I shall come forth as gold. My foot has held fast to His steps; I have kept His way and not turned aside. I have not departed from the commandments of His lips; I have treasured the words of His mouth more than my necessary food.”

Job’s biggest concern wasn’t the pain he was in, the possessions he’d lost, the children he’d had to bury, or that his friends were accusing him of things he hadn’t done, but that though he went forward, God was not there, and if he went backward, he could not perceive Him. It’s the absence of the presence of God that vexed him more than anything else he was currently experiencing, and that’s saying a lot.

If you’ve ever wondered why God saw Job as a blameless and upright man, this handful of verses should suffice in answering the question. The first thing that stands out and serves as the bedrock of Job’s unshakeable faith is that although he could not see, hear, or perceive God, he was certain that God saw, heard, and watched over him. He knows the way I take. He sees me where I am, as I am, hears the cry of my heart, and when He has tested me, I shall come forth as gold.

Just because God is silent, it doesn’t mean He isn’t there. Just because God does not act on our behalf when we would like Him to in the manner we deem fitting, it does not mean He will not, or is incapable of doing so.

Job had been crushed, everything he’d had was taken from him, his health was failing, his flesh stunk to the point that his own wife couldn’t stand him, he’d cried out day and night, repeatedly pleading for everything from an answer, a resolution, and even death itself, yet through it all he never doubted that God knew the way he took, and one way or another, when God had tested him, he would come forth as gold.

If you possess this level of submission to the will, purpose, and sovereignty of God, wherein no matter what, you are fully assured that God sees, hears, and will bring about a resolution in the manner He sees fit, then feel free to call yourself blameless and upright. If not, perhaps a little less chest-beating and a little more humility would be in order.

We murmur and bristle at the slightest hiccup nowadays, thinking it’s the end of the world if the corner store runs out of bagels before we get a chance to buy one, and fail to consider that we run across people every day who deal better with far worse things than we do with the trivial.

Job wasn’t boasting about his righteousness, his attributes, his charity, or his uprightness; God did it on his behalf. It’s an important distinction and one we would do well to take to heart. The only thing Job was certain of, and as such was willing to verbalize declaratively, was that his foot had held fast to God’s steps; he had kept His way and not turned aside; and he had not departed from the commandments of His lips.

Whether that classified him as blameless or upright did not concern Job. He wasn’t interested in the title, just the obedience and faithfulness. Had he been the sort of man to feign righteousness for the sake of others or pretend to be upright when he wasn’t, the inverse would have occurred. He would have boasted of his blamelessness, insisted upon his uprightness, while God would have remained silent regarding his boasts, or rebuked him for having made such claims.

This is also a reliable telltale sign, generally speaking, when someone insists that you address them by their title or office, whether self-appointed or undergirded by some piece of paper declaring them to be what they insist you address them as. Unless you live out in the woods, far away from civilization, you’ve likely run across such individuals, and more often than not, the entire exchange is off-putting and disappointing.

“I have a to-go order for Jeff”, the girl at the counter shouts over the din of conversation and steaming milk.

“Actually, it’s Dr. Jeff,” the man answers smugly. And? Will that make your coffee taste any better, or your bran muffin feel less like you’re chewing sodden dirt and crunchy pebbles?

Granted, I used an inoffensive example, but you know, and I know, and you know that I know, and I know that you know, that it happens with such regularity within Christendom as to have become cliché. Whether the title is prophet, apostle, elder, bishop, or pastor, unless that’s the name on your birth certificate, shake my hand and tell me your name’s Bob. I’ll respect you more for it.

If indeed you are an apostle or a prophet, the calling will be evident soon enough. If you aren’t, no matter how many times you insist I address you as such, you’re still a faker, a farceur, a pretender who will one day have to answer before God for having claimed a title you had no right to.

Claiming a title will do nothing to impress God. All it does is stroke the ego of the self-obsessed, self-serving, and self-aggrandizing, who, as yet, have no identity in Christ, but in themselves. If they did, they would understand that the title of servant is more than enough, it suffices, and encapsulates everything one could ever hope to be in Him.

I’ve known genuine men of God who could be labeled as prophets, biblically speaking, yet none of the real ones claimed the title for themselves, and what’s more, they scolded anyone who addressed them as such. They understood that it’s not about them as an individual, but about whom they served, and if any of the honor or glory risked being syphoned from Jesus and appropriated to them, it was something they could not abide.

If you ever wonder whether someone is or isn’t what they claim to be, ask yourself one question: Are they determined to further the kingdom of God, or their own? Do they give God the glory or take it for themselves? That should tell you everything you need to know.

With love in Christ,

Michael Boldea, Jr.

