Here’s part 2 of my review on Six Prayers God Always Answers, by Mark Herringshaw and Jennifer Schuchmann.
How many times do people find themselves at the end of the rope, literally at the end of themselves, and they cry out to God with a prayer in the form of a bargain? Does God answer these kind of prayers? How many times have you heard preachers and theological pundits say that we shouldn’t ever pray these kind of prayers?
Maybe so, but there is compelling evidence that God answers them anyway. He probably answers them because He already knows the outcome anyway, and that our pleading and bargaining won’t make a difference. As with Abraham bargaining with God over the fate of Sodom and Gomorrah, God knew there were not even ten righteous people to be found, so the fiery judgment of the cities was assured. Here’s what the authors ask.
“Could it be that God doesn’t bargain for the outcome of the negotiation, but that the process of negotiating is God’s way of bargaining for us for something greater?”
What about questioning prayers, where sometimes man questions even the very existence of God. “God, are you there?” someone might breathe in desperation, not really expecting but sincerely hoping for an answer. How many people take Pascal’s Wager and cry out from the heart rather than from logic and reason to a God they are not even sure yet exists.
Humanity spends so much time looking for treasure, not realizing the true treasure is the very thing they reject and work to destroy. We spend our lives looking to “find God,” and fail to find Him because we’re looking in all the wrong places. God knew we could never find Him on our own, so the spiritual became material and stared us right in the face—the last place we thought to look for Him.
Ultimately, mankind wants to experience God and yet remain unchanged by the experience. Not. Possible.
So we move on to the sort of prayer that God rarely, if ever answers. The poor me, “why me?” sort of prayer. Though not implicitly stated in the book, I think this goes back to the desire to not want to be changed by a God-encounter. When we reject such change—a change for the better—we end up finding ourselves face down on the ground asking “why me?”
Why doesn’t God answer these kinds of prayers? Well, like Job found out, we can’t handle the truth. The answer to “why” is often more than we could bear, understand, comprehend, or even have time for. Imagine, God actually setting you down and telling you the answer to why. Do you have a few million years to spare for the explanation and the infinite mind to understand the answer?
Didn’t think so.
If we could understand the answer to why, we ourselves would be God, and no longer in need of Him. As this will never be the case, we are forced—like it or not—to our subservient place in God’s order of things. This brings us back to the fact that meeting God is always a life changing, mind blowing, perception altering experience.
When faced with this fact, we are left with either two choices. We either accept that God is God and submit ourselves to Him, knowing this will not give us the answers to our questions, or we make God small and impose our own answers on Him.
God’s answer to “why” is “I AM.” Though a short answer, tell me, can you explain it?
Didn’t think so.
To be continued…
