Job CXXXII

 If Job had remained silent, his friends would have likely come to the same conclusion. The only thing that would have been different is Zophar saying should a man who remains silent be vindicated, rather than should a man full of talk be so.

There are situations and instances when no matter what you do, whether you speak up for yourself or let people judge you at will without mounting a defense, their conclusions are already reached, their mindset cemented, and no matter what you say or don’t say, they will not be swayed.

It’s a slimy sort of approach reminiscent of politicians. It’s like the old trope where one man asks another if he still beats his wife, and he demands a yes or no answer. Whenever he attempts to mount a defense and insist that he’d never lay a hand on the mother of his children, he is quickly cut off and reminded that all that is required of him is a yes or a no. Well, the presupposition that the man beat his wife is already established in the minds of his accusers. If he says yes, then it’s a continuation of it; if he says no, it means that he used to but has recently stopped.

Some people have already made up their minds about you, and there’s nothing you can do to change them. They will see you as you once were, not as you are, unable to reconcile transformation and rebirth with the individual that used to run from God as fast as their feet could take them. No matter how much you insist you are no longer the individual they once knew, no matter how much evidence there is to substantiate your assertion, they’re too set in their ways to allow for the reality that God can transform an individual to the point that their entire nature becomes unrecognizable from what it once was.

You may have a past, but you’re no longer living in it. If someone insists that they must see you through the prism of your past rather than the new creation you’ve become, that’s on them, and God will deal with the injustice of it in due time. Are such individuals being used by the enemy? More often than not, yes. By their insistence that you are the same as you’ve always been and nothing has changed, the enemy is attempting to get you to see yourself as you once were rather than as you currently are.

It’s not so much that people change; it’s that God changes people. If it were not so, we wouldn’t have the testimonies of men who once exemplified cowardice becoming bold and outspoken even in the face of persecution. We would not have testimonies of men who were once slaves to sin, now pursuing righteousness with abandon.

It’s the easiest thing in the world to point to someone’s past and ignore their present iteration because it allows for men to feel spiritually superior and look down on others. You say you have been born again, you say your life has been transformed, but I remember when you used to do this thing or the other, so what about that? When this inevitably occurs, our instant reaction is to shy away from our past, from who we once were, while still in darkness, trying to play it down or dismiss it offhand.

When it comes to owning who we once were, I personally believe the best course of action is to take a page out of Paul’s book and acknowledge even the gloomiest of details regarding our past, knowing that we are no longer who we were but something wholly different.

Galatians 1:13-17, “For you have heard of my former conduct in Judaism, how I persecuted the church of God beyond measure and tried to destroy it. And I advanced in Judaism beyond many of my contemporaries in my own nation, being more exceeding zealous for the traditions of my fathers. But when it pleased God, who separated me from my mother’s womb and called me through His grace, to reveal His Son in me, that I might preach Him among the Gentiles, I did not immediately confer with flesh and blood, nor did I go up to Jerusalem to those who were apostles before me; but I went to Arabia and returned again to Damascus.”

You may have heard of my former conduct, and I cannot deny it, but what I can say is that I am no longer the man I once was. Yes, I persecuted the church, Paul confesses, beyond measure and tried to destroy it, but then something changed. God called me through His grace to reveal His Son to me, and I am a man forever transformed.

That’s what God does in the innermost parts of man, and Paul was self-aware enough to realize that you can’t change the past, no matter how hard you try, but by the same token, your past does not define who you are in the present.

True faith in Christ is not performative; it’s transformative. It’s not about putting on a shirt with a button-down collar or wearing freshly pressed khakis; it’s about being born again and becoming a new creation in Him. Much of what passes for Christianity today is performance art, and it’s not even good performance art. It’s more akin to community theater in Pookipsy than a Broadway show.

We’ve come to equate spirituality with how loud someone can yell or how boisterous their declarations are, rather than looking beyond the superficial and discerning whether someone has been born again or is feigning it for some ulterior motive or another. We get taken in by showmanship because a showman is there to entertain, not call men to repentance or preach the Gospel. That suits us just fine. We don’t want accountability, we don’t want to be convicted, we don’t like the feeling of the Gospel scouring the inner depths of our heart; it’s unpleasant and painful, so we’ll settle for superficial entertainment by some carnie sideshow with pink hair and no depth of understanding of who God is.

With love in Christ,

Michael Boldea, Jr.  

Posted on 7 March 2025 | 12:15 pm