DEAR GOD, YOU SURE DON'T ACT LIKE YOU'RE ALIVE - DAY 5o

Day 50 – the mystery of prayer

Communion with God is the one need of the soul above all other need; prayer is the beginning of that communion... A coming-to-one with Him...is the sole end

of prayer, yea, of existence itself.  –GEORGE MACDONALD

 

Have you ever heard of the Jeffersonian Bible? As its name suggests, it was the creation of Thomas Jefferson, author of the Declaration of Independence and the third president of the United States. In regard to his religious views, Jefferson was a deist. He, like Voltaire and all other deists, believed that God was active in creation but since has been passive. He believed that “in the beginning” God wound up the universe as one would wind a clock; thereafter, He let it run its course. After the first chapter of Genesis, He never again interfered with the universe, removing Himself from the everyday lives of men and women.To Jefferson, God was unapproachable. After He gave to humanity “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness,” He left us alone. We quickly forgot the notion that “all men are created equal” and, left to our own desires and devises, brought upon ourselves misery and suffering. Compounding our problem, we have no hope of restoration in this life, for the God of the deist no longer deals with our affairs. Deists thus find themselves singing along with Bette Midler: “God is watching us from a distance.”

Jefferson could not fathom such a long-distance God intervening and doing the miraculous. Any thought of the Divine breaking into the natural world was considered absurd. Nothing supernatural had occurred since creation, so he advised everyone to quit looking for miracles altogether. This, of course, placed him at odds with much of the Biblical story. So Thomas Jefferson, in an attempt to mesh the scriptures with his own personal theology, took it upon himself to amend the Bible. He eliminated every gospel reference to the miraculous and compiled the remaining verses into what became known as the Jeffersonian Bible. Gone in his version of Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John was any mention of the chorus of angels telling the shepherds of Jesus’ birth. (In fact, any angelic message whatsoever was omitted.) Gone were all of Christ’s miraculous healings, the miracle at Cana where Jesus turned water into wine, the calming of the storm, the time when Jesus and Peter walked on the sea, and the feeding of the five thousand from one basket of food. Even the resurrection of Jesus, the focal point of Christianity, was eliminated and dismissed as untrue. To say the least, this abridged version of the gospels stirred quite a controversy!

Now I can relate in part to what Jefferson was trying to do. I understand what attracted him and other intelligent men to deism. This philosophical view was (and is) nothing other than an attempt to mesh the existence of God with all the suffering in the world. Deists, past and present, refuse to explain suffering by limiting God’s power or knowledge or even His love, choosing instead to worship a God whose availability is limited—a God, alas, who is not available at all. God, possessing both knowledge of our plight and the power to deal with it, has chosen to distance Himself from us. He formed us then forgot us. We, according to the deists, are presently the victims of divine neglect, examples of the old adage, “Out of sight, out of mind.”

This means, as a corollary, that deists worship a God who will not answer prayer. To them, no such involvement of God in daily life is possible. Many of you, if you are honest, would here concede to the deist. How often your prayers seem to fall on deaf ears! How few, if any, of your petitions are granted! If asked to give a personal testimony on answered prayer, how awkward you would feel, stuttering and groping for an example! Granted that testimonies of miraculous prayer do exist (entire books have been written about them), they always seem to happen to someone else. Thus you find yourself in regard to prayer much like those deists. You have abandoned all faith in its utility. While you refuse to assert that God has totally removed Himself from the world, you get the impression that at least He has withdrawn from your prayer closet. To use a well-worn phrase, your prayers seem to go no farther than the ceiling. And since nothing is seemingly accomplished time after time when you pray, the inevitable happens: you quit praying altogether. You become like that apathetic mouse in the psychology experiment who, having tasted the unpalatable pellet so often, will not even venture to see if the next one could be real. In this state of learned helplessness you live—believing in God but seldom, if ever, praying to Him.

