The Godhead - God

God can be maneuvered

The late Jack Hyles, in a 12/26/82 sermon, ‘I Am Only Human,’ argued that ‘God can be maneuvered,’ saying, ‘The Old Testament saints knew God so well they maneuvered with God. They all started off, ‘Thou, the great God of Jacob, Thou the God of the creation, Thou the God that made the stars.’ [Hyles has also preached on the subject, ‘How to Make God Your Slave’!]

Confutation

The Psalmist said: “Whatever the Lord pleases He does, in heaven and in earth, in the seas and in all deep places” (Psalm 135:6 – NKJV), and king Nebuchadnezzar, after his understanding returned to him, said about God the following things: “He does according to His will in the army of heaven and among the inhabitants of the earth. No one can restrain His hand or say to Him, What have you done?” (Daniel 4:35 – NKJV), and Paul said to the Ephesians that God “works all things according to the counsel of His will” (Ephesians 1:11 – NKJV). As you can see, therefore, God does whatever He wills, and in order to accomplish His will He uses also the inhabitants of the earth. Nowhere in the Bible do we find a story that teaches us that God can be maneuvered or that we can maneuver with God. God is God, and man is man; God uses men to accomplish His purpose, but men cannot use God. God is the One who controls the whole universe, while man is under God’s control and he can do nothing apart from the will of God. Therefore anyone who claims that God can be maneuvered or that we can make God our slave does not recognize the sovereignty of God and thus he shows that he does not know the Scripture.

Perhaps someone will say that actually God can be maneuvered through prayer because when we pray we move God to act in a certain way, just as the saints of old moved God to do certain things when they prayed to God and God heard their prayer. To those who think such a thing, I say the following things. What you believe is wrong because through our prayer we can’t maneuver God in any way because our prayer is answered by God only if it is according to His will, for the apostle John said: “Now this is the confidence that we have in Him, that if we ask anything according to His will, He hears us. And if we know that He hears us, whatever we ask, we know that we have the petitions that we have asked of Him” (1 John 5:14-15 –NKJV). And what John said was confirmed by James who rebuked some believers who asked and did not receive because they asked amiss, that they might spend it on their pleasures (James 4:3).

Therefore, when we hear someone say that we can ‘move the hand of God’, we need to keep in mind that God will move His hand only if what we have asked of Him is according to His will, thus His sovereignty is by no means affected because God continues to work according to His will. Is it not clear that if our will is contrary to the will of God, He will accomplish His will and He will not give us what we asked of Him in faith? Therefore, we can’t maneuver God through our prayer, rather it is God who maneuvers us even when we don’t realize it. If we thought that God, by granting us our request, allowed us to maneuver Him, we would be wrong because we would not understand the fact that it was God who moved us so that we might ask Him to do a certain thing because that thing was according to His will. Let no one deceive you. God is the Ruler of the universe; it is true that sometimes in the Scripture it seems that He was maneuvered by some holy men, and maybe even in our life it seems that God acts in accordance with our wish or will, but the fact still remains that God does whatever He wants and consequently He accomplishes His purpose in our life. He is the one who directs our steps, and His counsel and not ours will stand. Remember this always.

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