Job CCL

2026-03-09T06:16:00.001-05:00

If Job were the man Eliphaz painted him to be, his rebuttal toward Eliphaz’s accusations would have sounded very different than what he answered. Here was a man whom his own friend painted as heartless and cruel, one who would merrily watch widows going hungry and men dying of thirst, who didn’t lash out angrily, who wasn’t caustic or biting in his response, who didn’t threaten or go on the offense, but whose only desire was to have an opportunity to plead his case before God.

Even when you are being accused of things you haven’t done by people you trusted, there is a certain decorum you must retain, and a particular way you must approach your defense. Surely, Job could have leveled his own accusations at his three friends; he’d known them long enough to know every time their actions or words did not mirror the righteous men they claimed to be, but Job wasn’t in the habit of fault mining, going toe to toe with baseless accusations, or trying to justify himself because there was nothing to justify.

He didn’t need to explain why his friends were wrong in interpreting what he’d done as wicked because he’d done nothing that could be misconstrued as such. When your first reaction is to defend yourself against baseless accusations, things that were said about you that were made up out of whole cloth, you’re playing the devil’s game, and it’s a game you can’t win.

A couple of years after I started traveling with my grandfather, there was a man who felt compelled to write a lengthy letter after he’d heard my grandfather give his testimony, insisting that rather than being a man sent by God to warn a nation to repent, he was a Russian agent whose mission was to dispirit the people of America, and make them see themselves as less than the shining light on a hill that they were. Yes, it was convoluted and had no basis in fact, but since we answered every letter we received, usually by hand, I took it to my grandfather and read some of the highlights contained therein, asking for guidance on what to answer.

To my surprise, because it was the first time he’d said something of the sort, he said, “nothing. When you entertain a fool and give him your time, you validate his foolishness and become a fool yourself. This man has made up an entire story, and insisting it’s not true will only make him dig his heels in. God will judge; He always does.”

That was one of those seemingly innocuous moments that taught me a life lesson. There was no prophecy, no casting out of demons, no fiery sermon, just a handful of words that I remember from time to time, reminding myself that not every question deserves an answer, and not every accusation merits a defense. An obvious lie will eventually expose the liar. The secret is having the patience for the situation to work itself out and not react in the flesh, so that in mounting your defense, you become the thing you’ve been accused of being. I’ve seen people grow bitter, resentful, angry, and hateful because they were accused of something they hadn’t done, and rather than let God deal with it, they sought to clear their name. It’s instinctual, to a certain degree, to try and vindicate oneself, but once you realize that the one doing the accusing isn’t looking for the truth and will twist every word you speak in your defense to prove your guilt, you’ll realize it’s a hopeless endeavor.

Psalm 26:1-3, “Vindicate me, O Lord, for I have walked in my integrity. I have also trusted in the Lord; I shall not slip. Examine me, O Lord, and prove me; try my mind and my heart. For Your lovingkindness is before my eyes, and I have walked in Your truth.”

Even though Satan was one among countless hosts of heaven and sons of God, and when God called Job blameless and upright, none of them tried to correct Him, Satan still tried to besmirch Job’s faithfulness and devotion. It was all of heaven against one lone voice, but the one the voice belonged to was so shameless and determined to prove God wrong that it didn’t matter to him whether Job was blameless; he was not concerned with whether or not he was upright; he’d find a way to make him seem less than the faithful servant he was.

The truth? Since when do we let the truth stand in the way of a self-serving narrative? What does the truth have to do with any of it? We’ll take the truth and call it a lie, we’ll take the lie and twist it into truth, and if you repeat both long enough, the simple-minded will go along because they always do.

Through it all, God sees, God hears, God knows. He knows that you have clung to your integrity, he knows that you have trusted in Him, and He knows that you have walked in His truth. He is not ignorant of the situation, or those accusing you of things you never did, and it is He who will vindicate, and bring to light the snares set before you, that the enemy was certain you would fall into.

Job wasn’t trying to vindicate himself; he was seeking to be vindicated by the God he’s served his entire life, a God who, for the first time in his existence, seemed distant, hidden, shrouded, and far from him and his cries.

If you are not the man or woman the enemy is accusing you of being, he will try to use others to turn you into it. It’s the most evil and sinister type of projection wherein the enemy, being fully aware that you are walking uprightly, with integrity and faithfulness, begins to level unfounded accusations and whispering innuendos to the point that your focus shifts from faithfully following after Him to defending yourself.

Keep following Jesus; God is your defender. Keep pressing in; God is your vindicator. Do not be distracted by the slings and arrows of men or devils. Your duty is to put on the whole armor of God that you may be able to stand against the wiles of the devil and his minions. If we’re too busy trying to stand against the enemy in our own strength, not having bothered to put on the armor, we will lose. If we are wise and focus on putting on the whole armor of God, leaving nothing unattended, come what may, we will stand. Sometimes the reality of a situation is as simple as that.

With love in Christ,

Michael Boldea, Jr.

