First off, if you haven't read this short story yet, click this link. http://gaslight.mtroyal.ca/mnkyspaw.htm Don't worry, I'll wait. Pretty creepy, huh? I probably should have warned you not to read this at night. If you have bad dreams about twisted wishes and mummified animal limbs, I will take the blame. I was certainly freaked out the first time I read it. It falls into a trilogy of literature that scared me senseless as a teenager.(Yes, I said teenager. Don't hate). The first was The Hound of the Baskerville's, which I thought was going to be another thrilling Sherlock Holmes mystery and, instead, was about a terrifying ghost dog murdering people across the lonely moors. To this day, I'm not sure what a "moor" is but I never want to go to one. The second was totally my fault. I suspected I had grown up a bit and could handle some more intense reading. Stephen King's It was not the book to test this theory on. I still don't like clowns and have to fight down a "get them before they get me" urge every time I go to the circus. Sort of a flight or pee my pants kind of instinct. The Monkey's Paw was the last, and in some ways, the most horrifying. I had to read it in school (like high school wasn't scary enough) and for some reason it resonated with me. Maybe it was the fear of losing someone in an attempt to prosper, maybe it was the thought of that loved one being transformed into a monster, but the horror of the story and the dread that it produced has stuck with me for years. I think a conversation I had a few weeks ago illustrates why.
I was having a discussion with someone who was experiencing a personal crisis. At some point, they brought up their prayer life, sharing how specifically they prayed for God to move. The idea of being that specific caught my attention. Where had I come across the notion of making sure your requests needed to be detailed? The person continued by expressing the fear that they had sinned and forgot to confess it, that they had missed a chance to make things right with God and the results were the current issues that they were suffering through. I assured them that God was not out to get them and His focus is on our hearts, not out words and left, trusting that I had offered the appropriate wisdom and comfort the circumstance called for. But the conversation and the ideas that it had stirred up in me would not go away so easily.
The idea that maybe God is out to get you, that He is looking for opportunity to bring judgement into your life is a reccurring one found in the lives of many believers. In fact, I would suggest that everyone of us deals with it from time to time. The fear of the Lord is a good thing, produced as the Holy Spirit enlightens us to the reality of our situation. Without the grace found through Jesus, we are in deep trouble. But if we stop there and miss the heart that exists beyond this truth, we confuse who God is. Sin and its results must be confronted with deadly earnest and sobriety. Yet in doing so, we must not misconstrue the personality and motivation of God. Yet many times, we treat Him like the monkey's paw- a powerful yet malevolent force capable of giving us what we need, but only if we don't leave Him a loophole through which He can wreak His judgement. That's not the God revealed in the scriptures and if we are to truly know Him, we have to adjust our thinking.
Some of you may be sceptical of this idea. You may think you have never considered God in such a way. And maybe you haven't. But I would suggest you are in the minority. Most believers, from time to time, live in fear of the Monkey Paw God. I know I have. So in an effort to banish this false impersonation of Jesus, I want to spend the next few days considering how this deception affects us, how we can be unaware that it exists, and how to ultimately deal with it. I think it will be well worth it.
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