Re: On negotiating with God.

"Off topic (yet not entirely off topic), the examples of negotiations between towering figures of the OT with God are fascinating. Neither me nor anyone I've ever known would ... if God spoke directly to us ... dare to negotiate with Him.

That is, unless God also spoke to us and instructed us to 'make our case' to Him.

(?) Since...how do you view the 'nerve' of Abraham and David and other when they negotiated with God?

I am no expert on the Bible. I am a student. It is sometimes easy for me to remember applicable passages because some of God's Word is written on my heart. He has a way of doing that which I can only explain by calling it divine. Which ever passage I quote or C&P here I urge the readers to look them up for accuracy and especially for context. Trust no man with your understanding. God is too close to ignore.

I've heard that a successful negotiation is one in which no one gets everything they want. I learned from negotiations that knowing what the guy on the other side of the table wants is the quickest way to get what you want. All my negotiations were over money.

We negotiate when we pray. We beg God to make our children well. Some, like me, are stupid, ignorant, or believe we are in such need that we are willing to promise God something in return. We, the stupid, ignorant and needy quickly learn that we are unable to keep a promises and cease promises. That indicates that we have a position from which to bargain with God. We do not.

I know first hand from year after year of experience that God's will is satisfying. David wrote, Psa 37:4 "Delight thyself also in the LORD; and he shall give thee the desires of thine heart."

Chicken or egg. When I sought the Lord with all my heart it all became clear. God became the desire of my heart. This is not exclusively offered to me but to you and anyone else who will put the entire measure of their faith in Him. For what is the desire of our hearts if it is not what will make us happy, fill us with joy and complete satisfaction?

'It is God who works in us both to will and to do His good pleasure.' Then, by what 'will,' do we will to do for God and by 'what power,' do we do His will? By God's will He gives us His will through grace by our faith. Faith has only one tiny value if put in anything other than God. Faith in anything other than God brings a false sense of security. Faith in God brings the understanding and total comprehension of a real security, an eternal security and a security that is identified in Romans 8:28 in no uncertain terms. It covers everything.

The Jewish people of the OT lived under a different contract. They did not have The Holy Spirit working within both to will and to do God's good pleasure. It was the Law, they break the deal and God ends their freedom, their prosperity and sometimes their lives.

They lived bound to the Law, a law which Christ fulfilled, a contract which He executed on behalf of you, me and anyone else who accepts Him as Savior. They broke their contract so God fulfilled their obligation with the death of Christ. They refused Him and God offered it to us.

Any contract can be negotiated, it the gift that can not be negotiated. One either accepts a gift of not. One doesn't bargain a gift. I suppose it was OK for them to negotiate with God since they had a different relationship. I've heard it compared to a marriage God to Israel as is man to wife.

"Here is a million dollars, I want to give it to you." Who ever said 'No, I want you to give me two million, except a son to his father?'

God didn't promise us with conditions other than that we believe He was serious about that gift and we accept the gift as promised.

We negotiate when we pray. We ask for what we want, at least what we think we need and what we really need. Then we negate or cancel some or sometimes most of our prayer by asking God that His will be done. NTTAWWT It's like 'I asked for all this stuff but I'd rather have what you want me to have.' In doing so we confess that we are ignorant of God's will. I believe He loves and honors that because He loves the humble.

Christ Jesus did that as recorded in Matt Chpt 26:39. There is nothing wrong with that. However, when we ask in Jesus name we are asking for God's will to be the ultimate authority in deciding which of our prayers God honors. Imo and especially to me, it's a fail-safe to keep me out of trouble.

So yes, I have tried to negotiate with God and failed to keep my promise. God kept up His end of the deal because it was His will not because of my promise. Anyone who wants to make promises to God is welcome to do so. I remember a huge fail and still after 45 years remember the steep learning curve and the misery which followed.

My granny use to say 'A burnt hen stays away from the fire.' I suspect many of those who wouldn't dare try to negotiate with God are just staying away from the fire.

