God Answered My Angry Prayer
By Gerald Sumeracki
It was hard to admit it to myself, I was very angry at God. To think that I could ever understand Him was not only foolish but totally ridiculous!
It started many years ago when I began to truly pray for God's intervention. I'm sure I'm not the only one to feel such anger so let me tell you how God clarified a few things for me.
In the scriptures of old, God plainly let the world know there was a true God and his chosen was Israel. He fought battles for his people and laid waste their enemies. Children walked in blazing furnaces and a sea was parted to allow passage for Moses and his people. That entire nation was fed by God over a generation's pilgrimage across desert lands! It was near impossible for small numbers much less an entire nation to live in such a hostile desert! God proved to man over and over through mighty deeds that He was who He said he was!
These great feats were performed by God to show he favored the people of Israel from whom the Messiah would come. That Messiah, Jesus Christ, came to humanity to fulfill the prophetic words of the ancients and in bringing those words to completion he brought man a new faith, a new relationship with God which would begin once his blood was shed.
My anger started when I asked and asked, continually asked God to do the works of Jesus in my life. After all, the scripture says that Jesus is the same yesterday today and forever. Should not his mighty deeds therefore be shown throughout all eternity? Jesus himself said that even greater works would be done by his believers subsequent to his return to heaven! I looked and looked for these greater works and to my dismay I found God's presence totally lacking in the world around me. I saw no real answer to prayer.
My anger was compounded with the confusion I saw in the Bible. The scripture says if one had faith as small as a mustard seed they could move mountains-----I never saw a mountain moved. I saw no cancers cured, I saw suffering and chaos all around me. I saw children die before they had a chance to live. I saw starvation, pestilence, hatred, anger and bitterness. And what else did I see? I saw thousands, even millions throughout the world on their knees begging, yes begging God for help, help that never came. Where were these greater things that Jesus promised us before he ascended?
Was I angry at God? I sure was and that anger kept burning at a low heat under the surface for years. I saw so many wonderful people pray. I saw preachers, priests, nuns and other religious in prayer. I saw ordinary folks like you and me, all interceding to God for the ills of the world and all I continued to see was suffering and death.
When I would ask why prayers were not answered the learned philosophers of the spiritual community always had the same answer, "The Lord's will be done."
"Well if it is God's will that all this happens" I said, "than why pray at all?" It seemed that many people thought God wanted to be begged and pleaded with and when He did not answer they just clung to that old clich�, "The Lord's will be done." Just a cop out as far as I was concerned.
I determined that God's will was that of non-intervention. All must suffer and die and that's the way of things. I came to believe that the few who did claim cures and miracles had merely experienced the results of natural conditions rather than divine intervention. God really did not enter into the affairs of men, I came to believe, and the more I opened my eyes to what was happening in the world the more this belief firmed in my soul.
The paradox of scripture none-the-less continued to haunt me. How could Jesus lie to us the way he did? He had said: "Greater things will you do because I go to the Father." I could see nothing from the time of Christ till the present day that even approached such a claim.
When my long standing anger surfaced one evening I challenged God to give me an explanation. To my utter surprise he did! This is what the Lord revealed to me.
He told me that the mighty acts He had done in the old covenant, all the supernatural works He had done in his manifestation as Jesus, were all acts to prove to man that He was and His Word was Truth. It showed the supernatural power of God in the natural to establish His credibility. What was to come after the Lord's blood sacrifice would be God's wondrous gift to mankind, a gift to bring supernatural power to all who would just trust and believe!
"What did your promise mean?" I asked the Lord. He told me it meant that believers who come to understand their place in Him can bring supernatural power into action within the spiritual realms. Through the Blood He shed the Holy Spirit could now empower natural man. Man's prayers, supplications, cries for justice, his agonies, sufferings and death could now all work to move in the supernatural when empowered by the Holy Spirit.
Now I could see mountains being moved, not the peaks of earth but those of far greater size and importance. Mountains of confusion, mountains of fear, mountains of ignorance, mountains of hatred, all lifted to the supernatural level by those who would come to the realization of how truly great was the power Jesus gave us. I came to realize what He meant when he told us to store our treasures in heaven and not on earth where rust and moth destroyed! The natural had to submit to the supernatural if prayers were to have effect.
What Jesus brought us was total Truth! The flesh ultimately means nothing in the light of the spiritual. What He revealed to me that night was awesome indeed! I could move mountains by believing and praying in faith. In trusting the Lord all spiritual mountains can be leveled, all spiritual strongholds can be brought down, every demon can be made to flee. Just because I could not see the results of prayer did not negate the reality of its effect! To pray in this spiritual reality would become my call.
Looking at my relationship to God and man in this revealed light brought me a new appreciation for prayer. Now I could pray in the spirit where the power of God could flow through me to do mighty works which had effects in the spiritual I could not even imagine! Peace replaced my anger. Truly does the Word state, "Greater is He that is in me than him that is in the world."
God gave us but a glimpse of the reality of the spiritual world to come in that most awesome promise in the Bible: "Eyes have not seen, ears have not heard, nor has it even entered the mind of man, the wonders that God has prepared for those who love him." To now be a participant in that spiritual battle against God's enemies was an awesome privilege indeed!
The power, the wonder, the magnificence of the spiritual is most difficult to understand by natural man and I was that natural man in my anger. Praise God through Jesus our Lord for the Holy Spirit's revealed truths, for in the knowledge brought me that night came the realization that I can truly move mountains, I can truly bring down strongholds, I can do all things in the realm of the spirit where the eternal resides. The very righteousness of God is mine, through Jesus the Lord, and through that righteousness my prayers become those of Christ Himself. I pray with a renewed purpose, I pray with conviction, I pray "Thy Kingdom come Lord Jesus!" We truly do serve a Mighty God!
Hallelujah Jesus!-----My Lord and my God.