How God Treats His Enemies

How many are my iniquities and sins?
Make me know my transgression and my sin.
Why do You hide Your face,
And regard me as Your enemy?
Job 13:23–24

Almost certainly, v15 is more well-known, from this chapter, than v23–24. But, here we have important insight into "how God treats His friends" (to borrow from the title of an excellent little commentary on Job by Bob Fyall). 

When God makes you to know your iniquities, sins, and transgressions, He is treating you as friends. (And Hebrews 12 would remind us that it is when He afflicts us for them, in service of bringing us to repentance, that He treats us as sons!)

But, when God allows you to feel justified in your own eyes—when He permits you to continue in blindness to particular sins—that He is treating you as an enemy.

Job was distressed that he was being treated according to unmediated justice, rather than according to grace in the Mediator. He had confessed what he knew of, and repented of it, but still affliction was coming. He was learning more about how God treats His friends. But he was worried that he was being treated as an enemy: that the Lord was permitting him to be hardened in his sins by blindness to them.

So I wonder, gentle reader, if this is one of your and my great desires of the Lord: that He would not hide His face from us as an enemy, but that, as a Friend and Father, He would make us know our transgression and sin.