Elevated Rank

Psalm 106:15 is always a little disturbing:

“So He gave them their request,
but sent a wasting disease among them.”

A little scary to think that we could make a request before God, and that He has the full authority and prerogative to answer in a way that strikes us as outright harmful. The reason? A couple of verses before, His children had ‘forgotten His works,’ had 'not waited for His counsel,' and ‘tempted God’ (v. 13-14)… Does that contradict my understanding of how God answers prayers? Perhaps I live in the bubble that says, even if I pray wrongly, omniscient God will correct to my good the requests made in ignorance…

Except that’s exactly what He did! A ‘wasting disease’ hardly seems a gracious correction, some providential display of mercy, but how often, when we pray squarely against the will of God, are we quick to recognize that the answer He gives remains consistent with His good intentions toward us? If He hadn’t sent a wasting disease, if He hadn’t checked the Israelites' ‘intense craving in the wilderness’ (v. 14), would they have ever had opportunity to turn back to Him? How humbling when we realize that what God has given us, even in strong rebuke, is exactly what He knew we needed in order to be set back into right relationship with Him.

James 4 points to the Israelites’ condition (and ours) as this: “You lust and do not have… You ask and do not receive, because you ask with wrong motives… You adulteresses, do you not know that friendship with the world is hostility toward God?” (v. 2-4). Was it not ‘hostility toward God’ which prompted those off-kilter prayers? Was it not the error of elevating our own desires above all else which led us into the death-like disease which is inevitable when we look outside of the Source of Life?

We fail to submit, or (as the military term in James 4:7 literally means), to “fall under the rank of” God. So long as we maintain that fulfilling our own desires is more pressing than obeying His; that receiving answers as we see fit is more critical than where we stand with Him, we’re placing ourselves in the precarious place of being answered with what we need: of being given the correction that says we have not aligned our motives with His, and are still hostile toward our Savior and Maker.

But praise be to Him, that – if even it meant He sent a “wasting disease” – He would not fail to align us with Him until we fall under His rank, and are again restored to the only One who truly knows how to ‘satisfy the desire of every living thing’ (Psalm 145:16) – not because His creatures are always wise to ask, but because His intentions toward us are always that we may have “life, and have it abundantly” (John 10:10).

Long-Distance Praying

Just finished a book which hit on how much of our praying tends to boil down to nothing more than intellectual pursuit: “The crisis of our prayer life is that our mind may be filled with ideas about God while our heart remains far from him” (The Way of the Heart; Henri Nouwen). Isaiah touches on the same: “’This people draw near to Me with their words and honor Me with their lip service, but they remove their hearts far from Me…’” (29:13).

How often do we tend to keep God at arm’s length, running through a mental list of concerns and praises, and never entering into authentic communion with the Living God? Where do we cross that line of talking to Him in a monologue fashion to actually “being” within His presence? Why are we so much more comfortable with “long-distance” praying, when God longs to hear us ‘pour out our hearts before Him’ (Psalm 62:8)?

Would we prefer to keep the spiritual realm wholly intellectual, and so fend off any personal infiltration of conviction, and yes, solace and rest? Would we dare to empty the intangible of all its mystery, that we might cling to the security of tradition and, in that, hope to acquire some control?

Or perhaps what we most fear is not even the fact that we cannot grasp this God of the universe, and His infinite character which spreads itself across us in astounding mercy, but that – were we to step away from our analysis – we would have to confront our selves. Perhaps we do not often enough pray from the gut because of how dangerous a territory that is… for in it, we are forced to contend with our wretchedness in light of God’s holiness. We, like Peter, become so consumed by our filthiness before this righteous God that we cry out, “Go away from me, Lord, for I am a sinful man, O Lord!” (Luke 5:8).

And yet the gift God has imparted to us in prayer is a manifestation of the truth that He came to this world, not to condemn but to save it. We are led into that intimate communion with our Heavenly Father, not because He would leave us in the despair of our complete destitution, but because, through our recognition of the same, we can then receive with gratitude the reality that God would draw us to Himself, as “sinners embraced by the mercy of God.”

It is not for us to cower at the sin which becomes so apparent within us, but instead, for us to entrust ourselves to the One who has fashioned a way of redemption; to Him who has hewn the way for us to "draw near," not out of fearful piety or intellectual religiosity, but “with a sincere heart in full assurance of faith” (Hebrews 10:22) which trusts that – in spite of ourselves – ‘He will receive us’ (Psalm 49:15).