A Meditation #2

        Let me ask you something. O reader, what do you want out of your life? Do you think that God wants you to have freewill and to have wants and desires in life? There are some that believe that God’s will is set in stone, and that whatever He will to do that will would be done and your will doesn’t matter. If that’s true then what’s the point of praying to God then? If Moses believed this theology then the children of Israel would have been dead a long time ago. In Exodus 32:9 – 13, God was responding to Israel’s Golden Calf sin saying that they were a stiff-necked people and that He wanted to destroy them in His wrath. If Moses believed this theology that God’s will is set in stone, then He would have let it happen, but that’s not what he did. Moses didn’t want Israel to be killed, and argued with God about making sure that He didn’t consume them. He told God to repent—which was a very courageous and bold move on his part. The most remarkable part was that God did repent and stopped His own wrath against Israel.

        If God’s will was so arbitrary and He believed that His will was final then He would have killed Moses for trying to change it, but God isn’t that way at all. God was probably pleased to hear Moses make His case for Israel, and talk with God as a friend with full passionate arguments from his own will. Do you believe that God wants you to have a will of your own? In the Greek new testament, prayer in the Greek is two words meaning will or wish and toward, so a prayer is your own will and wish toward God. God has a will, and you have a will: Jesus had a will to not go through with His suffering and made it known to God the Father, and the Father’s response was to send an angel to strengthen Him. It’s clear that the Father didn’t want Jesus to deal with the suffering by Himself, but He also knew that what He had to go through was absolutely necessary to save Mankind. Jesus prayed three times for God’s will to change: fulfilling His own parable of the persistent widow. However, after He realized the will of His father, He faced the suffering like a real courageous man of God.

        Just because the Father’s will wasn’t exactly what the Son’s will was in this circumstance, doesn’t mean that Jesus had no will of His own and didn’t have the courage to let it known to His Father in prayer. Prayer is what’s required to make known your own will to God, but what if you don’t know your own will is in life? Will you be timid to let it be known to the Father—if you don’t know what it is yourself? Also, on the other side of the coin, if you know your own will for God to know, why would God give you what you want? I have been praying for a job that I love and that I can see the good in my labor as Solomon said about a worthwhile life, but why would God give it to me when there are others out there who don’t have the samethings I do? In fact, they probably don’t even have a job at all to pay their bills or support their families? I work with people from other countries that came to the U.S. because they want to support their families and get the money that America has because of God’s covenant with Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob that was given to this nation. The people I work with have next to nothing in their old country, but in America they have a lot of blessings that this nation offers. I am blessed to be in America, so why would God give me a good job that I love? I don’t have an argument to give God for this, but I realized now that I need to persuade God—even if it’s may not be His will. For the most part, unless we read it in the bible, we don’t know God’s will for our lives. If someone says that they know God’s will for your life, then I wouldn’t talk to that person—they are probably deceiving you.

        God is often silent—which is the reason why the proverb is so profound: “It is the glory of God to conceal a matter, but the honor of kings to search it out” (Proverbs 25:2). But, God is not so distant from us that He doesn’t work in our lives and doesn’t have a freewill, imitate relationship with us. God wants to be near to us, and wants to share the responsibilities of making decisions in life—even if we believe that our will doesn’t matter. Jesus told us to be persistent with God in the parable of the persistent widow and the parable of the friend who went to His friend at midnight to give him bread for his other friend. These parables were for us to bring our heart’s desires to God. The truth is: We are not robots or animals that have no will of our own, and have instincts to eat and drink and mate with everyone we see. We have a will to do right and wrong, good or evil, live or die, and even make mistakes or be wise. I wouldn’t want it any other way in this life because God doesn’t want us to be His slaves, but to be His freewill sons in Christ. Jesus told us to ask, seek, and find because God wants us to have the best in life. We are blessed to be in a country that loves freedom because freedom is what man needs to come to God.