Four Vinettes From God's Day Off
Larry the plumber might pray, "Lord, I need a new truck for my job. Please find me one." And then he finds one! He praises God and says "Thank you Lord, you meet all my needs. You knew that I just want to make an honest living and you honoured that."
Teressa the school teacher prays, "Lord, I can't get sick today. I'm being reviewed by my principle." But she doesn't get what she asked for. Instead the flu gets really bad - she manages her class poorly, loses her temper and gets poor grades. She says "Well, the LORD is teaching me a lesson. I need to learn to just do my best regardless of how I'm evaluated."
John the contractor, decides that he's going to raise money for his church. He dedicates this money to God and asks him to protect him. Part of the process was applying for tax credits he didn't really earn. But the money is going away from a wealthy government and into the hands of the poor. He praises God because he doesn't get caught in his scam. "Surely you are a God who brings down the rich and raises up the poor!"
As a matter of fact, that day 1,000 people around the planet say "Lord, I believe that if I just have faith, I can have a better job. I'm going to trust you to give me the best job possible. 7 of those people get pay raises that very same day. They go around telling other people that the only thing holding them back is their faith. They just needed to believe in God.
But do you know what - none of them learned anything about God that day. He'd taken the day off. All their ideas about God were nothing more than fictions.
The Moral of the Stories
This example has a VERY powerful and a VERY important lesson in it. If there are times when God is not exerting his will in a situation, and we assume that he is, then we are going to have very wrong ideas about God.
I want to run through each of these ideas and look at what would happen if God actually ignored these types of prayers all the time. Let me preface this by saying - I'm not suggesting that God doesn't answer prayer. I am saying that its possible that we are praying about things that God is not about to interfere with for very good reasons.
The Example of Larry
But you might say. "Look at Larry the plumber's example. He praised God because he found a truck! How can we it be a bad thing that he praises God as his provider?" Well, first of all, God didn't get him a truck in this example! If the situation would have been different (let's say Larry was a plumber in the impoverished nation of Cameroon) he wouldn't have been given the truck.
This could be a problem in every day life IF our prayer for our material possessions and necessities were not ALWAYS being supernaturally answered by God. We are thanking God for the things that our society is giving us - rejoicing, taking joy in, desiring what our wealthy society provides for us. The real God will seem much more austere. This God who lets us struggle, hurt, sorrow and suffer, and merely offers his condolenscences and urges us to help others in need - teaching us how to rally around each other in a community - that God is unknown to us and perhaps even a little repugnant.
The example of Teressa
"But look at Teressa and how she interacts with God. She has prayed for something, but when her request for good health is denied she doesn't get angry at God, she draws a really valid conclusion - God wants us to humble and do our best in all circumstances." Its true that Teressa drew a valid conclusion about God - but that is not because she was watching God at work and learned something about him. Instead, she actually has to perform mental gymnastics to figure out a way that the God of the Bible (i.e. with the character traits of the Bible) might be responsible for what is actually just the relentless mundaness of the laws of nature.
This could be problem in every day life IF our prayers for a certain topic are not actually being 'answered' by God. We start to try to explain away every event as if the choices of men and the laws of nature are actually the loving actions of a divine benevolence. We search for the fact that makes us think "ahhh ... this is why that tragedy happened."
For example, I know of a lady who's spouse died. At the bedside of her dying husband a person became a Christian. One of the lady's friends said to her "See, that's why your husband went through this tragedy, to save an eternal soul!" As a matter of fact, some Christian thinkers and apologists even try to suggest that this is the very best of any possible worlds. The tsunamis, genocides, tortures, the actions of the Lord's Resistance Army - these are only apparent tragedies. They are veiled mercies that we don't appreciate simply because we don't see the bigger picture. Of course, this kind of mental gymnastics is much easier to pull of in prosperous times and places (and we are the richest generation ever in the history of mankind). But its easy to see why when tragedy falls our faith falls apart. Our creative limits are reached, we crack when we realize We are no longer able to read divine benevolence into the universe's response to our prayer.
John the Contractor
"Yes, I see the problem with John the contractor." You might say. "He doing something against the character of God, and thinking God approves just because it works out."
