There is a great phrase many say: “God is good.“ That is certainly true and an appropriate thing to proclaim. However, many of us say it routinely only when life goes our way. “Traffic was easy today, I made all the lights, and I wasn’t late for work or class—God is good!” When we hear that God has healed someone, inevitably someone says, “God is good.“ True enough.
But when God chose not to answer our prayers for my wife Nanci‘s healing after 4 1/2 years of almost never missing our evening prayer time, does that mean God was, in our case, not good? Of course not. God is not only good when He does what we want, but also when He doesn’t do what we want. This is when people who lose their faith are right in losing it, because they are losing a faith that is not a true biblical faith.
As long as we hold on to vestiges of prosperity theology (which teaches that God will bless with material abundance and good health those who obey Him and lay claim to His promises), we set ourselves up to lose our faith, and perhaps ultimately to walk away from God. Because if God has to do what we want in order for us to be happy, then He is not our master but our servant.
I believe prosperity theology is from the pit of Hell. It confuses and misleads people about God and what He has and has not promised. When my friend Greg was dying when I was 16 years old and he was 18, I thought I knew beyond any shadow of doubt that God would heal Him. I claimed the reality of that healing, fully expecting it. When he died, I learned the painful lesson that we do not necessarily get our way when we pray.
It doesn’t mean God does not answer prayer; it doesn’t mean that God is not honored by our prayers. It certainly does mean that we need to be careful when we claim Christ has promised things, because when we proclaim false promises, we misrepresent Him, undermine His truths, and distort the reality of how He loves His people.
Vaneetha Rendall Risner writes:
Why does God answer yes to some prayers and no to others?
Why does God miraculously heal some people and not others?
Why does disaster strike one city and not another?
Can we simply draw straight lines between our requests and God’s answers?
Years ago my infant son Paul died unexpectedly and an acquaintance said when he learned of our loss, “Don’t take this wrong, but we prayed for all of our children before they were born. And they were all born healthy.” We had no words.
In Acts 12, James was killed and Peter rescued and I wondered why God let James die and Peter live. Did God love Peter more than James? Was James’s life less important? Were people not praying for James?
Looking at the fuller counsel of the Bible, we know God has plans that we do not understand. Living or dying, being spared or being tortured, being delivered in this life or the next is not an indicator of God’s love for us or the measure of our faith. Nothing can separate us from God’s love, and our future is determined by what he knows is best for us.
Still, prosperity gospel proponents have told me that if I had prayed in faith, my body would have been healed, my son would have been spared, and my marriage would have been restored. It was all up to me. If I just had the faith, I would have had a better outcome. Their words have left me bruised and disillusioned, but that theology is not the gospel. God’s response to our prayers is not dependent upon our worthiness but rather rests on his great mercy.
If you are in Christ, God is completely for you. Your struggles are not because you didn’t pray the right way, or because you didn’t pray enough, or because you have weak faith or insufficient intercessors. It is because God is using your suffering in ways that you may not understand now, but one day you will. One day you will see how God used your affliction to prepare you for an incomparable weight of glory. This is the gospel. And it holds for all who love Christ.
Job 2:10 says, “Should we receive good from God and not trouble?” If we believe God is distant and not involved in the details of our lives—or at least not the bad details of our lives, but only the good ones—or if we come to believe, contrary to His Word, that God lacks power, we believe fundamental falsehoods. Likewise, if we believe He lacks knowledge and our loved one died simply because of someone’s negligence and therefore their death was not the will of God, then we are in a bad place. The grief process must include eventually accepting what has happened. Holding false beliefs about God will prevent us from that acceptance.
We must embrace both God’s love AND His sovereignty—not one instead of the other. If you only embrace His love, you will be confused and hurt when life gets hard. If you only embrace His sovereignty, you will resign yourself to thinking your life is driven by a cruel, impersonal, and distant God, and you’ll forget His plan to work in your best interests. “Yahweh is good to all, and His compassions are over all His works” (Psalm 145:9, LSB).