I'm sorry for rambling and not getting directly to the point. That's the way my old mind works and I appreciate those who tolerate my mannerism and long winded responses.

Fordtunate Son

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May 27, 2022, 3:07 AM

>>>Point is we don't know what happens.

I agree whole-heartedly with you on that. I think everyone, regardless of their beliefs, has to admit 2 things if they are being honest with themselves.

1) There is mystery in the universe, and
2) We don't know everything.

I've never met anyone who claimed they understand everything in the universe, from how a seed grows from a single drop of inanimate water, to how a spider knows to spin a web, to what regulates the chemical releases in your body, and on and on. So I think we all have 1) and 2) in common.

Now, from that common ground things diverge a bit...like in a million different directions.

What do you do with that mystery? Do you ignore it? Do you try to attribute it to something? Is that something purely mechanical or is it sentient? Is it singular or multiple? A million different ways to try and grapple with the millions of mysteries that everyone acknowledges. A person can pick any aspect of existence and generate an endless stream of questions related to it. And every answer you ever come up with can always be followed by "why?"

So, the story of religion is the story of "how do you deal with mystery?" Or do you choose to pretend it doesn't exist.

Is the universe simply a mechanical device with no trace of intelligence beyond our own? Why?
Is there a friendly old man looking after us who cares about our individual lives? Why?
Is this old man just a creator who made the universe and walked away? Why?
Is this friendly old man simply a fifth universal force, like the strong and weak nuclear forces, gravity, and electromagnetism? Why? And on and on.

Now, an Atheist would just say "There is no God." But that still doesn't remove the mystery. They simply choose some other mechanism, or name, to explain why electrons and protons have 2, but not 3, or 4 or 5 different charge types. Why are there only 2, which we have chosen to label positive and negative?

An Agnostic would say "We simply don't have the tools to understand. 5 senses are not enough." And that may be true. X-Rays have been around since the beginning of the universe. But we couldn't see them until 1895, when we invented a device that detected them. So what else is out there that we still haven't detected? An agnostic may have resigned himself to never understanding the mysteries, but the mysteries are there nevertheless. And the why remains.

A Deist sees order in the universe, physical laws being followed, planets orbiting stars, not just randomly floating around in space, etc. They attribute that order to design, not randomness, and therefore, intelligence of some sort. Maybe not human intelligence, but something other than complete chaos and randomness. And that may explain some mysteries, but again, not others.

A Theist sees more involvement still. Not just an intelligence, but an intelligence that humans can interact with in some fashion. Maybe that intelligence cares about us, maybe not, maybe a little, maybe a lot. Maybe there's more than one, and a million more variations off that.

But the one thing the Atheist, Agnostic, Deist and Theist all have in common is that they are trying to understand what they can’t fully grasp. And for all of them, the mystery is still there.

How does a smell bring memories to you?
When you sleep, what part of you is generating the dream, what part is remembering the dream, and what is controlling your heartbeat and breathing while all this is going on? And where are "you" while these 4 things, and a billion others, are happening in your body?

Is all that random? Is all that by design? Is anyone pulling the strings? Are you simply a wound up clock slowly unwinding to your death? Does anything you do matter at the eternal scale? How do you know? Do you have free will? Do you have limited free will? Are all your actions predetermined? Are you a single life, or is each cell in your body a life?

What separates the split second when a living body becomes a still warm dead body? While their cells are still working, but after their consciousness is gone, are they alive or dead? Is life tied to consciousness? Are you some type of dead when you are asleep and your consciousness is gone? What is that spark of life that moved on, and where did it go? What is controlling all that? What created that system? And why that way rather than some other way? More questions, more mysteries.

It’s the attempt to grapple with all that, and more, that is at the root of religion. Now there are other more devious reasons, sure, and anything man is involved in he will corrupt and pervert and exploit. You can count on that. But although it can bring out some, of the worst in man, it can bring out some of the best. A lot of killing has been done over religion, but also the greatest buildings, works of art, and most inspired moments. Like anything else, it can be used for good or bad.