Job CCXLIX

2026-03-08T06:55:22.685-05:00

Who we run to in our time of distress says everything about where we place our faith, hope, and trust. We can say we are fully trusting in the mighty arm of God, but if every time we find ourselves buffeted, we run to everyone else but God, then our actions belie our words and prove us to be either double-tongued or outright liars.

Job had not given up on God. He had not sought answers from another, and even in the protracted silence he was experiencing, wherein he did not hear the voice of God nor feel His comforting hand, God was still the one he ran to, and yearned for answers from.

“Oh, that I knew where I first met Him, that I might come to His seat!”

God’s silence was new to Job. It unnerved him, and having his three friends insist it was because of wickedness in his life didn’t help matters any. He was going back through his memories, trying to pinpoint the environment in which God’s presence was felt, thinking that if he could replicate it, then he would be able to present his case before God and know the words that He would answer.

When one is persecuted for their faith, whether imprisoned or tortured, it may not be easier, physically speaking, but from a psychological standpoint, at least they know the why of it. I am being beaten because I will not deny Jesus. I am in prison because I am a believer. Job didn’t know why he was suffering the things he was, and that was adding to his already monumental pain.

When my youngest was old enough to walk, she got into her exploration stage with much more enthusiasm than her older sister. If you have children, you know what I’m talking about. They want to touch everything, explore everything, stick pencils, forks, and anything that has a chance of fitting into outlets, and be, in effect, a human hurricane during their waking hours.

One day, my wife had a roast in the oven. The glass door gets hot whenever the oven is above 350 degrees, and wouldn’t you know it, that was when Malina decided to waddle over to the oven and explore that particular piece of kitchenware. She reached out to touch the glass, and my wife slapped her hand away for fear of her burning herself.

That was a new experience for Malina, so much so that it shocked her, because Momma had never done anything like this. She was maybe three at the time, so she knew enough words to communicate, but as the tears started flowing down her cheeks, the only thing she would say on repeat was, “Why, Momma? Why?”

My wife picked her up, sat her on the couch, and explained that the oven was very hot, and she would have hurt herself. Once the why of it was cleared up, she wiped at her face and said, “Okay, Momma”. The explanation had sufficed, and she could bear the burden of having her hands slapped by her mother because the intent had not been to do her harm, but to keep her from harm.

There are countless situations when understanding why something is occurring gives a sense of relief and lifts the weight threatening to crush us into the dust. We want rational explanations for why something is happening, but wanting something doesn’t always mean we’ll get it.

The question of why is never truly satisfied. Unless you are a toddler, with full faith and trust in your mother or father, you are always bound to have follow-up questions relating to why, as well as justifications as to why the answer you received is not to your satisfaction. When Jesus said that unless we become like little children we would never enter the kingdom of heaven, it went beyond innocence or the absence of guile and duplicity, to exhibiting the trust and faith exclusive to little children.

The only time my daughters would go on a protracted campaign of ‘why’ was when they were trying to get a rise out of me, and they knew that if they kept it up long enough, they eventually would. Why do I have to eat the broccoli? Because it’s good for you. Why? Because it has fiber, and it will make your life a whole lot easier when it finally makes its way through your colon. Why? Because that’s the way God designed the human body. Why? Because He didn’t want you to needlessly suffer every time you went potty. Why? And no matter your answer, the question would always be why.

Even as grown-ups, we have the same tendencies, asking God why, even though He’s already given the answer in His Word. Whether we’re hoping for a different answer or just being obstinate for reasons known only to ourselves, unlike little children, we should possess enough wisdom to understand that sometimes we will not receive the answers to the questions we are posing.

It doesn’t mean we never will; it just means that, for the moment, we must trust God and His sovereignty and continue walking in faithful obedience. Trials are temporary. Suffering is temporary. The valleys we must traverse in order to reach our destination are likewise temporary. Our reward for faithfulness and obedience is not. They are eternal just as the God who will be faithful to reward us is eternal.

Job knew how he’d lived. He knew he’d been faithful, so the explanation Eliphaz had proffered for why he was suffering rang hollow and untrue. He knew he could find no resolution with his friends, no satisfactory explanation as to why he was suffering in the manner he was, so his response was not targeted to Eliphaz, or the other two who were present, but to God Himself, for Job knew that only God possessed the keys that unlocked the mystery of why.

Job wasn’t looking to quarrel with God. Would He contend with me in His great power? No! But at least I would know that He knows, that He sees me, and hears my cries. At least I would know that He is aware, and all of this isn’t happening without His knowledge.

Consider the level of faith and devotion Job had toward God, in that as long as he knew God had allowed these things to come upon him, he would be satisfied in that knowledge. Yes, he would make his plea, yes, he would attempt to reason with Him, but that, to him, was a secondary issue. His primary desire was to know that God had not turned from Him or was somehow ignorant of what he was enduring.

With love in Christ,

Michael Boldea, Jr.