Smoodock's Blog

According to some believers, ‘Ask, seek, knock,’, often seem to be buttons one pushes to make God one’s own private genie. Rub the bottle, press the buttons, say these words, do these things and God will serve you, give you your heart’s desire, or make unfathomable power available to you! Actually, such thinking comes directly out of paganism. Put simply, one might say that the worldview of gentile religion was that the gods were the reality, and we were their shadows. If we were at war, it meant the gods were fighting among themselves. Worshiping the gods, vis-à-vis getting them to do as we ask, involved our acting out what we wanted them to do for us. The logic was, if the shadows of the gods were to do a thing, and if it was done perfectly, then the gods were forced to act out what their shadows did.[1] Carrying this over into our religious understanding, we might ask: “What can I do or say that would cause or force God to do what I want him to do?

Nevertheless, God is not my private genie, and Jesus never meant for anyone to interpret such a thing from his words concerning asking, seeking and knocking. Think about it. Would you, as a parent, give your children everything they asked for? Would you encourage them to seek out everything they wished to do or to have? Would you want every door to open before them, when they knocked? So, what is Jesus saying?

Context is important whenever we wish to understand the word of God. If I told you that the president wanted to see you, would you believe you needed to travel to Washington D.C., when you were actually sitting in the local Elk’s Club lodge? It should be obvious I was speaking about the president of the local Elk’s Club. So, context is important to understand what Jesus is saying in Matthew 7:7-8.

The immediate context concerns judging others (Matthew 7:1-6). However, Matthew 5 concerns coming into the presence of God and learning to allow his light to shine through us in our relationships, both with God and man. Moreover, chapter 6 has to do with our giving to others and our motives behind doing that, vis-à-vis are we glorifying God or ourselves? Are we trusting in the Kingdom of Heaven or are we looking to the world? Are we seeking to obey God or are we anxious about serving him? Context is important, and when Jesus says, “everyone who asks receives” (Matthew 7:8), it isn’t about a wish list. Jesus claimed we didn’t need to ask God for the things we need in life, because he is the good Father who always provides for his children (Matthew 6:26, 30-31, 33).

Jesus’ point is this. When we ask (Matthew 7:7), are we asking God to hollow or glorify his name (Matthew 6:9), through what we’re asking, or are we asking God to favor our lusts (James 4:3), vis-à-vis our will, as opposed to his will? Jesus said, if you ask anything in my name (John 14:14; cp. 1John 5:14) he would grant what we ask. The Sermon on the Mount is all about coming into the Presence of God and the consequences of doing such a thing. We must not try to take what is holy and derive out of that what is mundane. We simply cannot take Jesus’ words and cause them to say whatever we want.

So, if the above is logical and true, why does Jesus speak of the mundane in Matthew 7:9-10, bread, stones, fish and serpents? Whenever we are speaking of spiritual matters, it is often necessary to explain them in mundane terms, because we are human and perceive things through our five physical senses. It is very helpful, if we’re able to physically see, if we are to come to understand spiritual sight. The loss of one or more of our physical senses hinders our ability to understand the physical world in which we live. So, expanding on what we know in our physical world is often helpful to understand what is going on spiritually, when we are unaware of how the spiritual world operates.

What Jesus is saying is, God knows our hearts. He knows what we want to say but find difficult to put into words (cp. 2Corinthians 12:4). If our words aren’t exactly correct, he’s not going to give us something we’d rather not have or something that would hurt us. He will answer our request according to our hearts. As for, seeking and knocking, we will find everything we seek and every door, upon which we knock, will be opened (Matthew 7:7-8), if we do these things in an effort to honor God or spread his influence in the world through the Gospel. This is the context of Jesus’ words. In fact, even we, as parents, know how to give good gifts to our children, yet we are sinners, prone to do evil. If this is so of us, why wouldn’t it be true of our holy Father in heaven (Matthew 7:11)?

_________________________________________________________________

[1] See The Bible Among the Myths by John N. Oswalt.