Don’t try to manipulate God
In the ancient world, pagan worship meant lots of sacrifices to your favourite god. If you were going on a sea journey, you would pray and sacrifice to the god of the sea, and in return, you would hope that he would keep you safe. If you wanted a baby, you would pray to the fertility god and offer sacrifices, and you would hope that this god would bless you in the way you wanted. It was a kind of “you scratch my back, I’ll scratch yours” kind of situation. If only you showed your devotion and did what that god wanted, the expectation was that they would do the right thing for you.
It might be an ancient way of thinking, but it is all too common among Christians today. If we are not thoughtful about how we pray and think about God, we can fall into pagan ways of thinking.
Perhaps the most obvious place this is seen is in the prosperity gospel teaching you find in megachurches the world over, or in televangelists in the early hours of the morning. The teaching is that if you are faithful enough, or give enough money, then God will bless you with health and wealth. It sounds kind of fair, like we are doing some kind of a transaction with God. There is a lot wrong with this, however. We don’t deserve God to bless us, and thinking like this makes God like a slot machine. You put in the coin, pull the lever, and he does what we want. That means we are in control and God is following our instructions!
We can fall into the pagan manipulation thinking about God in a more subtle way as well. We might not put it as crassly as the prosperity gospel puts it, but we do expect that God will give us a good life if we do the right moral or religious things. We see this when we start to get angry with God when things don’t go the way we want. We start to resent it when bad things happen. Surely we are entitled to special treatment? We have been faithful! As soon as we start to think that our Christian life is some kind of transaction, that we do things for God and he then does things for us, we are thinking in a pagan way.
Real relationships don’t work in this strict transactional way. If we reduce all our closest friendships to limiting all our actions to what others do for us, that’s pretty cold. No, we treat others with grace, but we cannot control how they respond to us. If we measure a response to action, that is not allowing the other person any freedom in treating us differently to how we think we should be treated.
In reality, God is so much more powerful than us. He knows better than us, including about what is best for us (Rom 8:28). We ask for things in prayer, knowing that God’s will may indeed be for something different. Real Biblical prayer is not manipulation; it is a long way from pagan thinking. We approach God with confidence, not pleading for him to do nice things for us because we deserve it, but knowing we don’t deserve anything from God. He treats us well due to the work of Jesus and so often gives us far beyond what we deserve.
Don’t pray like a pagan. Don’t resent God when he doesn’t give you what you want. God is God, and you are not. Ask with confidence, knowing he will treat us better than we deserve. God treats us with grace and not how we deserve. How wonderful!