Imagine your dad giving you a beautiful bicycle for your birthday. Its shiny splendor thrilled you. You couldn’t wait to take it for a spin around the neighborhood. But then a boy who lived around the corner spied you riding it, and rather than appearing awestruck, he was rather condescending about it. He told you about an even more beautiful bike available to you and implied your dad was really holding out on you when he gave you this one. All you had to do, he said, was to give him yours, and he promised you a much fancier one in trade. You began to question why Dad hadn’t given you the nicer one in the first place. Yeah, why hadn’t Dad given you a nicer bike? Well, what was there to lose? Such a deal to be had, if only you were willing to relinquish your father’s birthday gift for something better. After all, your dad was probably just being a bit stingy, right?
Does something ring a bell here? The snake’s best strategy for Adam and Eve to eat forbidden fruit was to raise doubt in their minds about the goodness of God, to question His true character. It wasn’t just the yummy-looking fruit that tempted them.
We think to ourselves, “I would never have eaten that fruit! The Father very clearly said not to eat it! Nor would I have been like those grumbling Israelites in the desert who, after being miraculously delivered at the Red Sea, complained that God must have drawn them out in the desert to let them die there. And I most certainly wouldn’t have been one of those who cried ‘Crucify Him!’ after waving palm branches and heralding Yeshua as the Messiah a few days before. I would never have questioned God’s goodness or motivation or inherent nature like that. What were those people thinking?”
Ahhh, but maybe…. Have we ever questioned the goodness of God when things didn’t go our way? When someone we loved wasn’t healed, a baby didn’t come to bless us, a marriage did not come to pass, finances were not forthcoming, a ‘deserved’ promotion wasn’t offered, or our ungodly neighbors were able to purchase the very home we wanted and needed, while we remained crammed into our little starter home?
Maybe we are not so unlike those we have mentally condemned. Every past good gift and bit of lovingkindess from God sometimes fades in the wake of disappointment and deferred hope. We begin to question if God really does want the best for us. If His directions are really to protect and provide for us or just to keep us from having some fun in our lives. Does He REALLY want life abundant for us or is He just withholding something good which He is perfectly capable of providing? Does he love others more than He does us? Does He ‘love the world,’ but we are chopped liver to Him?
Maybe we should take things into our own hands, like Sarah, and help God along with His promises. After all, “God helps those who help themselves,” right? [Not in the Bible, in case you are unsure.] It would take many blogposts to innumerate the many times this strategy went awry in Scripture. (Think Adam and Eve, Sarah, Saul, Judas, and a host of kings, among others.) Not to mention testimonies from our modern lives.
Let’s always believe, think, speak, and act from the solid rock of faith in the truth that God loves us deeply individually, and profoundly, that He is by nature Absolutely Good, that He wants the best for us, that His will is for us to experience His total shalom of body, soul, and spirit …even suffering torture and death for us to have it). From that Rock, we can explore why we don’t always receive what He wants us to have at any given time. But let us never believe ‘the boy down the street’ (who by the way just wants our bicycle for himself) over our loving Father Who sacrificed to give it to us in the first place. (Just wait til to experience all its bells and whistles!)
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Part two of this post is coming next, in which we will explore what it took for our Father to get our bicycle back for us from that lying trickster, as well as how we can learn to tap into that vehicle’s innate power.
Julie
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