Everyone wants to receive from God, but many just don't want to commit to Him. If they have a faith at all, it is merely an imitation of other people who may or may not believe either. They just want to play games with themselves. If they do get what pray for, they rationalize it as being a good coincidence. If they don't get what they want, they either claim that God is unjust, or unfair, or impotent to deliver the request, or even nonexistent. And yet, God demands a commitment from you as well: you must believe that He does exist, that He is able to give you what you pray for, and that He actually desires to give you the very best of what He has to offer for your benefit.



The very first hurdle we must overcome in approaching the Lord in prayer is believing that God really does exist. In our contemporary society, it is very easy to worship science and the insights of men and women who may or may not really know what they are talking about. Think of all the scientific insights that are far different today from even twenty years ago. Currently, it has been said that, with the advent of the Internet in particular, that knowledge literally doubles every two to four years. That means that our understanding of our local and universal environment will be vastly different even four or five years from now. And yet, we attempt to evaluate the existence of God based on our current knowledge.

The Bible says:

The heavens declare the glory of God; And the firmament shows His handiwork. Day unto day utters speech, And night unto night reveals knowledge. There is no speech nor language Where their voice is not heard. Their line has gone out through all the earth, And their words to the end of the world. (Psalms 19:1-4, NKJV)

Scientists are continually discovering new things: new moons, new "dwarf" planets, new planets, new stars, new galaxies, and theorizing about other universes. They have found dozens of component parts of atoms, even though originally atoms were considered the absolute smallest particles. Now we have muons, gluons, quarks, mesons, and continually find even more atomic components. Scientists theorize about what the absolute smallest particle could be, they theorize that we live in eleven dimensions rather than the four that we recognize, and on, and on, and on.

If God does exist, He must know both our current answers to these questions, and the ultimate answers to them. How can we possibly judge God, when by definition, He must know infinitely more than we can possibly know!

I remember reading an article that said that when the universe was only a gargantuan mass of plasma, there was the equivalent of sound waves vibrating within. Apparently, these vibrations lead to the distribution of mass and energy that we call our current universe and left a perpetual reverberation we call Cosmic Microwave Background Radiation. Yet, the Lord God said to Job:

"Where were you when I laid the foundations of the earth? Tell Me, if you have understanding. Who determined its measurements? Surely you know! Or who stretched the line upon it? To what were its foundations fastened? Or who laid its cornerstone, When the morning stars sang together, And all the sons of God shouted for joy? (Job 38:4-7, NKJV)

Some people say the Book of Job is the oldest book in the Bible, perhaps over 4,000 years old (originally passed on as verbal stories and later written down). Could it be that God was actually telling Job something that was totally impossible for him to know, and undiscernable to all mankind till our time? Was the singing mentioned really the reverberations of the gigantic plasmic mass? You decide.

Copyright (c) 2007 Jon Straumfjord