If Prayers “Worked”

Question from Ollie:

If today God showed evidence that you needed that he existed and the Bible is 100% true what would be the first thing you would ask him to change in your life?

Answer by SmartLX:

I’d ask for an end to the threats to society me and my wife are concerned about for the future, and in particular the future our son will face.

And then, going off of Mark 11:24, I’d do my best to believe that these threats had already been negated and that God would take care of everything. If I did manage to believe this, which would be much easier if I were 100% convinced of God’s existence, it would be a load off my mind.

And then I’d wait. If everything stayed hunky dory, I’d praise and thank God all my days. If on the other end of the scale EVERYTHING I feared came to pass, I would wonder why God had heard my prayer and allowed this. Hypothetically pre-convinced of Biblical inerrancy, I’d go back to Mark 11:24 and conclude that God had done something in response to my prayer which had given me what I’d asked for in a technical sense without actually saving us from the threats. I would curse myself for not wording the prayer correctly, and I would wonder why God (who could read my mind) had not interpreted it as I intended regardless. I’d eventually figure he had something more important to sort out with regard to His grand plan.

This is of course similar to what actual believers go through when they pray for things. As you can see, even when the existence of the Biblical God is assumed, no matter what happens there’s a way to give credit to God, and therefore there’s no way to know whether God did anything at all in response to a prayer.

2 thoughts on “If Prayers “Worked””

  1. SmartXL please correct your errors, in the first and second line there should be a comma between the words SOCIETY and ME, also, I believe that in the second line of the same chapter, the word FOR should not be there.

  2. Ollie writes: [If today God showed evidence that you needed that he existed and the Bible is 100% true what would be the first thing you would ask him to change in your life?]

    I would ask the god to immediately end all the things generally considered “bad” or “evil” in human existence and to restore all of us back to Eden. After all, isn’t that why we are created in the first place? We are supposedly so loved and cherished, so it only seems right that we finally are shown that by this loving and benevolent deity. In fact, I’d argue that this is actually OWED to us, since none of us asked to be born and put in this situation, and none of us deserve the punishment that each and every human got stuck with just because a young couple ate some fruit off a sacred tree. We’ve all been held responsible for something we had nothing to do with.

    I’m not going to hold my breath waiting for this to happen however…

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