I was having a discussion with friends the other day and the subject came up - can God change His mind and do something entirely different from what was in the original plan? This was in the context of prayer - do our entreaties cause changes in the universe that might not have happened otherwise?
Adam and Eve - created to live in a perfect world until they disobeyed God's orders. The days of Noah when all humanity was evil in God's eyes. In both of these cases, there was an original plan that went awry. A & E should have lived carefree in perfect harmony with their creator, but after the fall, God had to go back to the drawing board and arrange a whole nother way. Humans messed up His plan. Or did they?
In Noah's day, sin had already entered the world and people, subject to it, sinned. The scriptures say that God "repented" that he had made man. Was sorry he had gone to the effort. Again, human beings messing up the plan. So God had to wipe the slate clean and start all over again with the only righteous person on the face of the earth.
The Babylonian captivity - those darn Jews! Just wouldn't follow the plan so God arranged for a slaughter and long captivity, once again, needing a Plan B.
One thing that gives me pause about these scenarios is that the Plan B's didn't work! The promise of a redeemer didn't work because the new human beings kept right on sinning without regard to the possibility of a savior. (Did they even understand what a savior was and why they might need one?) The flood had only just wiped out civilization when Noah's son Ham sinned in a big way and it all went downhill - again - because through the fall, we have a sin nature. How was starting over with flawed material supposed to help? After a century in Babylon wouldn't you think the Jews would have learned their lesson? Not. The city of Sodom was leveled supposedly because of their homosexuality. One would think Lot and his daughters would choose to live righteously. Nope. They got their father drunk, had sex with him and began their own tribe.
Isn't God a better planner than this. He's God after all, he should know what's going to work and what's not.
Here's the thing - God is all the omni's - Omnipresent, Omniscient, Omnipotent. He knows everything past, present and future, He's everywhere at once past present and future, and He can do anything in all of those three locales at the same time. While we're living our tragedies and sins on September 3, 2011, God is already in tomorrow and next week and next year and next century and millennia. He's not surprised or shocked by what we do. He knew it before we were born, even before the world existed. Does he need to change his mind about earth and see if something else works out better? And if He did, how would we know without a WayBack machine?
In our Bibles we read the words - "God repented", or God was angry and changed his mind about man. Those phrases, however, have been mistranslated. In the original language of the OT those words are written - "Nachum" which means to "cause a change of direction". You're walking down the road and see a McDonald's to your left so you "nachum" - change directions. You've been punishing your child for not cleaning up their room and it's only making things worse, so you decide to nachum. In the record of Biblical history God sees that the world's populace is getting farther and farther away from his plan, so he nachum - changes the direction that the world is going. Through a flood, a captivity, an explosion of salt and sulphur. Although they bear a similarity, changing direction and changing one's mind are not the same. One implies that a mistake was made; the other implies an ongoing plan.
Do our prayers affect the direction of God's plan? Can we pray long enough and hard enough, enlist a thousand people to pray with us, fast and weep and it causes God to smack his head and say, "Of course! I was going to do it this way, but since you've got the right number of people helping you out, I'll do it your way?" How very human of God that would be. Which is probably why we believe it to be so. God carrying out His plan from beginning to end is such a difficult concept for us because of our limitations on this earth.
And yet, we continue to pray. Because prayer calls God into our every day lives. It's not a magic bullet or a vending machine - put your prayers in, get your wishes fulfilled. It helps to have something greater than ourselves involved in our trials and tribulations, no matter what the answer turns out to be.
