And though your beginning was small, your latter days will be very great. (Job 8:7) Let’s not get confused with the context of this passage. Job’s friend, Bildad, is telling him that Job’s family got what they deserved: divine punishment from God. He accused Job’s children of being secretly bad and therefore paying the price for their imagined evil. I just want to say as an aside that Job’s friend sucked and if you have a friend like this guy, you should de-friend him or her immediately. Now, after he cursed Job and his family in a penultimate hypocrisy, he was proposing that if Job would beg and borrow, that God would change Job’s fate and make things better than before. There are two theological problems with Bildad’s argument: the first being that some people are innocent and deserving of God’s favor; the second is that people would believe that God is swayed by people faking innocence. Neither of these are true. Yes, these are two principle tenets of a standard religion, but what we see in the Bible is that God has another standard and people desperately fall short. Having said all of that, how do we see to it that our future ends up being better than our past? From this entire book of Job the only guarantee seems to be God as judge. Bildad implies that clinging to God and His mercy is the only solution. The equation only works with a mediator. It only works when Jesus stands in for us and when we trust Him for our everything. You see, Jesus takes our insignificant lives and make them worth something more than the fertilizer our body becomes after we die. When Jesus intervenes in our lives, we become more than what we are now. We have a chance at a greater later. What makes somebody great is not our own righteous behavior and action. It’s Jesus who stands in for us before the judge and advocates for our “now” to be only a shadow of things that will define us later. If you forget why you believe in Jesus, or what your faith is doing for you, now you know– it makes your later better than now.