Job CIV

 Job 7:6-10, “My days are swifter than a weaver’s shuttle, and are spent without hope. Oh, remember that my life is a breath! My eye will never again see good. The eye of him who sees me will see me no more; while your eyes are upon me, I shall no longer be. As the cloud disappears and vanishes away, so he who goes down to the grave does not come up. He shall never return to his house, nor shall his place know him anymore.”

In every situation we are confronted with, especially in the arena of faith, we can either focus on the strength of our adversary or the omnipotent power of our defender. That’s not to say we should dismiss our adversary altogether or insist he has no power or ability, but we must juxtapose that reality with the power and ability of the One who stands with us and keeps us from stumbling.

As faithful servants of the one true God, we must strike a balance between understanding that our enemy is real, he seeks to devour and is set on our demise, and the reality that the God we serve is able to sustain us, strengthen us, and give us the wherewithal to come through any situation victorious if only we cling to Him and trust Him to guide our steps.

When we insist that we possess enough strength in and of ourselves to stand against the enemy without God by our side, without His presence and aid, is when we get in trouble, and a seemingly little thing becomes insurmountable because we thought we could overcome it of our own volition rather than by the blood of the Lamb.

The fierceness with which the enemy attacks is meant to stir fear in our hearts. Fear then makes us react contrary to God’s purposes, oftentimes irrationally, and we find ourselves battling against the enemy before us and the fear within us, which blooms and grows like a flame at any gust of wind. The only time fear gets a foothold in our hearts is when we do not look upon a given situation through spiritual eyes but rather through physical ones. In the physical, there will always be situations that seem insurmountable, that seem so overwhelming as to cause us to not even raise our shield or our sword, thinking the battle lost before it’s begun, but in the spiritual, the reality of God’s presence becomes a strength and a reason for courage and boldness.

When Elisha’s servant went out and saw that horses and chariots surrounded the city, fear overtook him, and his reaction was one of trepidation, “Alas, my master! What shall we do?” was his only question, the subtext being that there was no way they could resist the enemy, there was no avenue of escape, and the best course of action would be to surrender, and hope for mercy from the enemy.

Elisha, however, perceived the situation through spiritual eyes, and rather than acquiesce to the fear that was coming off his servant in waves, he prayed that his servant’s eyes might likewise be open so that he could see the situation was not untenable, the battle was not lost, and hope still remained a viable refuge. It wasn’t misplaced hope or wishful thinking; the reality of the horses and chariots of fire around Elisha were real; the servant just didn’t have the eyes to see it.

Once his eyes were opened to the spiritual reality of the moment, and he saw that the mountain was full of horses and chariots of fire all around Elisha, the servant understood that it was not they who were in the minority even though they were two men standing against an army.

In moments of trial and testing, it’s easy to forget who’s on our side, and as such, we begin to entertain the idea that all is lost, allowing despondency to settle over us like a wet blanket, smothering our faith in the God we serve. For all of his uprightness and blamelessness, Job had allowed this mindset to divert his gaze from the God he served, and now the only thing he saw was his eventual demise, his death, and the reality that soon he would no longer be.

He considered his lot; he saw the circumstance he was currently in, and the only avenue of escape he saw for himself was the grave. Thankfully, even when we are faithless, He remains faithful because God cannot deny Himself.

We tend to idolize those who came before us, seeing them as more than mere men. Due to the prism through which we see them, we tend to adopt an inferiority complex, thinking we could never achieve similar results as them when it comes to a relationship with God, until we realize they were flesh and blood men and women just like you and me who had their seasons of hardship, desperation, trial, and despondency, only to endure and persevere through them not in their own strength, but by clinging to the One who gives strength.

It’s not that we can’t replicate the faithfulness, tenacity, or intimacy of those who came before us; it’s that most today are unwilling to pay the price in order to acquire these things. The one common denominator of all who came before, who are seen as heroes of the faith, is that they surrendered all to God. There was nothing they held back, nothing they retained control over, no area of their lives they were reticent to surrender that they might know God. If we hold anything back, by definition, we are not fully His.

Philippians 3:7-11, “But what things were gain to me, these things I have counted loss for Christ. Yet indeed I also count all things loss for the excellence of the knowledge of Christ Jesus my Lord, for whom I have suffered the loss of all things, and count them as rubbish, that I may gain Christ and be found in Him, not having my own righteousness, which is from the law, but that which is through faith in Christ, the righteousness which is from God by faith; that I may know Him and the power of His resurrection, and the fellowship of His sufferings, being conformed to His death, if, by any means, I may attain to the resurrection from the dead.”

In his current understanding, Job believed that he who goes down to the grave does not come up. With the advent of Christ, His death, burial, and resurrection, we know that we too may attain what Job deemed impossible, which lends those of this generation, and all the generations that have come and gone since Jesus, a new layer of hope, that we too will one day rise, just as He rose.

With love in Christ,

Michael Boldea, Jr.  

Posted on 27 January 2025 | 12:16 pm