Through the Fire

"So the Lord blessed the latter end of Job more than his beginning" (Job 42:12).

Through his griefs Job came to his heritage. He was tried that his godliness might be confirmed. Are not my troubles intended to deepen my character and to robe me in graces I had little of before? I come to my glory through eclipses, tears, death. My ripest fruit grows against the roughest wall. Job's afflictions left him with higher conceptions of God and lowlier thoughts of himself. "Now," he cried, "mine eye seeth thee.

And if, through pain and loss, I feel God so near in His majesty that I bend low before Him and pray, "Thy will be done," I gain very much. God gave Job glimpses of the future glory. In those wearisome days and nights, he penetrated within the veil, and could say, "I know that my Redeemer liveth." Surely the latter end of Job was more blessed than the beginning.
--In the Hour of Silence

Operating System

1 Corinthians 2:1–16

Recommended Reading: Proverbs 1:1–7; 2:1–22; 4:1–27

Do you stay up on New Year’s Eve to wait for the clock to strike midnight? If you do, you probably don’t care that much about when the New Year begins in places like Fiji or Auckland, New Zealand. However, you probably cared a bit more on December 31, 1999, as TV cameras captured the stroke of midnight in those locations to see whether the world had avoided the Y2K disaster. As clocks struck 12:00, 12:01, 12:02 in each time zone around the world, we all breathed a collective sigh of relief that televisions still functioned, nuclear power plants hadn’t failed and cars continued running.

Remember the craziness that preceded Y2K? Companies and governments spent billions of dollars to hire software programmers to pore over and correct millions of lines of computer code. All because of a looming catastrophe if computers were to misread the last two zeroes in the year 2000 as 1900.