Asking God for answers – goodchristianfiction

As I’ve mentioned recently, my Bible reading currently finds me in the cycle of stories of the Old Testament, where God’s people love Him, forget Him, mock Him, and turn back to Him again in waves of joy and grief that often leave me wanting to scream at my Bible as I might yell at the television set–“What do you think you’re doing? How can you be so stupid that you would worship a man-made idol or other people’s gods when you have a history of covenant with the one and only God?”

But, I usually remind myself how easy it is to armchair quarterback history. A perspective from thousands of years in the future, after all, can easily see where others stumble, especially since my perspective includes knowledge of the New Covenant, which was completed when Christ came and sacrificed Himself for us.

Before Christ, the closest any individual came to God was through the High Priest, who was allowed to cleanse himself and enter the Holy of Holies, the most sacred place in the Temple, the place where God dwelled, only once each year in order to offer sacrifices that would give the people a way to forgiveness from God. When Christ died on the Cross, that curtain that separated the rest of the people from that Holy of Holies literally split in two! From that moment on, those who ask Jesus to be their Savior have entrance into the Holy of Holies through the indwelling of the Holy Spirit, which means that we can call on God anytime, anyplace, anywhere.

But, since human nature really never changes, how often do we also cycle through loving God, forgetting Him, and even mocking Him before we remember just how special the gift of Grace and Salvation are and return to Him again?

Modern culture likes to concentrate on a kind of non-religion where everyone can feel good about him/herself so long as we give everybody enough room to believe whatever they want, and we don’t get in anybody else’s way.

Even though Christ loves all of us so much that He died so that we all would have the chance to choose everlasting life with Him, He did not negate following God’s commands:

Woe to you, teachers of the law and Pharisees, you hypocrites! You give a tenth of your spices–mint, dill and cumin. But you have neglected the more important matters of the law–justice, mercy and faithfulness. You should have practiced the latter, without neglecting the former. (Matthew 23:23)

There is no way to God the Father except through our belief in Christ the Son. Christ commanded that we love God first, with everything that is in us, and to love others as we want ourselves to be loved. Between these two commands, He covered every other rule laid out for human behavior in the Holy Word.

Yet, despite the simplicity of God’s plan for our salvation, don’t we manage to make everything so very complicated? We judge when we should be silent. We offer disapproval when we should be extending a helping hand. We let ourselves off the hook when we should be listening to the voice of conscience that tells us we just messed up. We hold onto our pride when we should submit to God’s ultimate power over us.

Despite the many downs in the history of the Jews, theirs is the ultimate victory in human history because it is through them that God chose to make Himself known to the rest of us. I feel sorry for those who stubbornly refuse to believe that God is because, in the end, they miss out on the pinnacle-moments of knowing a loving Creator.

Through his many psalms, David, the man after God’s own heart, expresses as well as anyone the joy of knowing, truly knowing, God’s love for us:

The Lord is my rock and my fortress and my deliverer, my God, my rock, in whom I take refuge, my shield, and the horn of my salvation, my stronghold and my refuge, my savior; you save me from violence. I call upon the Lord, who is worthy to be praised, and I am saved from my enemies. (2 Samuel 22:2-4)

Like intersecting circles in a graph, we humans may have different perspectives about the world, but the one thing that should center us is coming back to our true center, which is Christ.

So, even though I want to chastise the people in the stories I read in the Old Testament, I know that I, too, am constantly on a path of winding toward and away from God, even though I have Jesus in my heart. The main lesson I have to learn is to keep going on my knees and asking God to keep guiding me and bringing me back to center.

How many times do you make a big decision in your life and only remember to pray about it afterwards? Even when you pray about big decisions you are trying to make, how much of the “answers” you receive are really just a reflection of what you wanted all along? How do we know that we’ve gotten any kind of true answer at all?
I think about these issues when I am faced with life’s big questions–new house, new job, relationships, big expenditures–but what about the everyday decisions I make so quickly, I wonder if I thought at all? Do daily prayers that include generalized statements like, “Your will be done,” really cover the bases?
Sometimes, I envy those who lived in the time of the ancients when signs from God were an actual occurrence for the truly faithful, like dew on fleece or the discernible whisper in the wind. I do not envy those living in the four hundred years of silence between Malachi and the arrival of Christ. How desolate life must have been when God kept Himself from even the prophets, especially in a world not yet saved by the blood of Christ.
But in a world where we have daily access to the great Intercessor, how human of us to take that great gift for granted. Jeremiah 17:9 reminds us that “the heart is deceitful above all things and beyond cure. Who can understand it?” How many times do we hear an answer from God that our heart has actually given us instead? If we do not temper our decisions with a strong foundation in the actual word of God, peacefully studied throughout life so that when moments of upheaval which call for decisions to be made actually come we are duly prepared, we will be more than vulnerable to the trap of thinking with our heart and not the Spirit that should truly guide us. Those who think with the heart believe they are validated in hurting others when they too are miserable, jumping out of marriages, for example, because God would want them to be happy. As Philip Yancey has pointed out, among other great Christian writers I am sure, God is not interested in our happiness so much as our salvation. The narrow road is often much less happy than the wide path, but much more peaceful in the end, and full of wonder.
Growth in life cannot come without pain, for how would we really understand joy if we had not also experienced loss? But growth also cannot come without being wholly committed to God, everyday, with every decision, in thankfulness for the Holy One.