In Luke 18:1-8 we get the “Parable of the Persistent Widow”. It focuses on her persistence to win justice against her adversary. All parables of Jesus have a point, but here we are told the point of this one from the start: to show disciples that we “should always pray and never give up.”
I’ve been saying for years that when we pray we shouldn’t think of God like a vending machine. The differences should be obvious. A vending machine doesn’t care about us. It doesn’t make decisions about what we need. It is created by something other than itself. It will eventually wear down and fail to work, operate, provide, give or respond.
But here I’m going to explore at least one characteristic of vending machines which bear at least some kind of likeness to God. That characteristic is that (provided they are not defective) they work. They operate. They provide. They give. They respond to our requests.
Vending machines move. You put the money in (coin, cash, card, or
Aristotle, observing that objects in the world are in motion, rightly reasoned that (pardon the redundancy) there must be a necessary being that is a) not itself in motion, but b) is itself responsible for all of the motion in the world.
Some would at this point want to jump in and point out that this leads to (or is) a ‘deistic’ view of God. A God who kicks off all the motion in the world and then sits back and does nothing else ever again. Just one big shove, and done.
Despite this being perhaps where our minds may go first, it doesn’t mean we have to imagine things like that. As in a pool or billiards table, instead of imagining God as the white cue that is hammered at the other balls and (we might imagine) immediately removed from the table after that first contact, we might also imagine God as the cue stick, or better yet as the player who is active both beyond and on the table throughout the whole game. The one calling all the shots.
Theologian C.H. Pinnock proposed that God is not just an ‘unmoved’ Mover, but rather the Most-Moved Mover. Unlike a deterministic deity with a fixed plan like clock-work, Pinnock had an ‘open’ picture of God’s sovereignty which we won’t go into here. Suffice to say that the Bible does not portray God’s sovereignty in such a way that conflicts with our experience of God ‘changing his mind’, feeling sorry that he made humans, or responding to prayers.
This brings us back to the teaching of Jesus, using the example of a pleading widow to teach us to “always pray” and “never give up.”
According to biblical theology, God has chosen to be the kind of God who wants to relate to us, and wants that relationship to be one of asking. Jesus, as a master teacher who knows human nature completely, clearly knows that we will get tired of asking and want to ‘give up’.
The short parable ends with Jesus concluding that God, who we should understand is very unlike the ruler who “doesn’t fear God or care what people think” is the kind of God who will, in his own time and own way, “bring about justice for his chosen ones, who cry out to him day and night.”
I don’t naturally want to cry out to God day and night. Not for anything. I find the deistic view easier. God has determined it all. Down to the last detail. No need to give him instructions. Just trust and wait until the end, when it will all get sorted out.
But no. This parable shows God to be the kind of God who wants us to be – at least a bit – impatient and persistent with him. He wants us to “keep bothering” him, like the widow did to the unjust judge. God wants us to ask for at least a little of the ultimate future in the immediate present.
This will take practice, and getting over our pride which doesn’t want to look like a fool asking God for stuff all the time and it seeming (at least some of the time) to make precisely no difference.
If we go to the Psalms, the prayer book of the Bible, the prayer book that shaped Jesus’ prayers, we immediately see this kind of view as they call persistently on God for all things, all the time, in all kinds of ways.
In prayer, I have the shameless audacity to be trying to move the Most Moved Mover.
Recovering the Kingdom 