The Destructive Nature
of
Careless Prayer Claims
This article is a dangerous article for me to write. It is dangerous
because it is easy for the reader to misinterpret what is being said, and
also because people may feel it is an attack on God. I am sure that I
will receive letters criticizing what I am saying in this discussion, and
I know it is politically incorrect in the religious community to write anything
critical of prayer. The fact remains however, that a great deal of damage
is being done by careless claims about prayer. We were recently sent a
video of a Larry King show in which big name people claimed that a miracle
had taken place in their family and asking that people pray that more of
a miracle might take place. The incident involved a grandson of the entertainer
Pat Boone and featured members of Boone's family and a number of big name
preachers. Over and over people calling into the show asked questions that
hit at the destructive nature of the claims that were being made, but the
program continued to extol what had happened as a clear miracle of God.
We want to emphasize that this article is not intended to deny anything.
Even the situation the Boone family finds itself in and its eventual resolution
is not what this article is about. God can perform any miracle He wishes
to, and we would not discourage anyone from asking God for a miracle--no
matter what the situation is and no matter what their belief system might
be. What we are concerned with in this discussion is careless prayer claims
and what their affect is on the people asking God's help and to the public
at large.
Claiming Supernatural Miracles
for Natural Ones
In the Boone family experience we have a young man who fell a great distance
and was severely injured. There was damage to many organs and great damage
to the externals of his body. One by one these injuries have been repaired
so that as you look at the young man he appears to be free of the damage
of the fall. The Larry King dialogue stated that his liver had healed, his
jaw had healed, his lungs had healed, and that God had provided this miraculous
series of healings one by one over the weeks that the young man had been
in the hospital.
The human body is an incredibly designed machine. Unlike man-made machines,
the body is designed with a variety of tools to repair itself when it is
injured or when physical changes occur within it. In the Boone family situation
we have a young man at the prime of life. His body is at its greatest potential
for recovery, and so a skeptic can look at what has happened and legitimately
say "This is just the natural body healing itself from a severe wound."
The young man's brain had also been injured from the accident and at the
time of this writing there is no indication that a full recovery will come
from that injury. Atheists make huge gains with people when they point to
a case like this and ask "why would God heal part of his body and not give
him a total recovery?"
I have always been amazed at how careful the Bible writers are to show
the reader that the miracles of Jesus were not like what we have just described.
Jesus gave no margin for skeptics. When a man who had been blind since
birth was given sight in John 9 , he was immediately able to see and function with
sight. Modern medicine knows that getting the eye to work is only part of
sight. To get a person who has never had sight to see and use sight instantly
is absolutely 
impossible. In Mark 8:22-26 we see an incident that looks very much like
Jesus confronted this problem in His healing. Jesus takes a blind man and
anoints the man's eyes. He then asks the man if he sees anything. The man
responds that he sees people that look like trees walking around. Jesus then
again touches the man's eyes and the Bible says the man sees everything clearly.
It seems that the Bible recognizes two different things involved in the
restoration of sight and the cure is instantaneous. In John 11 when Jesus
brings Lazarus forth from the dead, there is no room left for doubt about
the miracle. Lazarus has not only been dead for three days, but he has been
wrapped in burial cloths so tightly that Jesus has to tell the people to
loose him when He restores life to him. The cure is instantaneous and complete.
No room is left for the skeptic to attribute the miracle to some natural
process. You can reject the claim as a lie, but you cannot deny that if
it happened it was clear miracle of God.
In today's world, skeptics can bring great doubts to the public at large
when they can show that there is a high probability that the claimed miracle
was just a natural process that everyone experiences from time to time.
I had an atheist friend with terminal cancer many years ago, who had a sudden
reversal in his tumor that eventually resulted in it totally disappearing.
He has continued his active campaign against the existence of God, which
by all rights should have ended when the cancer took control of his body.
We would do far better in our approach to the public to point out that
it is the wisdom of God's design of the body and of the natural world we
live in that allows all recovery from all illness than to make a claim that
God supernaturally produced a cure for us that can have natural causes.
The question is not whether God is active and alive on planet Earth, but
how God acts in today's world and with whom.
Making God a Respecter of
Persons
One of the unique attributes of the Christian system is that it does
not put one person over another. One of the most beautiful stories in the
New Testament is the story of Cornelius. This man was a centurion in what
was called "The Italian Regiment." He was a follower of God, and God acted
in response to his prayer. Peter is brought to Cornelius and in undeniable
terms God shows Peter that the Christian system is for all men. When he
sees this Peter says "I now realize how true it is that God does not show
favoritism but accepts men from every nation who fear Him and do what is
right." The nationalistic, paternalistic, ethnic favoritism that existed
under the Law of Moses was done away with. Passages like 1 Corinthians
12:12-31 show that the Church is made up of all kinds of people working
as a unit--not one favored over another. Galatians 3:28
says it best when the writer tells us "There is neither Jew nor Greek,
slave nor free, male nor female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus."
