Trump’s Day of Prayer (Part 5) - It’s a bit more complicated than that...

This is the final blog in a mini-series exploring questions raised by President Trump’s declaration of a national Day of Prayer in response to the coronavirus pandemic. Just a few weeks later the number of cases increased until the USA had more than anywhere else in the world. Does this mean that God doesn’t listen to prayer or that He couldn’t answer prayer? Is this a challenge to the Christian faith?

The crux of the matter is that the Christian God has not promised to listen and respond to all our prayers, like a genie in a lamp. True prayer requires childlike humility expressed by faith in Jesus Christ rather than spiritual self-confidence. Like a good father, God is free to give the answers “no”, “wait”, or “this is better” as well as “yes” and He doesn’t have to explain why. In fact, if we take seriously what the Bible says about God it is clear that we could never understand fully even if He did explain. However much we grasp it is always a little bit more complicated than that...

Imagine that two people are praying. They are each asking God to meet personal needs, unaware of each other. God is listening to both and coordinating events so that both prayers are answered. Now imagine that there are a hundred people praying, or a thousand, or a million, or a billion. God is listening and coordinating the answers to all these prayers. Add to that people who are unable to pray for themselves like young children and people with restrictive physical or mental conditions. And what of those who do not pray or who are actively hostile to God? They do not escape god’s attention just because they are ignoring God! The complexity of interactions moves rapidly beyond our comprehension even before we consider that God, in order to answer prayer, must also be coordinating physical phenomena and caring for non-human life forms too. Jesus himself recognised that God answers our simple prayers in this much more complex reality when He said:

“Therefore I tell you, do not be anxious about your life, what you will

eat or what you will drink, nor about your body, what you will put on.

Is not life more than food, and the body more than clothing?

Look at the birds of the air: they neither sow nor reap nor gather

into barns, and yet your heavenly Father feeds them. Are you not of more 

value than they? And which of you by being anxious can add a single 

hour to his span of life? And why are you anxious about clothing?

Consider the lilies of the field, how they grow: they neither toil nor

spin, yet I tell you, even Solomon in all his glory was not arrayed like

one of these. But if God so clothes the grass of the field, which today is

alive and tomorrow is thrown into the oven, will he not much more

clothe you, O you of little faith? (Matthew 6:25-30).

It is hard - impossible - to really envisage a God so powerful and wise that He is actively arranging and overseeing everything that happens in the cosmos with an eye, not just on the immediate needs, but also on the events of history from beginning to end. Yesterday He was putting everything in place for today, and today He is preparing the way for tomorrow. This is not irrational in that there is no a priori reason why such an almighty being should not or cannot exist. But it is hard to grasp because it goes so far beyond the limitations of the human intellect. A finite mind has no way of comprehending the infinite. Yet this is exactly the kind of God revealed in the Bible (Acts 17:23-27; Colossians 1:15-17; Hebrews 1:1-4).

As a case in hand, consider the comments by Andrew Cuomo the Governor of New York. One month after Trump’s declared Day of Prayer Cuomo, who is known for his hostility to religious conservatives, told a press conference that the number of virus cases is “...down because we brought the number down”. He continued:

“God did not do that. Faith did not do that. Destiny did not do that.”

For Christians, prayer is not a magic bullet for solving our problems. It is an act of relating to God by faith and humility in our need. And God answers prayer in the context of a complex reality of interconnected factors - spiritual, physical, moral, biological, and human - touching the past, present and future. Within that complex reality there are people who honour God in prayer and others who deny God altogether. How then should God answer? And would we be able to recognise and understand His answers? For unbelievers this may appear to be another reason to question and doubt a God who is powerless or unwilling to answer prayer. But for the faithful it is another opportunity to submit in humble trust to the all-powerful and all-wise God revealed in the Bible.