I understand most of the stories in the OT of the Bible, if not the entire Bible, went down the exact same way it was written, but what was written got the main point of the story I'm sure. I seriously think the emotions were the same.
Last night I made the kids watch Prince of Egypt, the cartoon movie. They had more questions than they watched of the movie, like the story really touches on things my kids aren't quite used to dealing with, like death. Why did he kill all the babies? Why did she put her baby in the river?
One of my favorites that stood out to me... On the subject of what slavery was, I explained that the Egyptians didn't want to do all the hard work themselves so they had slaves. And they needed the slaves because they wouldn't know how to build all their buildings. And God wanted to free His people. He did. He freed the Hebrews from Egypt. Then he did it again when he was freeing black African people from the Christians. It's so weird how the two stories relate and the role religion played in them. But I made the American Slavery reference to explain to the kids that God doesn't discriminate. He didn't free His people just because they were His people. He freed people who were suffering because they were suffering.
So anyway, I got to thinking, Why did God take so long to free His people? They were to a point where they were giving up faith. So why so long? And I think what happened was God knew what it was going to take to free those people. Remember Jesus WAS, before the invention of man just the same as He IS. So everything He preached about love, tolerance, and peace was still a deal in heaven. God knew it would take "smiting," something He didn't want to do, to free His people, but He knew it was inevitable in order for life to evolve.
I wonder how often do our prayers involve some sort of sacrifice, especially on God's part. I think we too often believe He is God, He is magical and can make anything happen at the word of "Let there be Light," and I'm thinking, there's a lot more to His intervention than the word. There's sacrifices being made, large ones, beyond our comprehension, and if we knew all that was involved in answering our prayers, we'd probably find contentment in our lives naturally. God won't do anything God doesn't want to do, but I think at some point, we get too narcissistic in our prayers where we have a hard time seeing passed the physical realm of things, and maybe that's why not all our prayers are answered fast enough, or the way we think it should be. Maybe that's why a lot of times, we ask for something and God gives us not what we ask, but what we really needed. Many of us learn that His plan is better than ours, for our sake, and it takes a lot of faith to believe that, but I think there's more to it. There's other lives and other things going on beyond our understanding, and God has to make our prayers jive with that.
Anyway, just something to think about when asking for things and finding faith in unresolved prayers.
