by Eric Metaxas
Biblical theology is crystal clear on this, because there are a number of Scripture verses that address it directly. Perhaps the most direct one is from Romans 8:28. It reads: “And we know that all things work together for good to those that love God, to those who are the called according to his purpose.” This is a very dramatic statement, and if you believe it, everything changes. Because it means that you can see everything that happens—both good and bad—as part of what God is doing to lead you toward the larger good. In other words, everything you do and experience, including suffering, has profound meaning. It is part of something larger that is happening and that is leading you toward something better. The J. B. Phillips translation of that verse makes the point even clearer: “Moreover we know that to those who love God, who are called according to his plan, everything that happens fits into a pattern for good.”
So those who have faith in the God of the Bible can know that even if we don’t get the miracle we are praying for, we can relax and trust that God is nonetheless leading us toward something through whatever it is we are enduring. That is an absolutely extraordinary concept, but if we believe that God can perform outrageous miracles, we should also be able to believe he can do that.
ARE ALL MIRACLES FROM GOD? WHY SHOULD WE CARE?
Imagine that someone you love is deathly ill and another person you know offers to pray for healing. Does the identity of the deity to whom they pray matter? What if you learned that the deity was a dark figure? What if the friend were to pray to the Prince of Darkness himself, and what if your friend said that the results were guaranteed, that your loved one would recover? It’s tempting, but wouldn’t a sane person be afraid to accept such a “gift” if that were really the source? Might not healing from this dark source come with serious consequences? We have all seen movies or know stories in which someone gets something extraordinary from the devil but must ultimately pay for it with his eternal soul. Don’t we know there are some things not worth trading?
Even if we cannot believe in the existence of Satan, the concept is the same. If all we want is the gift—the miracle—and we couldn’t care less who the giver is, we have not thought things through very well. If someone got what he wanted by doing the bidding of Adolf Hitler, what should we think of that person? If anyone were to give their loyalty to Hitler to get something in return, would not most people rightly regard that person as an immoral monster, who was in part responsible for all that Hitler did? Would that person not somehow partake of the evil of Hitler’s deeds if they were to tacitly or openly assent to his doing something for them? Or can we shunt aside and ignore the sadistic horrors of the death camps if we get what we want?
We can consider the idea more broadly by asking whether it is immoral to accept a stolen car as a gift. If we do so, are we not complicit in the car’s theft? Have we shielded ourselves from thinking about the person from whom the car was stolen? Do we not have a moral obligation to think about that person—and therefore an obligation to refuse the “gift”? Isn’t it true that anything we get from a suspicious source isn’t a gift at all but simply puts us in debt to the giver? If I accept a “gift” from a criminal, won’t that criminal expect something from me in return? Am I prepared to give that?
The supernatural world is not all good. It is populated with angels and demons both. So to open oneself up to the supernatural realm without knowing exactly with whom we are communicating is not just foolish but also potentially extremely harmful. We have to admit that perhaps we don’t know quite enough about the supernatural realm to gamble with it recklessly. If I am in touch with some supernatural power, I would do well to know just who wields that power and how they are ultimately disposed toward me. Are they giving me something to lure me down a path I would never take if I knew in advance where it was leading? We have to consider that if Satan exists, he is a supernatural being with the ability to use “miraculous” powers to deceive us. That’s another good reason for us to be critical and careful and not to believe anything and everything.
We live in a culture that is for many reasons uncomfortable with speaking of evil or of Satan. One reason is that many people are embarrassed by the notion because it is often associated with the medieval idea of a red figure with hooves, horns, a tail, and a pitchfork. The Bible says nothing of anyone looking like that, but it does speak clearly of God’s adversary, and the word “Satan” simply means “adversary.” We have to be willing to separate such cartoonish notions from what actually exists. Even if we decide to reject this idea, let’s be sure of what it is we are rejecting. Let’s also be aware that many people we would regard as intelligent and sophisticated have taken the idea of a Satanic realm seriously. M. Scott Peck, who wrote the blockbuster bestseller The Road Less Travelled, also wrote a book titled People of the Lie. This Harvard psychiatrist did not take the idea of evil seriously either, until over the years he had encountered a number of patients in his practice whose behavior could not be explained in naturalistic terms. For anyone wishing a sober accounting of this subject, they would do well to start with that book.
CAN PRAYER MAKE MIRACLES HAPPEN?
Even though prayers are not offered only to get a desired result, there is little doubt that most miracles are the result of prayer. God wants us to pray to him and ask him for things, just as any loving father and mother want their children to come to them with whatever is on their minds. But if our focus is solely on getting the outcome we want, the prayer will fail, precisely because our belief is placed in the wrong place. It’s a great irony. If all we care about is the result, then we are effectively making that result our God, rather than God himself. So if we are praying to our “God”—the God of results—rather than to God himself, then we are praying to a “God” who is not God, and who is therefore powerless to help us.
