Avoid Presumptions About God’s Will
Back to How to Avoid Misinterpreting the Bible
If we are to truly hear from God, it is essential that we avoid the trap of blindly assuming that if it is contrary to our longings it must be God’s will. It is equally critical that we not go the other way and automatically assume that if it seems certain to make us happy, it must be God’s will for us.
Few Christians – maybe none – have walked with God for long without sometimes mishearing him because what the Lord was seeking to tell them was contrary to their expectations. Scripture insists that as the sky soars way beyond our reach, so are God’s ways far beyond our own (Isaiah 55:8). Yet still we unconsciously develop presumptions about God’s ways that seriously distort what he is seeking to tell us.
No matter how sincere, our preconceptions blind us to possibilities, without us realizing it. They have horrifying potential to send us spinning into delusion.
Mindsets, whether positive or negative, can dangerously cloud our perception of reality and of what people are really saying. For example, there are people whose tragic pasts have convinced them that they are unlovable. Some of them end up married to adoring partners and yet their mindset so blinds them that they continue to be convinced that they are not loved, no matter what extremes their partners go to in trying to prove love in word and action. In fact, many such people are so blinded to all the evidence that they deliberately act obnoxiously in an attempt to drive their loved one away because that seems less painful than what they consider the inevitable shame of being dumped.
They can even be doted on by the most loving and most important person in the entire universe – Almighty God – and they still can’t accept it and, despite everything, they continue to feel utterly unloved. A positive mindset can be just as dangerously blinding. With tragic consequences, young people can feel so invincible that they are certain that no warnings of danger apply to them.
So let’s briefly explore how mindsets can hinder us from hearing God’s voice and discovering his will for us. Many of us fall into the rut of always expecting God’s will to be challenging, scary, painful. The Bible is dripping with evidence for this expectation. We are to love God more than any other person or thing. This can be divinely tested, as it clearly was for Abraham when he was asked to sacrifice his precious son. Jesus was continually asking people to give up everything to follow him. An entire book of the Bible is devoted to Job’s horrific test. We know God’s will for Jesus was terrifyingly painful. Jesus and the rest of the New Testament warn us to expect severe persecution. Scripture tells us to rejoice when trials hit, because they build character.
As if hundreds of Bible verses were not enough to make us expect the worst, many of us have the additional pressure of being prone to feelings of guilt, depression, inferiority, or pessimism. A friend of mine shares his experience, which is an extreme example of how preconceptions distort our ability to hear from God.
I had an abusive father who only sent me to church to get a free baby sitter. I often looked at God as similar to my father. I stopped attending church when I was 13. I tried to be a good Christian for a while, but before long I plunged from being a good kid to being a mean spirited, hateful person.
I tried numerous times to get back to God but each time I hit a wall of fear that was so unbearable that I felt compelled to turn away from God. I often told myself that this fear was God’s punishment for my gross sins and that it proved I was beyond forgiveness. I had a lot of bad thoughts about God that I had no control over. As a result, I often slipped into depression. I would then get on medication and return to my sinful lifestyle.
It seemed the only way I could function was to eliminate God from my life. I did fine for a while. I got married and had a son. I got off drugs and alcohol. I even started a business. For the first time in my life I was finally happy. I thought I had completely erased my past.
Then I began to think that all these good things were from God. I told myself, “It can’t be! There is no God!” “Why do so many people love God?” I puzzled, “He wants only to send everyone to hell.” Wondering if I had overlooked something, I explored a number of websites and learned a lot about God. I asked myself, “Why do I despise God so much?” Within a couple of days I was once again overwhelmed by fear. I told myself, “This fear is surely God again; I remember this from years ago.” I immediately cried and began repenting. I vowed that I would face my fear of God. I turned my back on everything evil in my life.
I started reading the Bible but I was afraid that it would only confirm that I’m condemned. Before long, it felt like everything in the Bible somehow condemned me. My mother worried about my spiritual state and visited me a lot. I would often tell her, “Look, this verse right here proves I’m going to hell!” We would then go over it and discover its meaning was totally different. I couldn’t figure out why I could read something and get such a condemning message from it. I would often stop reading the Bible because oppressive fear would come over me.
