The texts that push back

If I only showed you Moses and Jonah and Amos you could be forgiven for thinking the case is closed. It isn't, and the same Bible is the one that reopens it. I want these verses in at full strength, because a question that only hears one side isn't a question anymore, it's a conclusion with a costume on.

"He is not a man, that he should relent"

1 Samuel 15. Samuel tells Saul the kingdom is gone, and then says, "The Glory of Israel does not lie or relent, for he is not a man, that he should relent." That's nacham, the Jonah word, and the verse flatly denies it of God.

Here's what gets me, though. In the same chapter, verse 11 and verse 35, God says "I regret that I made Saul king." Same word. So the tension isn't between the Old Testament and some later theology. It's inside one chapter.

Numbers 23:19 says it too, through Balaam of all people: God is not a man that he should lie, nor a son of man that he should change his mind. Psalm 110: "YHWH has sworn and will not relent." Malachi 3:6: "I, YHWH, do not change." And then Malachi finishes the sentence: "therefore you, children of Jacob, are not consumed." God not changing is the reason for the mercy. Which... complicates the picture nicely.

Jesus himself, right before he teaches the Lord's Prayer: "Your Father knows what you need before you ask him." And then he teaches them to ask anyway.

"Do not pray for this people"

This set is harder. Three times in Jeremiah, God tells the prophet to stop interceding. "Do not pray for this people." And then, in chapter 15, the line that knocked the wind out of me: "Even if Moses and Samuel stood before me, my heart would not turn toward this people."

Moses and Samuel. The two great breach-standers. Not enough.

A few verses later God says, literally, "I am weary of relenting." Nacham again. He's tired of it.

Asked for, argued for, refused

And then there are the prayers that were everything the first two posts said a prayer should be, and were turned down.

Moses asks to enter the land. "Enough. Do not speak to me of this matter again." David fasts seven days for his child, and the child dies. Psalm 88 ends in darkness, no turn, no "he has heard." Paul asks three times for the thorn to go, and gets "my grace is sufficient for you." And Jesus, in the garden: "All things are possible for you. Remove this cup from me."

Look at that list again. Moses, David, Paul, Jesus. These are not people who prayed badly.

"That's just how they saw it back then"

There's a way out of all this, and I want to take it seriously because it's a fair one. You could say: the Old Testament is how people perceived God. God never changed his mind; Moses just didn't know what God was going to do, and the story reports the view from the ground. Theologians have a word for it, accommodation. Scripture talks about God in human terms because we couldn't follow otherwise.

Okay. But I don't think that gets you out, it just moves the question forward to Jesus. Because the claim of the New Testament is that Jesus is not a perception. He is, Hebrews says, "the exact imprint" of God's nature. "Whoever has seen me has seen the Father." The people who wrote the Gospels walked with him, ate with him, touched him. If I want to know what God does when somebody argues with him, the Gospels are the closest look I'll get.

So that's where I'm going next.

To sit with

Every time God relents in the stories, it moves toward mercy. Can I find one place where someone prays God into being less merciful? (Jonah tried.)
Is relenting a change in God, or is it, as Jonah's own complaint suggests, the thing about God that never changes?
Moses, David, Paul, Jesus. When I'm refused, which company do I think I'm in?
Jeremiah was told to stop praying. Have I ever stopped praying for something, and was it obedience or just fatigue?