Oswald Chambers: Hope - A Holy Promise Sample

The suffering of Job is accounted for by the fact that God and Satan had made a battleground of his life. Satan had declared that Job does not love God for himself, but only for His blessings, and now everything in the way of shelter and comradeship and sympathy has been completely stripped from Job, and he sees that God must have allowed it. This is the deepest line Job has come to as yet, but he still clings to it that God is honorable. This is supreme despair, along with extraordinary confidence in God who meantime looks like a moloch.

Job believed that God prospered and blessed the upright man who trusted in Him, and that the man who was not upright was not prospered. Then came calamity after calamity. Everything Job believed about God was contradicted, and his creed went to the winds.

Reflection Questions: Do I love God for himself or for His blessings? What happens to my confidence in God when He withholds blessing?

Quotations taken from The Highest Good and Baffled to Fight Better, © Discovery House Publishers