This is the final installment of this Mad at God series. I simply want to add a few thoughts and a general summary. Again, I am writing this series because I continue to encounter believers who feel that God has betrayed them, kept something good from them, or failed to keep some promise. Inevitably, they have distanced themselves from God and his church. Often they are married and their anger hinders their spouse’s and even their children’s relationship with the Lord.
I want to reiterate that being disappointed with God is not the same as being angry with him or taking up some offense against the Father. I can be disappointed and confused without judging God to be unfaithful. But if I am angry with him, it seems I must have judged him to be untrue, unfaithful or uncaring. In every instance in which I have heard people vent their anger, they have judged God to be unfaithful for breaking promises he never made or for not trusting him to have made a decision in their best interest.
It is not uncommon for us to pray fervently for something, and when it is apparent that God has turned down our request, we feel cheated. After all, the Bible says that whatever I ask for, believing that I have received it, it shall be mine (Mark 11:24). That is essentially the foundational scripture for the “prosperity gospel.” It tends to view God as a vending machine or a doting, wealthy grandparent who will give us whatever we want as long as we can imagine him giving to us. That is the “name it and claim it” approach to prayer. But we need to understand prayer in the context of God as a wise and loving Father, because that is the Biblical description of our relationship with him.
The truth is that we sometimes earnestly desire something that would not be in our best interest in the long-run. Because we tend to live life with a short-term perspective, we don’t understand why the Father did not respond to our fervent prayer. On more than one occasion, I have known seventeen-year-old boys who earnestly desired the newest, hottest car on the road to impress their friends and, especially, their girl friends. In my day, those were 400 h.p. Firebirds or Dodge Road Runners with a 440 engine, or a Corvette with a 427 stuffed under the hood. In the majority of cases, when the father gave into the request, the car ended up being totaled within 90 days. The seventeen-year-old did not have the experience or judgment to drive a car with that much speed.
Inevitably, even after the wreck, these guys wanted their dads to buy them a new care just like the one they barely walked away from. Sometimes we desire a relationship, money, the bright new house, the bright new car etc. and believe that those would open a door for years of happiness. But God knows our hearts and our future and our assigned destiny. He may not say “yes” to a prayer for a desire that in the long-run would not be in our best interest. We cannot see down the road far enough to know whether or not that road is leading us to a washed out bridge or a sunny drive in the country.
When our desire is not met, we may tend to think God doesn’t love us. But the love the Father has for us is “agape” love which, by definition, means to “always act in the best interest of the other person.” Some things we believe will be the key to our happiness might actually spell devastating pain down the road. If we believe that the Father loves us and knows what is best for our eternal destiny, even when he says “no” to something we deeply desire, we may not understand, but we will be able trust. The idea that if someone loves me, he or she will always give me what I want, is a very immature and childish way to understand love. God always has a greater blessing waiting for us, customized to meet our deepest needs in the best way. If we take offense at God, we may miss that blessing because we turn our back on the one who holds that blessing in his hand.
Ultimately, we need to come to grips with the reality that the Father is committed to our eternal destiny in heaven and not so much to our comfort and worldly desires while we are on this planet. Sometimes the greatest gift is a season of hardship as he tools our character. Some “good things” could move us away from the destiny he has planned for us. Some relationships or other desires become idols in our lives so that God cannot give place to those idols. There are many things we simply don’t have the ability to understand because we are confined to the moment we live in, rather than being able to see the road all the way to the end. From his view, God sees every washed-out bridge, every flooded low place, every ambush by the enemy, and every fallen tree blocking the road. Faith trusts God to guide us safely to the end. Saying “no” to some of our deepest desires, may be part of that guidance.
The apostle Paul makes the point in Romans 8:32, that if God loved us enough to give us life through the death of his Son, will he not also give us all things that will truly bless us? If we trust God to always be guided by love in his response to our prayers, we will have no need to be mad at him. If we believe he is committed to our welfare, we will judge him by all the things he has done for us, rather than the one thing he has not done. Too many of us have not decided who God is on the basis pf revelation, but on our short-term view of whether he has given us what we want. There will be things that make no sense to us and that definitely remain a mystery, but deciding who God is before we experience disappointment is the key to drawing close to him and accepting his “no’s” when they come.
