Should we appease God?

As we struggle with our relationship with the Almighty, the tendency is strong to seek ways to win His favor. Appeasement seems a natural thing. We try to do things that hopefully, will influence Him to come to our service.

Appeasement conveys the idea of bribery, or bargaining to say the least. We visualize a weak person seeking to placate a much stronger one by various devices.

If our God was a being who was not so very intelligent, he might be persuaded about some of the deals we offer him, such as obedience for some miracle or special work. To be so persuaded, he would have to have some need that we could satisfy.

A God like this would not be seeing us as children but as merchants he could bargain with for something.

Such a God would have to be limited in his own ability to be persuaded that he could be helped by us. Finally, he would have to have a weak sense of justice to subvert it to his personal gain.

All these things speak not of an all powerful, all knowing, all just God. They do not suggest the God revealed in the Scriptures and in nature itself nor in our inner sense of who God really is.

Appeasement is not founded on the real relationship that we have been granted by the Lord. The Lord has granted to us something far better. He has conferred upon us sonship. By virtue of what Christ won for us on the Cross, our sins are forgiven. The sin is what created the gap in the first place. If sin had not entered the picture, our relationship would always have been perfect. There would have been no need for appeasement as God would no longer have been seen as distant and forbidding, demanding and stern.

The true approach to God is not appeasement. There is no bargaining with God. We have nothing to offer Him. We are empty handed to start with and in any case, God needs nothing from us. In fact, He is offended by the idea of appeasement. He looks with a smile knowing we are helpless and incapable of doing anything to help Him. He is not offended by us as He understands our broken nature and tendency to mis-understand His great love for us.

If we could only see Him as a father who knows much more than we, who is much more powerful than we can even conceive, it would help us to understand better what our attitude and approach should be.

Most of us have had fathers who had less than saintly attitudes, less than Solomon’s wisdom, less than true generosity. So it is a bit unlikely that we will be able to achieve the attitude and approach by replicating that which we had with our earthly father. Instead, we must keep our eye on the holy Scripture and depend on the Holy Spirit for the right approach to the Lord.

Our God is a warm, caring, knowing Father who wants only our good. He is able to bring about our good and is not only able but is willing. 

Our prayer to Him should be first preceded by a re-cap of who He is, How great He is, How merciful and loving He is. We should remind ourselves that He really does care. He is not only able but willing to do for us what we cannot do ourselves.

We can know God only indirectly by our human senses. His creation appeals to our sight, our hearing, our senses and our intelligence. 

We can only know God by the Holy Spirit. The Holy Spirit moves upon our consciousness and our conscience as to the reality and presence of God. The word of God revealed to us are only words of no effect except by the Holy Spirit. The Spirit of God quickens our spirit and makes the word of God a living thing in us. Apart from the Holy Spirit, we can have no true consciousness of God.