Apply your heart to instruction and your ears to words of knowledge.
Proverbs 23:12
Submit to God and be at peace with him; in this way prosperity will come to you.
Accept instruction from his mouth and lay up his words in your heart.
If you return to the Almighty you will be restored:
If you remove wickedness far from your tent and assign your nuggets to the dust,
your gold to Ophir to the rocks in the ravines,
then the Almighty will be your gold,
the choicest silver for you.
Surely then you will find delight in the Almighty and will lift up your face to God.
You will pray to him, and he will hear you,
and you will fulfill your vows.
What you decide on will be done,
and light will shine on your ways.
When men are brought low and you say, ‘Lift them up!’
then he will save the downcast.
He will deliver even one who is not innocent,
who will be delivered through the cleanness of your hands.
Job 22:21-30
I will be honest here and admit that I don’t completely understand the context of the passage of Job or how these two passages are related. I only know that I felt an urging to post both. For me, Job has always been a difficult book to understand. It’s like a tangled ball of yarn. Hopefully, with time, patience and God’s guidance I will be able to unravel it all.
The one thing I hope I’m seeing right in the passage above is the idea of one who delights in Almighty God and prays to Him on behalf of the lost, that God will deliver them. Since only Jesus is innocent in all wrong doing and all the rest of us have “fallen short of the Glory of God” (Romans 3:23), the last part of Job 22 also seems to be a picture of Jesus’s sacrifice for us. “He will deliver even one who is not innocent, who will be delivered through the cleanness of your hands.”