Before I speak directly to you, let me address deism in general. I must admit that deism is one logical way to think of God and, in particular, one way to make sense of suffering in the world. But it is, at best, pessimistic. At worst, it is downright depressing. It is also has a shaky and tenuous foundation, for if just one example of miracle could be documented in history, deism would be declared once and for all false. If only one occasion could be found where God intervened in the world, Jefferson and his colleagues would have to change their tune. They would have to reinsert the gospel verses he omitted, because a single divine intervention opens wide the door to the possibility of others. 

Later on our journey, we will look at the resurrection of Jesus. I believe the weight of the evidence points toward its veracity. At least on this one occasion, it appears, the miraculous occurred. Fittingly, the pin that bursts the bubble of deism is the very miracle upon which Christianity is founded. I do not, of course, expect all of you at this stage to accept the resurrection as true. But I do ask you to admit this: if it did happen, then deism crumbles at its foundation. 

Before going on, an inherent inconsistency about deism should also be exposed. Deists ask us to deny the possibility of the miraculous in the present, but even they acknowledge the miracle of Creation “in the beginning.” If God was a miracle-worker back then, how can deists exclude any possibility of miracle now? To me, they are being just as presumptuous as those overly religious folk who see a miracle at every turn.

And, now, to the subject of prayer. I do not claim expertise in the art and manner of prayer. All I can and will offer is what seems to make sense from personal study and experience. In keeping with a popular trend, I will present my thoughts on prayer in the form of a Top Ten List:

TOP TEN TRUTHS ABOUT PRAYER

1. The primary purpose of prayer is communion, not petition.  It is, as George MacDonald puts it, a “coming-to-one” with God. This sense of fellowship with God is truly prayer’s “sole end.”

2. God is aware of every prayer. Nothing that happens, including my prayers, goes unnoticed by Him.

3. Honesty is the best policy. God knows my thoughts before I say a word. He is big enough to handle anything I throw His way. (If I need proof, I can read the books of Job and Lamentations.)

4. Some prayers of petition are answered. The possibility exists that God, infinitely powerful, will intervene and grant my requests.

5. Many prayers of petition are not answered. Don’t ask me why, but God does not always intervene, even when I pray for deliverance from illness or injustice. In these times I must yield to His sovereignty, trust in His power, wait for His justice, and cling to His love.

6. More prayers are answered than it seems. I believe that God hears and answers more of my prayers than I imagine and that someday I will fully understand this and give thanks.

7. Most miracles are not the result of prayer. Every time I suture a laceration, I am reminded of this. All I do with the nylon thread is approximate the edges of the wound. A few days later I remove the thread. In between, healing occurs, and to me it still is a mystery and miracle. So many things, trivial to me and taken for granted, are just as miraculous. What I need here is not prayer but perception.

8. The motive is more important than the method. Forget about time of day, posture and position, sentence structure, etc. If I come to God with a heart desirous of communion, I'll be better off than the person has attended all the seminars but has not attended to his heart.

9. Private is more important than public. I should pray in private more than I pray in public. I believe that no one should ever know how much I pray in private. The more I pray in private, the more important it is that no one knows.

10. Hard prayers should be prayed more than easy prayers. It’s 

      easy for me to ask God for something or thank Him for

      something. It’s quite a bit harder for me to pray for my  

      enemies, default to His will, grant and seek forgiveness, or 

      surrender my life in service. If it is true that “prayer changes

      lives,” then I am convinced that this hard road is the path 

      that must be taken. The hardest way back is often the

      surest way home.

I hope that these ten truths prove somewhat helpful as you face the uncertainties of prayer. This much is certain: they will be of help only to those of you who choose to pray.

¹Despite appearances to the contrary, deists do not totally deny God’s love and justice. They believe that at the end of the world He will act once and for all in our behalf to set things right. Until then, however, they cannot fathom any divine intervention in the world.

²Deism maintains a rather sizable following today. It appeals especially to those who have come to believe in God but are not yet convinced He does anything miraculous in the world. Antony Flew, a long-time atheist who recently converted to theism, is one example of a contemporary deist.

Daily Quotation

Quoted in C. S. Lewis, George MacDonald, 48.

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