You pray for a million bucks and two seconds later the doorbell rings. You answer the door to find an angel with a big sack of money–$1Million, to be exact. You consider this a “yes”—an “answered prayer”.
You pray for a million bucks and two seconds later, nothing happens. You keep praying for a million bucks, and months later, nothing has happened. You keep on praying and three years later, nothing has happened. Do you consider this an “answered prayer”? And if so, what is the answer? No? Not yet? Maybe?
How come we all seem to understand the “yes” in context of the direct intervention in the first example, and yet things get so very fuzzy in the second example?
How about this?:
You pray for a million bucks and two seconds later the doorbell rings. You answer the door to find an angel staring at you. The angel says, “God says, ‘No’.” Then the angels disappears. You consider this a “no” and an “answered prayer”.
How come that is not what people expect from a “no”? And how come the first example is not what people expect from a “yes”? OK, leave the angels out if you like—how come the immediacy and unmistakable clarity of the answers is not what people expect when communicating with God today?
Practically speaking, what people treat as a no/not-yet/maybe answer is really more like God had said “Guess!” Some folks even turn it into some sort of test, as if God is saying, “If you ask me enough times for this, then I’ll give it to you, provided you don’t waiver in your faith.” One problem with that, of course, is that such a conversation is wholly imagined in most cases, for hardly anyone ever reports having heard such messages from God. Further, it paints God as somewhat aloof, which idea is generally contrary to most Christian’s assumptions about him.
So what I’d like to know is: How do you know for sure when God says “no”?
The Obvious
Here is what is obvious: Things are not operating now as they operated during the narratives in scripture. For example, there are no apostles today (by most accounts), and there are not angels in charge of church congregations (Yes, that seems to have been the case; note how the letters in Revelation 2-3 were all addressed to angels). Jesus is no longer writing letters to churches. Signs, miracles, and wonders are no longer being performed. God no longer seems to be striking people dead for egregious sins in the church.
So what else has changed? Are we to expect that anything we see happening in the New Testament is still supposed to be happening today? Is there no intervention left? Well, that’s the question of the day, now, isn’t it? Yet nobody wants to touch it. Nobody wants to stop and define it all. Instead, they would rather go on asking God for a million dollars (even though there is no example of such in the Bible to my recollection). And they want to go on imagining his answers.
They do not want prophets to visit them, nor angels. They do not want handwriting on the wall, nor prophets to interpret it. No, they seem quite content rather to guess—as if their religious are a matter of imagination in the first place, and not of reality. But I’m no good with that. I want the facts. And since there is not one single document in the Bible addressed to anyone in our own time, facts on how things are today are not quite as convenient as we might like.
If we were to put aside wishful thinking, tradition-based doctrine, personal bias, and dishonesty, I can find no reason to believe that God is interacting with individuals today. I see all manner of believers praying for things they never get. They get no answer. Every once in a while, events turn out in a positive way, so they take this as a “yes” answer from God, but this does not account for the times in which nothing happens—-or in which the opposite happens. Still, they want to keep believing that God is interacting with them, anyway. They insist that he is.
But if he is, why isn’t he interacting as he did in the New Testament? Why doesn’t he send apostles to correct and to call out false teachers, or bad behavior amongst Christians turned hypocritical? Why doesn’t he strike down Christians who defraud other Christians? Why doesn’t he answer the questions of the believers as he did through the letters of the apostles in the First Century? Why doesn’t he insist that all the churches stay doctrinally pure and unified with each other as he did in the beginning?
Most will throw up their hands at such a list of questions, yet remain adamant that God does indeed answer their personal prayers. They pray it won’t rain on the church picnic, and it either rains or not. When it does rain, how shall they explain that God willed it to be so? “Uh, God sent the rain so that we would learn how to be flexible and how not to take things for granted—-yeah, that’s the ticket.” How interesting that people do not hesitate to wax prophetic like this, speaking for God when God hasn’t uttered a word himself. Meanwhile, their buddy across town is prophesying a different song altogether: “Uh, God sent the rain to remind us of the beauty of springtime and to draw us closer to nature.” And yet another: “God sent the rain because he is mad at us.” And another: “God didn’t send the rain; Satan did.” And on and on it goes, this guessing party. Meanwhile, all the contestants have little awareness that they are engaging in false prophecy, or even that they are contradicting one another. Each one is sure he is right, though he gives no thought to the prophecies of the others around him.
The astute Bible study recognizes immediately, however, that this is not prophecy as practiced in the Bible.
I do not believe that God is answering prayer today—at least not normally. I used to believe it, but then one day I decided to be honest and rational regarding my religious beliefs, and since then, I simply cannot find any manner of consistent evidence that supports his intervention. Many will endeavor to contradict me with their beliefs, but I am looking for actual evidence. And that is a different matter altogether.
