The Practice of Piousness

The following is from Oswald Chambers' book Baffled to Fight Better:

"Bildad is cultivating the margin of his eyesight, so to speak. This is a trick of the piousness not based on a personal relationship to God. Bildad is apparently speaking of an abstraction while all the time he is criticising Job--it is Job who is the hypocrite and the fraud.

"It is not meanness in Bildad that makes him do this, but 'limitedness'--he is 'all replete with very thou.'

"Bildad has never seen God, while Job is getting near the place where he will see Him. All the god Bildad has is his creed; if he had known the real God he would have prayed to Him, and would have recognised the facts that were too big for him.

"Whenever we put belief in a creed in place of belief in God, we become this particular kind of humbug. To 'imply wrong by my right' is the trick of every man who puts his creed before his relationship to God.

"During this war [World War I] many a man has come to find the difference between his creed and God. At first a man imagines he has backslidden because he has lost belief in his beliefs, but later on he finds he has gained God, i.e., he has come across Reality. If Reality is not to be found in God, then God is not found anywhere.

"If God is only a creed or a statement of religious belief, then He is not real; but if God is, as the Book of Job brings to light, One with whom a man gets into personal contact in other ways than by his intellect, then any man who touches the reality of things, touches God."