Luke 11:9-10 And I say to you, Ask, and it shall be given you; seek, and you shall find; knock, and it shall be opened to you.… The principal objection which the thought of our time makes to the efficacy of prayer is based upon the scientific idea of law. Law, it is said, reigns throughout the universe, and is unchangeable and deaf to all entreaty. The truth of all this must be ungrudgingly conceded. If it were not true, if the order of nature were not invariable, there could be no science. No stronger proof that there is an intelligent and benevolent Power, upholding and directing the course of nature, can possibly be given to a thoughtful mind, than its unbroken order and the invariable methods of the Divine will. Such, then, is the Reign of Law, and no man, it is said, can grasp the conception and enter into intelligent sympathy with it, without abandoning the fond conceit that God will grant a favour to one of His creatures on being asked to do so. It may have been pardonable to pray for rain, for health, for freedom from pestilence and famine, when these things were supposed to depend upon the caprice of an omnipotent will, but the scientific idea of law renders these prayers absurd. Well, now, I do not pretend to give a complete answer to this objection; but I have a sufficient answer. It is the commonest fact of human life that man makes the forces and unchanging methods of nature the servants of his will. In this way he makes natural forces perform achievements which, when compared with any merely natural occurrences, might strictly be called supernatural. Now, if man, with his limited knowledge of the laws of the material world, can make them serve his turn in so many ingenious and surprising ways, while their order goes on unbroken, surely an Almighty and all-wise God, by skilful combinations of existing forces, and without departing from a single method to which His wisdom is pledged, can execute the behests of His own will. Surely He has not given man a greater liberty than He has left Himself. But this answer I have given is met by two objections. 1. It is said man's interference with the order of nature is obvious, it is a visible interposition, but who has ever marked the point where God interposes? If he counteracted one law of nature by another to meet the pleadings of His petitioners, would not science have detected His supernatural agency? Certainly not. No scientific man can explain what Force is, upon what its variations of intensity depend, or how its changes of form are brought about. 2. But then, there is another objection — that it is inconsistent with the wisdom of an omniscient God to suppose that He would ever alter His plan at the request of His creatures. Without pressing the answer that, as a God intent upon moral ends, it is part of His plan to leave room for answers to prayer, there is the obvious fact that God actually allows human beings to alter His plan, for His plan means here the original order of nature. The free will, the caprice, if you like, of human beings is constantly originating changes in nature which would not have been if they had not been, or would have been different if they had been other than they are. Now surely what man, for the purpose of his education and progress, has been permitted to do, God, having an eye to the same purpose, must be free to do Himself. The objections against the reasonableness of prayer from the point of view of the scientific conception of law, if valid at all, are valid for a great deal too much. They all imply that man is not free, that every thought of his mind and act of his will are as much determined for him by fixed laws as the course of the wind or the advance of the tide. And if this were true responsibility would be at an end; benevolence and murder would be simply different aspects of nature, like sunshine and storm. Religion would be a mere dream, resembling the fantastic forms of the mist as it catches the changing currents of the passing breeze. But there are very few who would not passionately reject a conclusion that contradicts our consciousness, and writes "vanity" over all the noblest and most pathetic passages of human history. (E. W. Shalders, B. A.) Parallel Verses KJV: And I say unto you, Ask, and it shall be given you; seek, and ye shall find; knock, and it shall be opened unto you. |
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