"Genie in a Lamp?" Part 2

In Part One I introduced a caricature of God that makes him out to be more of a Genie in a

lamp than the God depicted in Scripture. No one passage paints the entire picture. An passage or series of passages must be understood in light of the whole.

Any idea we form about the prayer-answering God must be understood in light of the many prayers not answered—prayers offered up by godly people. For example, King David fasted and lay all night on the ground in his appeal to God for the newborn child.

And the Lord afflicted the child that Uriah’s wife bore to David, and he became sick (2 Samuel 12:15).

Uriah was the husband of Bathsheba. Bathsheba is the woman David committed adultery with while Uriah was off to battle. The cover-up involved having Uriah killed in the frontline of battle.

Although the text does not come right out and say it, it looks like David’s appeal to God was for his child, that he live.

…the elders of his house stood beside him, to raise him from the ground, but he would not, nor did he eat food with them. On the seventh day the child died” (2 Samuel 12:17, 18).

If the life of the child was the desire of David’s heart and the child died, what went wrong?

Another example is the apostle Paul. Paul received visions and revelations of the Lord. In order to keep him from boasting about such a privilege, to keep him from “being too elated by the surpassing greatness of the revelations,” Paul writes,

a thorn was given me in the flesh, a messenger of Satan to harass me, to keep me from being too elated. Three times I pleaded with the Lord about this, that it should leave me. But he said to me, ‘My grace is sufficient for you, for my power is made perfect in weakness’ (2 Corinthians 12:7-9).

Now read Paul’s response:

Therefore I will boast all the more gladly of my weaknesses, so that the power of Christ may rest upon me. For the sake of Christ, then, I am content with weaknesses, insults, hardships, persecutions, and calamities. For when I am weak, then I am strong (2 Corinthians 12:9-10).

Here are two incident where godly people prayed to God, but did not receive the thing for which they asked.

Consider one more person—Jesus, the Son of God. In the garden called Gethsemane, on the shadow of death, he fell on his face and prayed,

My father, if it be possible, let this cup pass from me; nevertheless, not as I will, but as you will (Matthew 26:39).

What a great motto that would make to live by: “not as I will, but as you will.” It is in keeping with something else James writes,

Come now, you who say, ‘Today or tomorrow we will go into such and such a town and spend a year there and trade and make a profit’—yet you do not know what tomorrow will bring. What is you life? For you are a mist that appears for a little time and then vanishes. Instead you ought to say, ‘If the Lord wills, we will live and do this or that.” As it is, you boast in your arrogance. All such boasting is evil. So whoever knows the right thing to do and fails to do it, for him it is sin (James 4:13-17).

Another passage to take into consideration is James 4:1-4:

What causes quarrels and what causes fights among you? Is it not this, that your passions are at war within you? You desire and do not have, so you fight and quarrel. You do not have, because you do not ask. You ask and do not receive, because you ask wrongly, to spend it on your passions. You adulterous people! Do you not know that friendship with the world is enmity with god? Therefore whoever wishes to be a friend of the world makes himself an enemy of God.

Like so many other connecting ideas in Scripture, there is a tension between last week’s texts and this week’s. They do not contradict one another, but one idea pulls against the other.

I have hardly said everything that needs to be said, but I hardly find the “genie in a lamp” metaphor appropriate or useful.