I bought a book about spiritual warfare. All was fine for a while, then even that book seemed to be condemning me and in despair I put it down. Eventually, I forced myself to open the book again. I re-read the condemning sentence I had underlined. To my surprise, I couldn’t find anything in it that could lead me to feel condemned. I began to notice that as I read, fear would sweep over me, causing me to throw the book down without finishing the sentence.
I eventually learned that the fear and condemnation were not from God, as I had always thought, but were from the enemy. This discovery changed everything. I looked back on all the things in my life that I had considered were from God and realized that they were not from him at all.
My friend’s experience might be far more extreme than yours but any preconception you have about God and his will is just as capable of distorting what God wants to tell you, and, like my friend, wherever you look in the Bible and Christian messages you’ll find much to confirm your presumption – whether it is really there or not. Most Christians who don’t habitually expect God’s will to be unpleasant, fall into the opposite trap. Again there is much scriptural encouragement for this view.
Abraham was renowned for his wealth; Isaac and Jacob enjoyed great material success; Job was very rich, Solomon was mind-bogglingly wealthy and many of the Bible heroes were kings.
A study of the Old Testament use of the word blessing is astounding. The way experts ascertain the precise meaning of a word is to find as many different occurrences of the word as they can and examine each context. Do this and you will discover that almost every time, the word blessing refers not to spiritual blessings but to material prosperity – many children, overflowing harvests, livestock breeding like there was Viagra in their hay (Scriptures).
The Bible is filled with promises of joy, God’s love for us, answered prayer, miracles, healings and victory.
John 16:24 . . . Ask and you will receive, and your joy will be complete.
Psalms 37:4 Delight yourself in the LORD and he will give you the desires of your heart.
Not only will God give you what your heart desires, he will (as stated in Philippians 2:13) give you desires that are from him so that the more you grow in your love for God, the more the deep desires bubbling within you will have been put there by God himself.
The obvious truth is that both sides of the coin – all the tests and pain and trials, and all the blessings – are in the Bible.
We can rob ourselves if we are not expecting earthly blessings. When Jesus walked this planet, many got their miracle from him solely because their faith that God will bless them fired them to keep pushing through all the obstacles.
On the other hand, there are dangers in expecting continual ease. Jesus warned us to count the cost. We find Barnabas and Paul “strengthening the disciples and encouraging them to remain true to the faith. . . .” I’ve stopped mid-verse. So far there seems nothing different here from normal prosperity doctrine. But let’s read the entire verse to discover how they strengthened and encouraged them:
Acts 14:22 strengthening the disciples and encouraging them to remain true to the faith. “We must go through many hardships to enter the kingdom of God,” they said.
To embrace the full teaching of Scripture we must avoid both the mindset of always expecting God’s will to be scary and the mindset of always expecting God’s will to be deliriously easy and filled with more thrills than Santa Claus’ magic cave.
God’s will is always the best we could possibly experience and to settle for anything else is as smart as shaving with a chainsaw. But our long-term happiness and our short-term pleasure and ease are usually oceans apart. Our wonderful Lord wants our permanent happiness, not some sweet fizz that turns sour. We are so often like children wanting to sentence ourselves to a lifetime of gorging ourselves on no other food but chocolate and ice cream; having no idea that their conception of heaven on earth would slowly transmute into the opposite.
As God’s ability to see the future soars high above our own, so his knowledge of what will make us eternally happy is far above our guesses. Consequently, we need to look to God to guide us, and avoid presumptions.
Whether positive or negative, presumptions are dangerous because they can close our minds to things God wants to tell us and they can also cause us to seize what we suppose to be God’s will when it isn’t at all. To use marriage as an example, there are those who think to themselves, “I long to marry, so it’s probably God’s will for me never to marry,” or “There’s a degree of attraction between us but I wouldn’t want us to marry, so God probably wants us to marry.” Then there are others who tell themselves, “I love this person and feel I couldn’t live without him/her, so marriage must be God’s will.” In either case, one needs further confirmation of God’s guidance. We must confuse neither wishful thinking, nor fear or pessimism with God’s leading.