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At 625 words this article is too short. Not because it needs to explain more, but because it needs to document its claims. There are no Bible verses quoted, and the two referenced Bible verses are not even about prayer.
At 625 words this article is too short. Not because it needs to explain more, but because it needs to document its claims. There are no Bible verses quoted, and the two referenced Bible verses are not even about prayer.
How is it possible to teach the Bible without quoting it? We must deem this Bad Bible Teaching.
What Sam Storms wrestles with is the cognitive dissonance between his Calvinistic beliefs and the biblical reality. The Calvinist thinks that God's sovereignty means He is required to determine the outcome of everything in advance. Thus he believes that prayer does not change God's mind. Prayer, in essence, is simply the articulation of that which agrees with what God long ago decided to do.
What is this based on? Probably this verse:
1Sa. 15:29 He who is the Glory of Israel does not lie or change his mind; for he is not a man, that he should change his mind.”
Yet in verse 35 we read,
And the LORD was grieved that he had made Saul king over Israel.
He is not a man, i.e., He changes His mind in a way that is not like a man.
The biblical reality is that prayer implicitly is predicated on the fact that it obtains results. And there are times in the Bible where God actually relents from His course of action:
Ex. 32:14 Then the LORD relented and did not bring on his people the disaster he had threatened.Ps. 106:45 for their sake he remembered his covenant and out of his great love he relented.
Jer. 18:7-8 If at any time I announce that a nation or kingdom is to be uprooted, torn down and destroyed, 8 and if that nation I warned repents of its evil, then I willrelent and not inflict on it the disaster I had planned.
Sam Storms would have it that God had already pre-planned His change of action at the beginning of time, so His relenting was already what He was going to do. There is no Bible verse that supports this nonsensical idea, but that is typical of the theological gymnastics Calvinism requires its apologists to do.
The reality is that we are commanded to pray with faith with an expectation that praying changes things:
Ja. 5:15 And the prayer offered in faith will make the sick person well; the Lord will raise him up. If he has sinned, he will be forgiven.He. 11:6 And without faith it is impossible to please God, because anyone who comes to him must believe that he exists and that he rewards those who earnestly seek him.
The best way to answer the question, “Does prayer change things?” is to determine what we mean by things. If the things in view are the course and circumstances of life as eternally decreed by God in his secret and sovereign counsel, the answer is “No, prayer does not change those things.” Prayer cannot change these things if by that one means that prayer can cause God to rescind a decree or force him to take back what he has planned. But we must not forget that prayer is one element in all God has decreed. And we must always be careful never to base or suspend our prayers on what we speculate may or may not be God’s sovereign and secret purpose. Our prayer lives are to be governed by God’s revealed and preceptive will, his moral will, which is to say the “will” of God for our lives as stated explicitly in Scripture. The Bible sets the parameters for our prayers, not what we think God has or should have decreed from eternity past.
God has sovereignly decreed when and how his Son, Jesus Christ, will return to this earth, and no amount of prayer, regardless of how fervent, will alter that fact. The day of divine reckoning for the wicked and unrepentant will come, regardless of who or how many may pray that it be deleted from God’s calendar for the future. According to Psalm 139:16 and Job 14:5, the length of our days on this earth is determined and decreed by God. We shall not die one second before or after the divinely appointed time. No amount of prayer will alter that fact. And yet, God may have also decreed that, in response to the prayers of his children, Mr. Smith is to live to be 85 years, 3 months, and 6 days old, rather than dying when he is 75.
My point is that apart from prophesied events such as Christ’s return and the final judgment or other events that are explicitly identified in Scripture, we do not know what God has decreed for human history in general or for our lives in particular. We do know that God commands us to pray because he is pleased to suspend certain blessings on the prayers of his people. Consequently, from a human perspective, it is true that “prayer changes things.” If we fail to pray, we may well forfeit those “things” that God has said may be ours if we ask him for them. Perhaps a better way of expressing the idea is to say that prayer “implements” or “facilitates” things, but that’s a bit awkward, to say the least. But surely God uses prayer to implement things he has decreed and commanded. When God decreed in eternity past that in 1984 Virginia Beach should be spared the devastating impact of Hurricane Gloria, he may have done so in conjunction with the decree that the prayers of his people be the reason why he did it. In this instance, the prayers of God’s people may have been the way God had determined to implement his will concerning where and when, if at all, Hurricane Gloria was to strike the shore.
Although this may not be an answer that satisfies everyone’s curiosity, we must put aside the vain notion that we can perfectly harmonize the relationship between God’s sovereign foreordination of all “things” and the responsible activity of human beings, one aspect of which is prayer. No amount of theologizing will ever fully satisfy our desire to reconcile these two biblical verities. We must, therefore, gladly acknowledge God’s sovereignty over all of life at the same time we passionately ask him to intervene in human affairs to change the course of affairs.
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