Consciencebound

Prayer: Shouldn’t it Work Like the Bible Says it Does?

Prayer can be a pretty interesting thing. There are countless anecdotal stories that point out where prayers were answered in very specific and undeniable ways in people’s lives. In fact, this can be found across various religious lines. People from almost all faiths can attest to their prayers being answered by God so clearly that it is a proof to them of the truth of their faith. I don’t like to rule out the possibility that God in fact does answer prayer, even across these various religious lines, but what i would like to do is to take a look at prayer as a proof for God in a way that modern Christians often do not do.

We all look upon the reports of answered prayer from a religion different then our own as being highly suspect. It is put in the same place that we put reports of Jesus’ face appearing on a tortilla in South America, or a potato that looks like the Virgin Mary. As Christians, we don’t have a category to put these “answers” to prayer that come from faiths that are seemingly blatantly wrong like Islam or Mormonism, or Hinduism. “I thought that God did not hear the prayers of the reprobate?” we may think. So we often just assume that these people are delusional or at best overly zealous.

But what about those critiques of prayer in general that are out there? The critiques of the Evangelical version of answered prayer surely would stand up to such criticism wouldn’t they? This is what can be confusing and difficult to really deal with. There is some pretty good evidence to suggest that prayer in general is really not effective. That is, either God is choosing to not be involved in and respond to our petitions or God is not as we assume that He is, or worse. There are even double blind studies that have been done which show that prayer has no real effect in changing reality or healing the sick. My reaction to these kind of critiques is initially, “God cannot be tested”. Or, “who are you to test God in this way?”. But then I am reminded of some stories in the Bible where God seems to have no problem with this sort of thing:

22 Then Elijah said to them, “I am the only one of the LORD’s prophets left, but Baal has four hundred and fifty prophets. 23 Get two bulls for us. Let them choose one for themselves, and let them cut it into pieces and put it on the wood but not set fire to it. I will prepare the other bull and put it on the wood but not set fire to it. 24 Then you call on the name of your god, and I will call on the name of the LORD. The god who answers by fire—he is God.” Then all the people said, “What you say is good.” 25 Elijah said to the prophets of Baal, “Choose one of the bulls and prepare it first, since there are so many of you. Call on the name of your god, but do not light the fire.” 26 So they took the bull given them and prepared it. Then they called on the name of Baal from morning till noon. “O Baal, answer us!” they shouted. But there was no response; no one answered. And they danced around the altar they had made. 27 At noon Elijah began to taunt them. “Shout louder!” he said. “Surely he is a god! Perhaps he is deep in thought, or busy, or traveling. Maybe he is sleeping and must be awakened.” 28 So they shouted louder and slashed themselves with swords and spears, as was their custom, until their blood flowed. 29 Midday passed, and they continued their frantic prophesying until the time for the evening sacrifice. But there was no response, no one answered, no one paid attention. 30 Then Elijah said to all the people, “Come here to me.” They came to him, and he repaired the altar of the LORD, which was in ruins. 31 Elijah took twelve stones, one for each of the tribes descended from Jacob, to whom the word of the LORD had come, saying, “Your name shall be Israel.” 32 With the stones he built an altar in the name of the LORD, and he dug a trench around it large enough to hold two seahs [a] of seed. 33 He arranged the wood, cut the bull into pieces and laid it on the wood. Then he said to them, “Fill four large jars with water and pour it on the offering and on the wood.” 34 “Do it again,” he said, and they did it again. “Do it a third time,” he ordered, and they did it the third time. 35 The water ran down around the altar and even filled the trench. 36 At the time of sacrifice, the prophet Elijah stepped forward and prayed: “O LORD, God of Abraham, Isaac and Israel, let it be known today that you are God in Israel and that I am your servant and have done all these things at your command. 37 Answer me, O LORD, answer me, so these people will know that you, O LORD, are God, and that you are turning their hearts back again.” 38 Then the fire of the LORD fell and burned up the sacrifice, the wood, the stones and the soil, and also licked up the water in the trench. 39 When all the people saw this, they fell prostrate and cried, “The LORD -he is God! The LORD -he is God!”

1 Kings 18:22-39

This passage seems to clearly show that God has no problem in making himself known and being tested in a way that is not too unlike those who have challenged God in our day. And yet I don’t see any Christian leaders put their neck on the chopping block like Elijah did. Why is that? Does God just not want to be bothered any longer? Are we as a people just to unspiritual? Or maybe this is just an Old Testament thing that we no longer see in the New Testament? But if you look at the New Testament, it seems that we have admonitions to test God in prayer that were just as bold as what Elijah did if not even more bold:

In Mark 11 verse 24 Jesus says: “Therefore I tell you, whatever you ask for in prayer, believe that you have received it, and it will be yours.”

In John 14, verse 14, Jesus says:”Whatever you ask in my name, I will do it, that the Father may be glorified in the Son; if you ask anything in my name, I will do it.”

In Matthew 17:20 we see, I tell you the truth, if you have faith as small as a mustard seed, you can say to this mountain, “Move from here to there” and it will move.

What are we to make of such verses? We read no shortage of these kinds of passages in books that are teaching a “biblical view” of prayer but often we are uncomfortable when we read them. Why are we uncomfortable? Because we don’t seem to experience these truths. The prayers that we see “answered” are often ambiguous and undefined or are things that are easily explainable by natural causes. They are not undeniable supernatural interventions of God. I have often even heard it said that God uses the natural to accomplish the supernatural! And I can see how it is that this would be the case, but that does not really give a satisfactory representation of the way that we see prayer in the Bible in many places. We do not test God like Elijah did or like Gideon did when he placed a fleece outside and asked that God would make it so that dew would be on all of the ground around the fleece and not on the fleece. And then he did the opposite just to be sure that God really meant what he said. And what happened? God did it according to the Bible! He made something happen that could not be explained in a natural way. He did something supernatural!

That is what skeptics like myself are looking for. Maybe I would just try to find a way to explain it according to natural causes but it would be pretty difficult to do so. I would encourage anyone reading this who has experienced answers to their prayers to go out on a limb and take a risk to show God to be true. You have Biblical support for such an exercise and there are many people like myself who are just waiting for something to happen like is reported to have happened in Biblical times. This would be unmistakable evidence that God is real and is interested in our lives.

JL

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