This principle of equality is lost if we claim that God offers miraculous
cures to those who He especially likes and denies them to those of us He
does not. God loves all of us and sent His son to die for all of us--not
just those who might be more appealing to Him in some way. Suppose that
God looks at your child and your prayer and says " OK, I like your prayers
very much and I love you very much so I will cure your child of this disease
and your child shall live." Then He looks at me and says "Well, I don't
think you have asked enough people to pray for you and I don't like the way
you pray and I really don't like you or your child very much so your child
will die."
I can tell you from difficult personal experience that this is exactly
what happens to many of us. When my wife and I first realized that our
first born had some problems, we prayed and prayed that the problems would
disappear. When that did not seem to be happening, we prayed that our son
would not be blind, because it appeared he had a vision problem. When it
was obvious he would be blind we prayed that he would be OK mentally so
we could work to handle the vision problems. After weeks and months of
prayer it became obvious our son was retarded. We were at the point where
we just prayed that he not have any more problems--but he did: a form of
muscular dystrophy and a form of cerebral palsy. There were those who disengaged
themselves from us because they felt we must not have much of a connection
with God. God was not answering our prayers because we were not spiritual
enough or because we had done things that made God refuse our petitions.
I even went through a period when I wondered if God was not retaliating
at me because of my years as an atheist--and in fact there was a minister
who made that statement to me.
It was only when I starting looking at Job and Christ Himself that I
began to see that the problem was not that God liked other people better
than He liked me.
Giving Weak Answers to
People
with Bad Results in Their Prayer Life
The experiences that we have had with people who claim to be Christians
on this subject have almost universally been negative. It is easy for people
who have no problems in their lives and no struggles at the moment to give
simplistic answers to people in pain. Saying that our faith is insufficient
is not only untrue but totally cruel and highly destructive. The blind
man and his family in John 9 were not people who were followers of Jesus
and did not even know who Jesus was when the blindness was cured. In one
case a widow's son was raised from the dead as his funeral procession went
out of the city in which they lived. When Jesus says "your faith has ..."
He is stating the process that led the person to Him, but He is not giving
a prerequisite for action. There are too many cases where people who had
no faith get an incredible miracle to take such a position. There is no
question that by the time my wife and I had been hammered with one negative
result after another with our son, our faith was hanging on by a thread.
Only when we started looking at God's purpose in creating man, at Job's
life and problems, at the terrible suffering that Jesus endured and how
He responded to those last hours before dying on the cross did we begin
to make sense of our situation.
Saying "Well, this is God's will" is another weak and destructive answer
that rips and tears at the spiritual fabric of people. There are many things
that happen in this world that are not God's will. It is not God's will
that any should be lost the Bible says ( 2 Peter 3:9 ) and
yet we know people will be lost. It is not God's will that John Clayton
sin. Does John Clayton sin?--yes--and that is not God's will. There is
a difference between what God enjoys, what God says will happen, and what
we think God ought to do in addressing our problems in life. To tell someone
who has just had a tragedy (that God did not solve the problem as he/she
wanted it solved) that this is God's will not only is destructive, but is
untrue. Jesus wept when He came to the tomb to resurrect Lazarus, and He
did that because He saw the pain of being human and suffering the loss of
what you love. We are told that we will all die, and we are told that we
will reap what we sow and those statements cannot be washed away by a careless
use of the phrase "this is God's will." God weeps with us in tragedy and
loss as He did at the death of Lazarus, but He does not sweep our pain and
agony under the rug with clever or flippant clichšs.
Ephesians 6:12
tells us that we are in a war with spiritual terrorism. The battle is
severe and there will be losses in the battle. Our prayer life needs to
be conducted with the realization that this war is going on. We have a
tendency to approach life with a Pollyanna attitude that nothing bad is
ever going to happen if we live a certain way and develop the correct set
of words and approaches to God. God knows what we have need of before we
ask, and He knows that life is hard and that we will have bad things happen
to us. The promises God gives us are promises that He will sustain us and
that we will not be given more to handle than we can endure ( 1 Corinthians 10:13
). There is never anything wrong in anything we ask God for, but we cannot
hold God hostage to our demands or feel that we have any worthiness that
God needs to reward.
What causes fights and quarrels among you? Don't they come from your desires
that battle within you? You want something but don't get it. You kill
and covet, but you cannot have what you want. You quarrel and fight. You
do not have, because you do not ask God. When you ask, you do not receive,
because you ask with wrong motives, that you may spend what you get on your
pleasures.
You adulterous people don't you know that friendship with the world is
hatred toward God? Anyone who chooses to be a friend of the world becomes
an enemy of God. Or do you think that Scripture says without reason that
the spirit he caused to live in us tends toward envy, but he gives us more
grace? That is why Scripture says: "God opposes the proud but gives grace
to the humble."
Submit yourselves, then, to God. Resist the devil, and he will flee
from you. Come near to God, and he will come near to you. Wash your hands,
you sinners, and purify your hearts, you double-minded. Grieve, mourn and
wail. Change your laughter to mourning and your joy to gloom. Humble yourselves
before the Lord, and he will lift you up.--James 4:1-10
--John N. Clayton
Back to Contents Does God Exist?, MayJun02.