Staff Writer| The Daily Reporter
Does God wish us success in everything we do? There is this great scene from what is now an "old movie" called Bruce Almighty, starring the comedian Jim Carrey. In the movie he has been given the powers of God. In one scene he has a hard time concentrating because he keeps hearing the prayers of every single person in the world. He decides that the easiest way to deal with them all is to say "yes" to everything. What ensues, you can imagine, is chaos as everyone wins the lottery and everyone's sports teams succeed. It's an interesting commentary on the sorts of things many people pray for.
However, it gets at a good question: why doesn't God give us everything that we want? There are pastors who will tell you that God wants you to have everything you ever wanted. All I can say is that if someone is telling you exactly what you want to hear, that God wants you to have everything you ever hoped and dreamed, then there's good reason to question them. Nothing in the Bible teaches us that this is the case.
We've been working our way through the major stories of the Bible and last week we learned about the fall of Jericho. God did, in fact, want his people to succeed as they marched into the Promised Land. However, it would not always be so easy. The very next chapter, Joshua 7, relates a completely different story.
After Jericho a man named Achan took some of the things devoted to God and hid them in his tent. The next battle was against this tiny town called Ai. While Jericho was fortified with a wall, Ai was not. In fact, in the Hebrew, the name means 'heap of ruins.' This was not an impressive city. They should have been able to conquer it, but they couldn't. God did not answer their prayer. Why?
In the case of Ai, God did not answer their prayer because there was sin. In fact, God's just judgment would be brought against Achan and his family (who knew of the theft). The clear message is that God's laws are not to be neglected. However, why else does God not give his people all that they want when they want it?
The first thing we can say is that if God were subject to our requests, then he wouldn't be God. We'd be the ultimate authority. This is why I get uncomfortable when I hear people ordering God around in their prayers. Who do we think we are?! He is God and we are not.
The second thing that is important to remember is that God used their enemies to test them. God's people need to learn to depend upon him, for victory and in defeat. Think of the life of Job and how God used his circ*mstances to teach him humility and dependence upon the Lord.
Looking forward to the New Testament, and the life of Christ, we can say that God doesn't give us everything we want because he is making us more like Jesus. Remember the Garden of Gethsemane, where Jesus prayed that the Father would remove the cup of suffering from him. Jesus did not want to undergo the pain of the cross, but he submitted to the Father. His request was denied (think about that!) so that we could have one who would always be praying for us (Hebrews 7:25).
Lastly, I think that God doesn't give us what we want, when we want it, because our wants are wrong. I don't mean that we want sin, though sometimes we do. Clearly, Achan desired sin. He wanted to keep what belonged to the Lord. Ultimately, Achan's sin was both in active disobedience, but also in not trusting and depending upon the Lord. He just wanted gold.
The author C.S. Lewis gets at this truth in his book, The Weight of Glory, where he writes, “If we consider the unblushing promises of reward and the staggering nature of the rewards promised in the Gospels, it would seem that Our Lord finds our desires, not too strong, but too weak. We are half-hearted creatures, fooling about with drink and sex and ambition when infinite joy is offered us, like an ignorant child who wants to go on making mud pies in a slum because he cannot imagine what is meant by the offer of a holiday at the sea. We are far too easily pleased.”
Pastor Everett Henes, the pastor of the Hillsdale Orthodox Presbyterian Church, can be reached at pastorhenes@gmail.com.
