Spitirual Authority

Back on the New Year's post,  I said that God could not override delegated authority. This may seem silly to those who have been taught that "God can do anything," but there are many things that God cannot do.

One example is God cannot lie. cf Numbers 23:19, Hebrews 6:18.  Many of the "God cannot   x  ." things are due to His character. He is the Truth, which explains why He cannot lie. He is Light, therefore there can be no darkness in Him.  cf  Job 34:22, 1 John 1:5.  Likewise, an omniscient being cannot learn.

Other things that God cannot do are the result of delegating a portion of His authority. He gave mankind a free will to make choices, and therefore He cannot make choices for men without their permission. An easy-to-understand example is that successful exorcism cannot be performed on someone who wants to be possessed.

The earliest chapters of the Bible introduce this concept of delegated authority. God had assigned the stewardship of the Garden of Eden to Adam. God could not interfere with Adam's choice to eat the fruit, even though God had told him not to eat it. The delegated authority made Adam responsible for his own choice.

In similar fashion, there is a delegation of parental authority. Good children respect this authority in a style similar to the way a good man will respect God. God patterned that design.

Why might God do that? Why would God let Adam mess up? 

(There may be other reasons, but) one purpose is often to allow the heart to be revealed. If God stepped in and orchestrated everything, then there would be no room for our choice of expression. God had instructed Adam about eating the fruit of the tree of knowledge, but Adam revealed his heart in his choice: Adam chose the fruit based on what looked good at the time, not because he trusted God. And on top of that, Eve had been truly deceived.

It is exactly the same way that KatieLyn messed up. The safety of her parents' home looked better than the risk involved in building a home of her own. The acceptance she'd found in her old job by being named employee of the month was preferable to having to look for a new job. And on top of that, KatieLyn had been deceived into feeling guilty about things that were not true.

I am not grasping at straws on the guilt-trip charge either, although the Lord showed me this in an unusual way. I will tell part of it here: A rape victim was telling her story twenty years later. The interviewer asked, why didn't you say something sooner, before the 7-year statute of limitations ran out? She replied, "I thought it was my fault; I thought I deserved the punishment."  As I was reading the interview, it dropped into my spirit that KatieLyn had been similarly deceived to believe that "it was her fault;" she was deceived into believing that she had loved the idea of marriage too much, and that a break-up was her punishment. But this was not the only thing that she had been made to feel false guilt over; remember from some of the earlier blog posts that her mother had also told KatieLyn that 'Joe is taking you away from me.'  KatieLyn felt tremendous guilt over causing her mother that pain as well.

God had an answer to all of KatieLyn's past fifteen years of prayer for a husband and relief from her feelings of guilt, but God needed her consent to bring it to pass, but she was trapped in a co-dependent bondage that she liked and was very comfortable in. God had an answer to her co-dependency already in the works for her. But God needed her to enter into a marriage covenant so that he could "instruct the harvesters" to bring in her blessing.  He needed for her to choose to be a wife more than she was a daughter in order to bring the better solution. God needed KatieLyn's cooperation and agreement before He could legally step in and do anything about it. God could not override delegated authority; He could not 'fix' her lack of faith if she did not want it to be fixed.

The Lesson
Everyone has been given delegated authority over his/her own life to either choose to follow God or to choose otherwise. Although KatieLyn was strongly persuaded by her mother to doubt God, (her mother going so far as to say that having doubts was wisdom, and that during the months that KatieLyn had trusted the Lord she "wasn't thinking clearly,") in the end, KatieLyn made her own choice.  She used her spiritual authority to reject God's plan, she revealed what was really in her heart, and that is the only thing that made her unfit as a wife. 

Credit: oil painting, Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden, circa 1800, Wenzel Peter, Vatican archive.