Predetermined Answers To Prayer

I am going to take a guess and say that the vast majority of you who read this blog are people who pray. Some do not , at least not with conscious knowledge that they are doing so, but I would say when things are difficult we all find our own way to talk to God and to petition Him for whatever it is we are seeking. But what is it that you are really asking from God?

Somebody dear to me just recently died after having suffered for many years from various ailments and diseases. For many years my prayers, and this sounds horrible, was for her suffering to end and to let her die peacefully in her sleep. This person hated being a burden to others but at the same time was a blessing to not only those who helped her out but she was a blessing to many people just by her unerring faith in God. Now what if my petition to God had been answered long before she actually died? A whole lot of people might have missed out on a great blessing.

I think that some of the problem is that when we pray, and petition God, we tend to take “thy will be done” to actually mean “ my will be done.” Makes me wonder how many times a prayer has been answered but those making the prayer didn't realize it because it wasn't the predetermined results that they were looking for.

In the book of Jeremiah you also have a story of a group of Jews, survivors of the Babylonian invasion, coming to Jeremiah and asking him to petition God on their behalf as to what they should do. Jeremiah 41-42.They gave their petition to Jeremiah and stated what ever God tells us to do we will do it. Jeremiah could only take them at their word and went and prayed on their behalf. The problem was, that they already had a predetermined outcome, meaning that they had already decided what they were going to do regardless of what the prophet told them. Their plan was to get as far away as they could and go to Egypt so that they could avoid war and pestilence and continue in their practices that caused them all the problems in the first place. What they should have realized is that they were greatly blessed already by God because they had been allowed to survive when many had been destroyed and they still had the opportunity to prosper. God had influenced king and he had ordered his men to let the people, particularly the poor, to stay in the land to prosper. God answered them 10 days later.

The Lord has said concerning you, O remnant of Judah, ‘Do not go to Egypt!’ Know certainly that I have admonished you this day. For you were hypocrites in your hearts when you sent me to the Lord your God, saying, ‘Pray for us to the Lord our God, and according to all that the Lord your God says, so declare to us and we will do it.’And I have this day declared it to you, but you have not obeyed the voice of the Lord your God, or anything which He has sent you by me. Now therefore, know certainly that you shall die by the sword, by famine, and by pestilence in the place where you desire to go to dwell.” Jeremiah 42: 19-22

After they heard this from Jeremiah they became angry with him ( see chapter 43 ) and decided that he was lying to them and they headed off to Egypt. In the end ,because they continued in their evil ways, they were destroyed with Egypt and missed out on the blessings of starting over in their own God given land.

So I guess, at least for me, the moral of the story is that you can't ever assume that you know what the will of God is. Certainly you can make your petitions to God and well you should, but you can't assume that the answer that you are seeking, how ever good it might seem to you, is what the will of God is or even where the greatest blessings are to be found. Keep your eyes open because the opposite of your desire may actually be where the greatest blessing is to be found.

Shalom.