I am glad that my interlocutor agrees at this point, but there is a bigger problem. John the Contractor THINKS that he is doing a good thing. He thinks that his prayer is valid. There is no mechanism in prayer to say 'Beep - this one isn't valid, if you get away with it, it doesn't mean that I (God) condone it.' That means that if you are like Terresa and you are performing mental gymnastics to justify all life's responses to your prayers - you have no safety. If you are completely wrong - or doing something that you think is right but is actually wrong - God isn't going to stop you from your practise of reading God into the situation.
But think of how many people are succeptible to this. For example, imagine there are two sincerely wonderful Christians. They even pray about many of the right things, prayers that God hears and answers. But the catch is that one of them believes that the KJV is the only valid Bible translations and that all others are the devil's Bible. The other thinks this is ridiculous and campaigns against the KJV-only person. Now both are going to pray 'God give me wisdom to help me through this battle.' They will both see times when their ministries are effective and they will credit that to God's support, and they will see other times when their ministries suffer and credit that to Satan's attack. In other words, the moment they start reading God into the events that follow their prayer they are going to begin mental gymnastics, and there is no way for them to know when this process has started! There is no way to know when 'reading God's hand' is illegitimate.
But think of how many important things Christians disagree about, and pray about from opposite sides. Surely this is going on all the time!
Perhaps the moral is that we shouldn't be reading God's hand in the events of the world at all. It is unsafe and unguarded territory. But then how do we know if something is an answer to prayer or not. It was easy to know when we assumed that God was either deliberately allowing or intervening in the events that followed EVERY prayer. It was our duty to translate the events of life (man's free choices and the events of the laws of nature) into divine intent. But what if that isn't true? Well, we don't know that it isn't true yet. That will be next blog post. But let's move on to one last example.
The outliers
Now here's one last danger that would occur if we were actually praying about topics where God wasn't intervening one way or the other (he was just letting things happen). 1,000 people prayed in faith for a better life, but only 7 got answers. But who do you think is going get on TV, radios, church pulpits and Christian universities? Surely, its not the 993 who just say "I asked for a better life and didn't get it." What kind of story is that? Maybe they have sin in their life. Maybe they didn't really have faith. Maybe God had a special reason for leaving them where they are. Who knows? But if someone prays and they get a marvelous response, then they are going to get attention. (And notice that we don't ask questions from them: 'Maybe they just got lucky?')
If you say to someone, "that's not right, God isn't about exempting us from the sorrows of this world, or using his power to make this battle ground a little heaven for us" you will be rebuffed with "Well, I've heard stories of God's power" (they'll be thinking of the 7) and then they'll say "I've seen it in my own life" (and they'll be thinking of the times when good stuff happened to them after they prayed).
But the problem is that we use stories and not statistics. There were not a statistically big number of people who get rich. Nor is it even possible that there could be! (Not everyone in the world can be indepedently wealthy, who would do the work?) But we use them as support for our beliefs anyhow, because that's the pattern we're used to following.
Summary
When we assume that God is deliberately causing the events that occur after our prayers (e.g. if we pray that we get healthy to deliver a presentation) then whatever happens we must explain God's hand. In other words, if we get well then God was blessing us. If we stay sick, then God wanted to improve our character. Let's call this practise "Reading God's Intention Into An Event" or "Reading God's Intention" for short.
But we know there are times when this is a bad idea. For example, if someone is stealing a TV from a store and they pray "God don't let me get caught", it is not a sign of God's approval if they get away with it. They got away with it because they were a sneaky criminal.
Some of the bad results of "Reading God's Intention into an event" when God was not actually forcing his will on a situation is that:
* You begin to confuse God and society. If we are prosperous we believe that the opulence given to us by our society is actually given to us by God, and we can become bitter towards God when external events go awry.
* You begin to confuse God and your opinions. We tend to narrate our events as God supporting, satan opposing us in any of our endeavors (e.g. God is blessing my ministry, satan is really opposing it). Thus tending to cement ourselves in our current positions and views. The problem with this is that NO MATTER WHAT HAPPENS, we can read the events of life this way.
* You begin to confuse God and luck. If you are one of the 'lucky ones' (e.g. you are one of the 7 people out of a 1000 who prayed for better financial situation and got the request) you tend think God answered it, and that others should expect God to do this.
But all this analysis is moot. If God actually does intentionally allow every event or intervenes in every event that we pray about, then the people are right to read God's hand in every thing that happens in response to their prayer. So next time (in part 2) we'll look at whether its biblical and logical to think that this is the case.
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