Religion isn’t for everyone. Some people just don’t care about it, don’t have questions, and don’t need it. And that’s fine. And for others simple answers are all they need. They are fine having “God did it” as the answer for everything, or “Natural science did it” as the answer for everything. And that’s fine too. But there’s much more to it than that.

So to go back to your original comment, “Point is we don't know what happens.” I agree completely. And, if you agree that no one knows everything, can anyone then say that there either is, or is not, a God, or anything else really, with complete certainty?

But given that, do you then do nothing, or do you do something? Are you curious, or not? Do you try to understand, or not? That’s a choice every individual makes for themselves.

>>>What is fact that all religion is man made bull. That is fact.

I’ll agree that it’s man-made. With the view that religion is man’s effort to understand the unknown, it kind of has to be man-made. If there were no man, I doubt there would be religion, but I’ll part with you on calling it bull.

Some of it is simplistic, sure, but a lot of it started with a simplistic audience. For a neanderthal, the easiest way to explain a lighting bolt in the sky is a bigger version of a neanderthal who can throw lightning bolts. Enter the god Thor. A simple question answered by a simple answer.

But religion is not just rudimentary science for natural phenomenon like lightning bolts. It has grown to grapple with deeper concepts, like what is the nature and meaning of life itself. If you only think of religion as Christian Protestantism, you are missing out on an awful lot. That’s like saying all food sux because chicken, or beef, sux. If you have a cosmic question, and an attempt at an answer, you’ve got a religion. And some of them are fantastic.

For instance, the Egyptian concept of the soul puts ours to shame. It’s incredibly complex, and addresses far more aspects of life than our simple version of the soul does. But it’s presented and cloaked in simple terms, in what ancient Egyptians had around them every day. So if you judge the book by the cover, you miss the depth in it. It’s a beautiful attempt to explain the questions they were asking, and the observations on life and living that they experienced in their daily lives. The same things we experience, but simply gloss over with some vague, undefined definition of a spirit, or a soul.

Like all human thought, religion evolves, develops, and advances. And so the history of religion is a window into the history of the development of human thought itself.

The questions it tries to answer show the questions that man is trying to answer at different points in history. For instance, a lot of early religions have no creation story. They didn’t care about or even think about where man might have come from.

But then, that question began to be asked. That mental development occurred. Suddenly man could conceive of a time before he was born, and he wanted to know where all men came from. Then creation stories developed. And they were simplistic, sure, but what they show is both the mental development to ask the question, and the mental development to try and answer it. It’s like watching man grow up and become aware of his surroundings and his place in the universe.

Then come the immortality stories. Man realizes he’s going to die. And so the obvious questions are, what’s after this life, and do I really have to leave this life? And what is this life even for? And again, there are multiple attempt to answer that question, of varying complexity.

All those questions and all those answers, collectively, show a complete range of human thought. And it’s pretty broad. The Eastern religions are radically different than our Western religions. In many of their religions, nature IS god, for all intents and purposes.

And you don’t pray to it, you don’t worship it, you simply deal with it. And that’s what religion is to them...learning to deal with a thing you have absolutely no control over and no way to communicate with. You can’t plead with a sunset, or pray to an ocean wave, or commune with growing grass. That’s about 180 degrees from having a god you can talk to, pray to, and who cares about you.

So religion is pretty big. As big as all human thought, really. And it is all man-made, in the sense that it is all man’s attempt to understand what he doesn’t fully understand. But that’s what makes it immensely interesting, and fascinating.

I hope you’ll continue to contribute your thoughts as we go. And I actually hope we disagree on a lot of things. Nothing is more boring and stagnating than a bunch of people all agreeing on the same thing so there’s no exchange of ideas and nothing to really talk about. The fun stuff is figuring out why we think what we think. What questions have we asked ourselves, and what answers work for us, or not?

And your ideas are part of the reason I put these posts out at all.

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On negotiating with God.