Sovereign Intervention
I think I believe two seemingly contradictory concepts.
On the one hand, I believe that God has made the world in such a way as to respond to and use our actions, including our prayers. Despite our preferences for a God as predictable (and controllable) as a machine, equally and lawfully distributing oxygen, planets, miracles and tsunamis, God sometimes seems to act like an interventionist genie, conjured up by profiteering faith-healers and televangelists. How embarrassing.
On the other hand, I believe that God is by definition the kind of being who is unchanging, eternal, and thus God will do what God will do no matter what. Whether we forget or remember to pray, a little or a lot, as individuals or in global concert, praying for vague blessings or specifically for things we are certain that the God of Scripture would approve of, God sometimes seems totally OK with being perceived as Richard Dawkins’ blind watchmaker. How disappointing.
To reference a couple of book titles by Pete Greig, the articulate and wise international founder of 24-7 Prayer, God is both the God of the shocking miracles of Dirty Glory, and the shameful silence of God on Mute.
How then, should we pray to this kind of God? We could make at least two errors.
On the one hand, we could pray our foot-stomping, confidently contending, passionately persisting prayers, dripping with biblically shameful audacity for God to break in act like an interventionist deity, and all the while forget to leave God any room to have a different purpose or plan than us for that situation. Tragically, we could do serious damage to our faith or the faith of others – all simply because we had a view of God that was not large enough to allow God to be both responsive and sovereign.
On the other hand, we could pray safe tidy prayers that cover all theological contingencies, making our prayers little more than self-referential pontifications pointed at God reminding him – and us – that basically we should remember to trust in his machine-like sovereign faithfulness over all things; all the while failing to have the prophetic imagination that God may be willing and postured to act from eternity within time in what we can only call a ‘response’ to something we pray. Tragically, we could fail to see healing of relationships or withered hands, or the confrontation of unjust systems or personal sin – all just because we had a view of God that was too arrogantly sophisticated to allow that God frequently does his work on earth through humans.
So then.
Let us pray with that strange and holy cocktail of deep assurance in a very large and unimaginably sovereign Father reigning over all things, and childlike urgency that can ask with unassuming and open-hearted expectancy for good gifts from the same sovereign interventionist Father.