Why Bargaining in Prayer Belittles God’s Independence!
Don’t bargain with God in prayer! It is a bad deal! It is driven by a flawed view of God’s love and the nature of his relationship with you. Bargaining makes your relationship with him crass, not spiritual (see part one). How tragic to misunderstand God’s generous and unconditional loving nature! But how relieving it is to know God does not need to receive to give! He gives out of his perfect goodness, a divine trait so clearly displayed in Jesus.
A Great Word for Us, But Not for God!
The focus of the first post explained how negotiating with your Heavenly Father harms your relationship with him. But what if bargaining does something worse? Bargaining with God actually dishonors him because it misrepresents him, attributing to him a terrible, horrible, no good, very bad word – “need!” Need a powerful word that should begin our relationship with God: “Lord, I need you! Lord, save me! I need forgiveness and a relationship with you by faith!” The first beatitude is foundational, for it is those who know and acknowledge their neediness to God whom the Holy Spirit gifts with grace: “Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven” (Matthew 5:3). But that important word for us cannot be applied to God. Not only does the Creator of all possess everything (Psalm 104:24 NASB), but he is eternally self-sufficient, that is, absolutely independent.
Upending Athens
As a result of Paul’s life-changing encounter with the self-sufficient God, Paul was not shy! After seeing all the idols in Athens, “his spirit was provoked within him” (Acts 17:16). Given an amazing opportunity to preach the Gospel to intellectual but pagan unbelievers, what was Paul’s starting point in distinguishing the true God from their many false gods? The true God has no needs! Paul preached, “The God who made the world and everything in it, being Lord of heaven and earth, does not live in temples made by man, nor is he served by human hands, as though he needed anything since he himself gives to all mankind life and breath and everything” (Acts 17:24-25, emphasis added). God made everything, including “the cattle on a thousand hills” (Psalm 50:10). What could these unbelievers offer to God that he did not already have?
Correcting a Misconception
Likewise, God was clearly upset with Israel in Psalm 50. In verse 7, he begins to present his indictment against them: “Hear, O my people, and I will speak; O Israel, I will testify against you. I am God, your God.” God took issue with how sacrifices were being offered to him by some who had a “caricature of God.” They saw him as one who is “grasping, dependent.”1 They imagined themselves giving him “what He does not otherwise possess”2 and therefore “somehow enriching God!”3
Does Not and Cannot
God’s nature is independent and self-sufficient. In systematic theology, it can be formulated this way: “It is not just that God does not need the creation for anything; God could not need the creation for anything."4 This means more than unwise bartering with God as if he were a mere human, for it is delusional for creatures even to think he needs them or anything else. That is why Paul began his Gospel speech in Athens with a defense of God’s nature before he presented Jesus as the Savior, alive from the dead. God is not pleased with us today when we think we can offer to him what he already has!
Leaving the Childish Behind
God is great and gracious! He does “not deal with us according to our sins, nor repay us according to our iniquities” (Psalm 103:10). Why? Out of his great love, God gives grace to us as sinners and mercy to us in our weaknesses: “For he knows our frame; he remembers that we are dust” (verse 14). It is not that God never answers the prayer of his children when they negotiate with him. But those kinds of prayers are immature and need to be left behind.
Bargaining is a Sure Sign of Immaturity
For example, God blessed Jacob, whose life had been wheeling and dealing at best (Genesis 25:29-34) and deceit at worst (Genesis 27:5-29), even invoking the Lord in his underhanded scheming (verse 20). When Jacob fled his brother’s rage, he prayed a conditional prayer of commitment: “Then Jacob made a vow, saying, “If God will be with me and will keep me in this way that I go, and will give me bread to eat and clothing to wear, so that I come again to my father's house in peace, then the Lord shall be my God, and this stone, which I have set up for a pillar, shall be God's house. And of all that you give me I will give a full tenth to you” (Genesis 28:20-22, emphasis added). D.A. Carson observes that: “His response is to barter with God: if God will grant him security, safety, prosperity, and ultimately a happy return home, Jacob for his part will acknowledge God and offer him a tithe.”5
Maturity Marked by Unconditioned Gratitude
Despite this, it was God’s good pleasure to bless him in every way, both materially and spiritually. Hear how different the maturing Jacob prayed 20 years later as he returned home: “I am not worthy of the least of all the deeds of steadfast love and all the faithfulness that you have shown to your servant, for with only my staff I crossed this Jordan, and now I have become two camps” (Genesis 32:10). He had matured in his understanding of God and now knew that he had not earned God’s grace. Carson observes this change in how Jacob viewed his life and how he prayed: “Bartering is gone…Twenty years or so have passed since Jacob’s outward-bound journey. Some people learn nothing in twenty years. Jacob has learned humility, tenacity, godly fear, reliance upon God’s covenantal promises, and how to pray.” 6
Praying and Serving the Unconditional God Unconditionally
What shall we do? We must improve how we pray and why we pray! How refreshing to learn to rise from prayer, relieved and resting in God’s grace rather than trudging on to pursue wearisome repayment to God. Let us enjoy praying “without ceasing,” praising God who does not need us and whom we desperately need! That is wise! That is worship! Then, let us serve God unconditionally. Instead of begrudging what the Father has or has not given us (Luke 15:29), let us love him and offer to him the only two gifts we can truly give him: glory and joy.7
Let us love God better by praying to him in more mature ways in response to his unconditional love for us. Let us anchor our prayers on his eternal independence, which freed him from having to give us any grace, and his eternal love, which cared for us anyway. He owed us nothing, and we had and have nothing to offer in return, yet in His compassion, he gave us the priceless gift of the precious blood of the Lamb (1 Peter 1:19).
At its worst and most immature form, "bargaining with God" leads to the errors of the prosperity gospel.
Here is a helpful, related article:
"6 Simple Steps to Revolutionize your Spiritual Life" by Jason K. Allen
1Derek Kidner, Psalms 1–72: An Introduction and Commentary (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 1973), 204.
2Carl Friedrich Keil and Franz Delitzsch, Commentary on the Old Testament (Peabody, MA: Hendrickson, 1996), 361.
3J. A. Motyer, “The Psalms,” in The New Bible Commentary: 21st Century Edition, eds. D. A. Carson et al., 4th ed., (Downers Grove, IL: Inter-Varsity Press, 1994), 517.
4Wayne Grudem, Systematic Theology: An Introduction to Biblical Doctrine, 2nd ed. (Grand Rapids: Zondervan Academic, 2020), 191.
5D. A. Carson, For the Love of God: A Daily Companion for Discovering the Riches of God’s Word (Wheaton: Crossway Books, 1998), 57.
6Ibid.
7“The balancing consideration with respect to this doctrine is the fact that we and the rest of creation can glorify God and bring him joy. This must be stated in order to guard against any idea that God’s independence makes us meaningless” Grudem, 192.
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