Perhaps the best way to talk about this is to think about prayers for healing. How do they work, exactly? The shortest and most accurate answer to that question is We don’t know. But we may indeed know something about how they work: For example, we can know something about the link between our thoughts and our prayers.
It is certainly possible that our mental ability to “visualize” a miraculous healing could have the ability to affect our body in a physical way. Though the link between one’s mind and one’s body is a deep mystery, we know there is a link. Someone who is relentlessly negative has a higher chance of falling ill than someone who is upbeat and positive. This does not mean that all illnesses are the result of our thoughts, but to deny any link whatever is to deny a great body of evidence. Honesty on this subject compels us to say that there is something there, but the details and the extent of that something are yet unknown to us.
Prayer obviously involves our thoughts, or certainly should. Whether we are speaking prayers out loud, or merely thinking them, our thoughts are meant to be engaged in our prayers. Even if we are praying prayers from a book or reciting a rote prayer, like the Lord’s Prayer, we are supposed to be thinking them as we pray them, not just reading them or reciting them. We are not mynah birds or parrots. There’s no magic in pronouncing the sounds in the phrase “Hallowed be thy Name” if we don’t know what that phrase means. So our thoughts are vital to our prayers.
But there has been a tendency in recent decades to blur the line between prayer and thinking. One often hears the unfortunate sentence, Our thoughts and prayers are with so-and-so. Or we hear We send our thoughts and prayers out to so-and-so. What in the world do these statements mean? How exactly can our thoughts be with someone? Does this simply mean that we are thinking about them? But how can our prayers be with someone? Do we mean to say we are praying for them? Much more confusing is the idea that we can “send” our thoughts and prayers out to someone. We pray to God so that he might answer them. Why would we “send” our prayers to someone besides God?
It seems the reason people use this kind of elliptical and obtuse language is because they are confused about what
prayer actually is. According to the biblical model, we pray to the God who is outside time and space, and that God reaches into time and space in answer. God is “outside the system” as we have said, and the miraculous is when he “reaches in” to our world from “out there,” beyond this world. It’s crucial we understand this. God created time and space but is not inside time or space and bound as we are. If someone has a narrowly materialistic view of the universe and believes there is nothing beyond time and space, their “thoughts and prayers” are hoping to get results from “within the closed system” of time and space.
Indeed, some believe that we are “gods” and partake of the divine in a way, so that we are essentially “praying” to ourselves or praying to the “collective unconscious,” of which we are a part. But this is nothing like prayer to the God of the Bible who created the universe. Such people are really talking about using their own thoughts to provoke some kind of change or action, rather than appealing to a God—who is distinctly other and who is outside time and space.
We see this mistaken view manifested in roughly two ways, one we can call the “New Age Fallacy,” and one we can call the “Religious Fallacy” or “Prosperity Gospel.” Both of these fallacies trade on the idea of mentally visualizing what we want in such a way that we force “the universe” to make it appear. Both approaches believe they’ve found the hidden principles to the universe and have figured out how to make those principles work for them. Both look to us and our own efforts, rather than to God and what he would do for us out of his love for us.
The “New Age Fallacy” is what we find in things like Marianne Williamson’s A Course in Miracles or The Secret. It’s the idea that what we really need to do is get our thoughts in tune with the “universe” and good things will begin to come our way. But this is an idea that is bounded by time and space—that seeks answers from within the “universe.” It does not bother with the God who created the universe and who is beyond the universe. It’s about what is here inside time and space and how we can get it to work for us. It’s about what we can accomplish if we only set our minds to it. It is not humbling ourselves before the creator of the universe, but about getting in tune with the universe itself, with “self-actualizing” and feeling “empowered.”
But as we say, this is dramatically different from the historic and biblical view of prayer. According to the historic and biblical view of prayer, we pray to God, and God—not us or our positive thoughts or the “universe”—is the one who hears and answers prayer. The importance of the distinction between these two views of “prayer” cannot be overstated. To pray to the God outside time and space is different than simply thinking good thoughts or visualizing positive outcomes.
The “Religious Fallacy,” while certainly invoking the name of God, nonetheless falls into a similar trap as the “New Age Fallacy.” It puts all the emphasis on the faith of the person praying rather than on the God to whom the person is praying. This has also been called the “Prosperity Gospel,” or “Name It and Claim It” teaching. It mustn’t be denied that the faith of someone has some connection with the efficacy of that person’s prayer. But if we push this idea too far, we end up believing that it is our faith that brings about the outcome. We think that if we can only believe strongly enough, we can make God hear our prayer and answer it.
Praying to God involves both us and God. God wants us to participate in what he is doing, and for sure one of the main ways we participate in what he is doing is by prayer. We can also participate in what he is doing by feeding the hungry and helping the poor and caring for the sick and giving of our resources to those who have little. God wants us to partner with him. So there is a paradox at work, and a mystery. On the one hand, the Bible says that apart from God we can do nothing. And yet, on the other hand, God invites us to do some things with him. This is at the heart of the mystery of prayer. God wants us to use our faith and to pray. But we can focus so much on the importance of our faith and our prayers that we forget about God and think it is our faith and our prayers that perform the miracle, rather than the God to whom we pray and in whom we have faith as we pray.
