your piety be your confidence, and your blameless ways your hope?

Job 4:1-21
Should not your piety虔誠 be your confidence, and your blameless ways your hope?
The three friends now begin the to-and-fro往復 argument which makes up most of the book. Eliphaz has first turn. Job has often helped others on trouble, he says, now he should be prepared to swallow his own medicine. God destroys the guilty, not the innocent. No one is blameless before him.
A prose散文 prologue序幕 introduces the great debate between Job and his friends which the author records in magnificent poetry.
As they tussle爭論 with the problem, both Job and his friends are hampered阻礙 by ignorance of the larger issue. They have no assurance of a future life. For them death is the end. So justice must be seen to be done in this life. According to the orthodox theology of the day - the position championed by the three friends - prosperity was God's reward for good living, calamity his judgment on the sin of the individual.
Generally speaking this held good. But the friends reduced a general truth to rigid僵硬, invariable rule. If Job suffers, then he must be a wicked man. But Job knows this is untrue.
So the argument goes back and forth, neither side shifting position, until they reach complete impasse僵局, at which point God himself intervenes. He does not answer Job's questions. But seeing God, Job is satisfied. If his freiends' theology had been too narrow, his own concept of God had been too small.
Why?
Most of us have the concepts, perspectives like Job's friends who reduced a general truth to rigid, invariable rule. But variable rule leads to no rule in the truth.
Out confidence is fear the Lord, and my hope is Jesus Christ. Blameless way is our feedback to God's great love.
How?
Trust in the Lord and do the right things for God is good and his love endure forever.