Why Do Bad Things Happen To Good People? – PART 6

Faith V.S. Feelings

The options for justice are limited for the unbeliever. Their desire for the restoration of fairness becomes a matter of revenge that pushes them to take matters into their own hands. For the believer, the restoration of justice begins with forgiveness and ends with turning the matters in question over to the Righteous Judge of all the Earth and the Court of Heaven.

There seems, however, to be one caveat to Divine justice and receiving answers to prayer of which most believers are totally unaware. That qualification has to do with confession of faith, acts of obedience and canceling out old contracts. Jesus demonstrated this principle in that when He ministered to people, He was either responding to a need as when He stepped in and rebuked a demon, (Mk. 1:23-25), or “When Jesus saw their faith”, (Mk. 2:5).

Nonetheless, the working of a miracle or the answer to prayer always required some form of human agreement with the request being made before the answer could come. The recipient was either required to acknowledge their faith in Him to do what they had asked Him to do, or to heed the warning to “go and sin no more”, ( Jn. 8:11) which indicated their rejection of the temptation to believe the lie, or they were asked to perform some act of obedience that would establish their agreement with the Divine will of God, like “go and show yourselves to the priests”, (Lu. 17:14).

Obedience to God becomes the critical demonstration of our faith in Him and unties His hands to do what we asked of Him. Obedience also demonstrates agreement. If that obedience is directed toward the Kingdom of heaven, our help will come from heaven. If we agree with fear, our agreement gives the spirit of fear the right to rule in our affairs.

Too often we fail to realize the critical part we play in the answers to our own prayers. We must have a basic understanding of the rule that operates in the war between God and Satan for our soul in order to win the contest. God is good and God is willing. Knowing that the outcome of the contest is determined by our own consent changes things and shifts the determination of the outcome back to us. Whom we yield ourselves servant to obey is whose slave we become. (Rom. 6:16)

Whose report are we going to believe? To determine that “I will believe the report of the Lord”, is always a required step in God’s intervention for us in any situation. If we continue to waver between the confession of our faith in the faithfulness of God and our past experiences of being let down and disappointed, James tells us we will not receive “anything from the Lord” (Ja. 1:6-8).

It is not that God does not answer prayer, but that the rules of our confession will either help or seriously hinder His ability to do something for us. Sin and the guilt it brings are huge barriers to answers to prayer. Isaiah says our “iniquities have separated [us] from [our] God; and [our] sins have hidden His face from [us].” (Is. 59:1-2)

Here we see the obstacle. Sin is the evidence of our unbelief in the truth and the evidence of believing, and being bound by, the lie. Believing in the lie empowers the lie. As long as the lie is given the power to act, it is permitted to rule and legislate in our lives.

The result of sin, which is contrary to our divine nature, is guilt and a sense of unworthiness which makes us feel like we do not deserve the love or help of God. (Remember God’s help and love and gifts of healing are not earned or deserved or conditional. They are based upon His love, not our worthiness, as the Devil would have us believe).

When we continue to remember our sin and rehearse our unworthiness, the pain and dysfunction of our past, including the current experiences it is generating, keep us under the jurisdiction of the LIAR. The Devil only knows the justice of the Law which says “the soul that sins shall die”. Therefore, when he gets us to sin, he also gains the right to act in our life under a usurped authority to punish us as sinners.

If we continue to disregard God’s strong admonition to those under the Gospel of Grace, to “reckon the old man dead” (Rom. 6:;11), and straddle the fence between Law and Grace, the Enemy will, sooner or later, tag us for breaking the Law. He then assigns the guilt and responsibility for that sin to us by making an accusation to God against us.

Because we are also “feeling” guilty, we submit to the Enemy’s indictment against us and do not resist him. God is forced to abide by our choice to again believe the Devil’s lies and watches us as we choose to take the Devil’s solutions to get rid of the guilt.

Not recognizing the Enemy’s accusation as part of the plot to condemn us before God, and that all of his solutions to get rid of our sin are designed to drive us deeper into the ultimate destruction of separation from God, we struggle on.

One of the bi-products of this self-punishing, “I am bad” and “do not deserve God’s help” is that now God seems to be just as indifferent as the Devil has been telling us He is. We are alone with our sin and mad at God for not helping us. Our relationship with God is strained, pulled between us being mad at God and feeling God is mad at us. This severe pressure only fuels the Devil’s religious works gospel as our only option to securing eternal life.

Accepting the Enemy’s condemnation and his solution for our sin and not understanding the finished work of Christ on the Cross allows the Enemy’s assignment of guilt to stand as a legalize judgment against us, the Blood bought sons and daughters of God. This allows him to act on a technicality, to bring down the consequences of sin into our lives including the injustices we cry out against, even though we are bought and paid for by the Blood of the Lamb.

As saved and under grace, the biblical prescription for sin is to repent, change our mind and stop believing the lie, i.e., stop believing the lie that led us to do the sin in the first place, and “confess” our sin. This confession, required as the prescription for our release from the grip of guilt, allows us to cancel out our previous agreements with both the lie and the sin.

Canceling out the agreements on behalf of our blood line, releases us from another measure of demonic judgment the Enemy has laid on us. God is free to act on our behalf as of those who have put their trust in Him, only after we confess our sin and acknowledge that the way to freedom is through the sacrifice of Jesus Christ.

Doubt, wavering and rehearsing the problem over again, hinders God’s right to “act” in our lives. Every time we re-acknowledge or re-accept the symptoms, or re-verbalize the doubt, we give the Enemy permission to restart the “body of death” operating systems. Every time we fail to identify the accusation against us as the work of the accuser, (which often comes in the form of a question that implies “nothing is, or will change”), we give the Enemy operating privileges to reactivate his systems of destruction in our lives.

The mechanisms for the reactivation of demonic programming in our lives, however, are so well hidden that we do not recognize how quickly the Enemy can accomplished it. Most people are totally oblivious to the power of agreement they are making even in their murmuring.