If we fall into that trap, we become convinced that if our prayer is not being answered as we would like it to be answered, it’s because we aren’t praying hard enough or long enough, or because our faith is simply weak. This puts far too much emphasis on our own role in whatever is happening or not happening. It will also inevitably lead to people saying that if you are sick and didn’t get healed, it’s because your faith wasn’t strong enough. To blame the victim or the sufferer for his or her illness, and to suggest that if that person only had more faith and prayed harder, healing would follow is simply wrong. When I was in high school, I had a classmate who suffered from multiple sclerosis and over time she grew frailer and frailer. After our senior year she died. I knew that she and many were praying for her healing. But I also knew that some Christians were saying she was not healed because she did not have enough faith. This is bad theology.
Another version of the “Prosperity Gospel” or “Name It and Claim It” teaching has to do with finding a verse in the Bible and then “claiming” that verse. Proponents of this thinking believe that God must fulfill his promise to us in whatever verse we are “claiming” because what God says in his Word, the Bible, is true, and we can trust it to be true. So someone might pray: God, your Word says in Isaiah that by your stripes we are healed and I know you are not a liar and that your Word is true and I claim that Scripture in Jesus’s name and therefore I will be healed of this stomachache! We need to have faith in what the Bible says, but we have to be careful that we aren’t trying to force God to do what we want. That is arrogance rather than humility. God loves us, but we cannot demand things of him as though our faith is in charge rather than God.
If someone believes it is our faith that heals us and forgets that it is God who does it, we should ask that person how much faith Lazarus had. Remember, he was decomposing in a tomb when Jesus raised him from death. His faith obviously didn’t matter. It was all God. It is God and God’s grace that heals, not our prayers and not our “faith.” Though we are exhorted by God to pray to him, we cannot compel him to do what we wish.
DO ALL CHRISTIANS BELIEVE IN MIRACLES?
In a word, no. Some Christians today, although holding to a conservative view of what the Bible says, nonetheless also hold to a doctrine called “dispensationalism,” which essentially says that before the Bible was completed (around 90 A.D., when Saint John wrote the Book of Revelation), there was a particular need for miracles, so God gave us a special “dispensation” of the miraculous. But since then, now that God’s Word exists in its complete and final form, we don’t need miracles. As far as they are concerned, God doesn’t need to reveal himself anyplace other than in the Bible, which is complete and sufficient. For these people, any “revelations” that go beyond reading the Bible are heretical and to be avoided and despised. As far as they are concerned, the Age of Miracles has been over for more than nineteen centuries.
But more typical of Christians who do not believe in miracles are those who hold to theologically liberal views of the Bible. These Christians do not subscribe to the dispensationalist view, which says that miracles happened up until the Bible was completed. They subscribe instead to the view that miracles actually never happened at all, including during Bible times. They are likely to try to find naturalistic explanations for Bible miracles, which we will touch on briefly in the next chapter. The difficulty with this view is that if all of the miracles in the Bible are explained naturalistically, we have to ask, What in the Bible remains? If we remove the idea of a supernatural God who is free to act in miraculous ways, we fall into the slough of despond inhabited by the scientistic naturalists. We essentially remove God himself from the Bible. Why anyone calling himself a Christian would feel the need to do this is complicated and mysterious, but much of this phenomenon seems to stem from embarrassment
at being “out of step” with the wider secular culture. In other words, they have accepted the false view that pits “science” and “progress” against faith. Of course, tragically, in this desire to accommodate themselves to the surrounding culture, they have abandoned the very thing that can bring hope and healing to that culture.
WHY IS IT SO HARD TO BELIEVE?
There are many reasons it is difficult to believe in miracles, but perhaps the principal difficulty in believing in anything has more to do with one’s era and culture than with anything we might describe as “logical.” We are inclined toward thinking that our objections to believing in something are “logical” objections, and therefore “objective” objections. But in truth our very ideas about logic and how one ought to come to conclusions about the nature of reality are informed by the usually unacknowledged presuppositions of the world in which we live. So the first step in trying to think about miracles is to see the presuppositions we bring to our thinking. This is itself difficult, perhaps because acknowledging them is a humbling project. Who wants to admit that we do not see clearly but through a cultural lens, darkly? Every culture and era flatters itself that we are finally seeing what previous eras and cultures could not see because of their own blinders and ideological lenses. To admit that we are in some sense no different from tenth-century peasants is unacceptable to most of us. It may be offensive. To accept it may take real courage.
Just because our ideological lenses are different—chronologically later and borne on more sophisticated “scientific” foundations—does not mean they are not ideological lenses. What is it about human pride that insists our generation is the one to finally see the unmediated and unadulterated truth? Cannot the utopianist horrors of the twentieth century (the War to End All Wars, the Maginot Line, the Gulag Archipelago, thalidomide) instruct us toward something like a greater humility? Wouldn’t that be the wiser course?
