Interference

In response to my first post about speaking in tongues, a woman on a forum that I frequent gave me something to ponder. She had said in her response that when we pray to God, Satan hears everything that is being said and sometimes interferes with the prayers, but when praying in tongues, Satan does not know what is being said to God.

So, here are my thoughts:

I am assuming that Satan's interference with prayer to God means that Satan is somehow intercepting said prayer so that it does not reach God.

If God is omnipotent, then no amount of interference from Satan should be able to keep a prayer from reaching God. Otherwise, if God is omnipotent AND Satan is able to keep prayers from reaching God, then God must be allowing this to happen. My question from this conclusion would be why? What purpose would it serve to permit Satan the authority to determine which prayers get through and which ones do not? I have a real problem with the idea of Satan being the filter on God's mail. It seems like a poor way to save a lot of souls, if you ask me.

So, if God's not allowing Satan to interfere with prayer, then He must not be omnipotent. I'm not comfortable with that idea either because like the idea above it, it grants far too much power to Satan. In fact, it put him on equal if not greater footing than God and that just will not do. It doesn't really give us a whole lot of hope for being able to win the good fight.

So, maybe this isn't exactly what she meant about Satan interfering with our prayers. I honestly think that the interference is something much more insidious. I see it more along the lines of Satan diverting our attention away from what we should be praying about. It's a very subtle manipulation of our human desires and feelings that makes us think we're going about things the right way when we really couldn't be further from the mark. Like when we decide not to say our evening prayers because we're too tired. Or when we pray for patience with a person and end up listing off all the things about them that annoy us. Of course, it could always be something I mentioned in an earlier post. Perhaps, he only really deceived us once, and we being the intelligent creatures that we are, thought we knew it all and got so wrapped up in believing the deception to be true that we can't get ourselves out of it without some help. Perhaps, Hell is a prison of our own making.

Falx

*Note: If you want a good book about temptation, read C.S. Lewis's The Screwtape Letters

Dreams and Stuff

Sometimes, dreams can be funny things. Sometimes, they deliver messages that we really need to hear or, as the case may be, read. I don't remember much about the context of this one, save that I was trying to help out a friend by cleaning her house for her. During one part of this dream, I was looking at the door of the refrigerator, and was reading two bumper sticker style magnets that were stuck there. The first read, "Help me to harm not those who would harm me" and the second read, "Be merciful to those who colour me a..." I didn't get to finish the last one because I woke up.

I was pondering these statements on the car ride to work when the completion of the second statement popped into my head: "Be merciful to those who colour me a villain and to those whom I colour a villain myself." Pretty weighty stuff there. It brought me back to a verse in Matthew: "You have heard it said that you should love your neighbor and hate your enemy, but I say to you love your enemy..." And I thought that maybe the dream was a response to my conflicting feelings over Osama bin Laden's death. On the one hand, I am glad that it is over and that those who lost loved ones in the 9/11 attacks can get some closure, but I feel very weird about celebrating his death... or any death for that matter.

If we really are to love our enemies, then so too must we love him, regardless of what he has done. We color him a villain, and yet, there are those who at the same time color him a hero. It makes me wonder if we humans really know the difference between good and evil at all, or if we're just muddling through thinking that we do.

Maybe that was the snake's great deception: that in eating the fruit of the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil, we would believe that we know the difference when really we wouldn't. Perhaps, that's why we were forbidden to eat it: not because God was afraid that we would be on equal footing with Him, but because He knew that in having knowledge that we weren't ready for and therefore didn't understand, we wouldn't be able to apply it properly.

Falx

*Quick note: The spelling of colour in the second statement in the dream was how it appeared in the dream. I'm not sure why the British spelling was used and I'm not sure if it's significant.