Why Argue with God?

It's the way to discover his immutable will.

The traditional attribute that we call divine immutability has fallen on harder times than most attributes, with entire theologies (process and openness) that question this divine characteristic. Such theologies are not mere academic exercises. They address a common conundrum: If God is unchanging, why bother to make requests of him? As one traditional theologian put it:

God dwells in perfect bliss outside the sphere of time and space ... [He] remains essentially unaffected by creaturely events and experiences. He is untouched by the disappointment, sorrow or suffering of his creatures. Just as his sovereign will brooks no opposition, his serene tranquility knows no interruption.[1]

If the all-powerful and all-wise God is set on a certain course, it is hard to imagine why the prayers of stupid and selfish creatures deserve a hearing, let alone a response.

The answer seems simple—don’t petition God; it’s pointless. Simple, that is, if it weren’t for the repeated affirmations of the one who has intimate knowledge of God. When teaching about prayer, Jesus once told a story:  

In a certain city there was a judge who neither feared God nor respected man. And there was a widow in that city who kept coming to him and saying, “Give me justice against my adversary.” For a while he refused, but afterward he said to himself, “Though I neither fear God nor respect man, yet because this widow keeps bothering me, I will give her justice, so that she will not beat me down by her continual coming.” 

Jesus concluded, “Hear what the unrighteous judge says. And will not God give justice to his elect, who cry to him day and night?  Will he delay long over them? I tell you, he will give justice to them speedily” (Luke 18:1-9).

Another time, he drove home the point succinctly: “Ask, and it will be given to you; seek, and you will find; knock, and it will be opened to you. For everyone who asks receives, and the one who seeks finds, and to the one who knocks it will be opened” (Mt. 7:7).

Jesus paints a picture of a fatherly God who longs to fulfill the requests of his needy children. He appears not to be immutable but one who is poised to act in ways he had no intention of doing until requested.

That is not all. God’s will seems to be subject to those described by Jesus here as “evil,” and elsewhere as “faithless and twisted” (Mt. 7:17).  God is not only subject to change, suggests Jesus, but is prompted to change by creatures of questionable character.  

This can’t bode well for the universe.

Jesus stands in a long line of Hebrew prophets who had been making the same point for centuries. Take that most entertaining story of Jonah. 

Jonah is told by God to go to Nineveh and “Call out against it, for their evil has come up before me” (Jonah 1:2).  The implication is clear: Nineveh has been so wicked, it will suffer God’s wrath. Jonah finds this commission so distasteful that he boards a ship headed in the opposite direction.

God responds by stirring up a violent, life-threatening storm. The crew, discerning that Jonah is the cause of the troubles, tosses him overboard. 

God responds by sending a great fish to swallow Jonah. From the belly of this great fish, Jonah repents of his disobedience. 

God responds by sticking his finger down the throat of the whale, and the whale hurls Jonah onto dry land.

Jonah begins preaching judgment to Nineveh, and the people of Nineveh repent. 

God responds once more; he puts his judgment on hold. 

In short, God constantly reacts throughout the story, and in the end he changes his mind. This does not look like a picture of immutable divinity.

In fact, often in the Scriptures, God comes off as a bleeding-heart liberal, a mad philanthropist, a god who will do an about-face at the least prodding of his narcissistic and often evil children. What type of heavenly parent is that?  An overly indulgent one, who can’t seem to say no to his children, who will change his intentions at the drop of a humble prayer.

Yet if we peel back this layer, we find beneath it another painting of an altogether different God. This is the almighty God who, through Jesus, intends to bring history to a cataclysmic conclusion, and he will not be swayed from his course. Parable after parable assumes that people need to be ready, for the judgment is indeed coming, and history will culminate in the arrival of the kingdom of heaven.  The arrival is not subject to the whims of fickle people. When Jesus teaches his disciples to pray, he includes a phrase to remind us of the unswaying nature of God’s purpose: “… thy kingdom come, thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven.”

This assured reality is often portrayed today as cause for comfort, but for the biblical writers, it was an occasion for sober reflection. 

In this light, God is not an overindulgent parent continually spoiling his bratty children but a stern and just judge who is Lord of his creation. “He is unchanged, blessed be his name, in his justice,” preached C.H. Spurgeon. “Just and holy was he in the past; just and holy is he now.”[2] He does not respond to history, which like a river, is constantly running over its banks. Instead, God steadily channels that river toward the kingdom of heaven. We can fight the current, and drown trying. Or we can order our lives to move with the current of God.

When we see this layer of the painting, we are back to the problem of prayer: Why make petitions to an unchangeable God? 

The answer seems to lie in this paradox: God responds to his people in order to fulfill his unchanging purpose.

The story of Jonah, then, is not merely an entertaining parable but our story, and we sometimes play the role of Jonah and sometimes that of the Ninevites. God intends good for the people of Nineveh. And God will work with what he’s got—even the fickle, proud, and resentful—to make that happen. He will move heaven and earth, sky and sea, and even the great creatures that inhabit them—anything and everything to guarantee that his unchanging purpose is achieved.

His purpose is nothing less than the salvation of humankind--salvation from our self-destructive narcissism and the ravages of injustice and oppression. 

In prayer, we align ourselves with the unchanging will of God; we learn to swim with the current and not against it; we learn to say, “Not my will, but thine be done.”

This is not meek abdication, mindless submission to the power and wisdom of an almighty divinity. It begins by boldly accepting the invitation to make our desires known to God: “Ask and it will be given to you.” It is not until after Jesus pleads that the cup of suffering be removed that he finally discerns that it is not God’s will that it be removed. Only after wrestling with God does he subordinate his desire to the will of God.

God’s unchanging purposes, then, are discovered in the argument of prayer. To reduce prayer to begging God to fulfill our desires is childish. To abdicate without first acknowledging our desires is to deny our humanity, the person created and shaped by God. Pure acquiescence is often portrayed as the most saintly posture, but in reality God invites us to argue with him. And it is through argument that knowledge of God’s will emerges.

In short, it is only through the argument of prayer that we better understand ourselves as well as the unchanging nature and purpose of God. 

[More on this theme in two weeks.]

 Grace and Peace,

Mark

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Photo: Ttakhwiri, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons

^[1] Richard Rice, in Clark Pinnock, Richard Rice, John Sanders, William Hasker, David Basinger, The Openness of God (Downers Grove: InterVarsity, 1994), page 25.

^[2] “The Immutability of God,” preached on January 7, 1855, at New Park Street Chapel, Southwark, England. Published on the Park Street Church website, http://www.spurgeon.org/sermons/0001.htm