III. We Should Love God Whether He Blesses Us or Not

The transactional gospel — "obey and be blessed" — is the loudest false teaching in American Christianity, and the Bible has been answering it for 3,000 years.

The crucial word is blessed — bārak (ברך). Job blesses God while losing everything. The sentence structure is: gave, took, blessed. Not "blessed me, then I'll bless Him."

The Hebrew is famously ambiguous (the Ketib/Qere variant), but the surface reading is shocking: my trust in Him does not depend on whether He spares me.

The covenant is not "you bless me, I praise you." The covenant is "you are God, I worship you." Worship that depends on outcomes is idolatry of outcomes.