More Things Are Wrought By Prayer

Welcome to Halting Toward Zion, the podcast where we limp like Jacob to the Promised Land and talk about life, the universe, and everything else along the way. I’m your host this evening, Bryan Broome, and I’m joined by Greg Uttinger and Emily Maxson.

Today we’re going to be continuing our march through Old Testament history. Having recently covered the person of Jezebel, we’re now going to cover the prophet Elijah. Elijah is most well-known for his confrontation with the prophets of Baal, where he calls down fire, but there’s more to him then just that. We’re going to talk more about what led up to that, the covenant that Elijah called upon God to remember, including its covenant stipulations and its sanctions. Greg, why don’t you get us started.

The background here is that Ahab and Jezebel have established Baal worship as the state religion in Israel, the northern kingdom. Baal worship, as we’ve seen before, is rooted in the idea that all is divine, but some powers are a little more divine than others. And if man, being divine, can harness those powers, well, then he can get stuff he wants, stuff he needs, like crops and children and peace on earth and things like that. God in this instance becomes a series of impersonal forces that man, through magic, manipulates.

Baal was particularly the masculine side of nature, the lightning storm, the rain that impregnates Mother Earth, everything big and boisterous and powerful but necessary. Ashera or Astaroth or Astarte is the feminine side, Mother Nature, the womb, the fertility of the land and all that.

The political advantage to this was that the king, and possibly the queen serving as high priestess, become social engineers on a cosmic level. If they can practice the magic that makes nature do what nature is supposed to do, then they’re really, really important, and people should really listen to them, obey them and serve them and give them stuff. So it would be very embarrassing if suddenly nature stopped doing those things.

Notice nature being used here as an abstract noun, which is to them more or less what it was. There was no personal Baal. In fact, Baal was not even an anthropomorphic god as such. Baal simply means lord. You might as well just say local deity and you’re close enough. This whole process is a violation of the first and second commandment at the very least, and probably every other commandment along the way.

In the midst of this, suddenly at Ahab’s court a man shows up. He is described elsewhere as hairy, probably a Nazirite, girded with a leather girdle, rough and confrontational. He simply says –

As the LORD God of Israel liveth, before whom I stand, there shall not be dew nor rain these years, but according to my word.

Then he runs and flees. At some point they probably search the record books. “Who was that anyway?”

“His name is Elijah, the Tishbite.” Elijah means “My God is Jehovah.”

A fortunate name, Jezebel perhaps would comment, but no one took him seriously right away. I mean it’s rude, it’s bad press, the optics don’t go well on this one, but he’s gone and nobody seems to have noticed, and we don’t really know where he is. He was from Gilead. They may have tracked that down.

But as the weeks turned into months, and the months turned into years, and there’s no rain, at some point somebody probably remembers this and says, “Um, do you think he could have something to do with this?” and his story goes on from there.

In the book of James we’re told a little bit more that 1 Kings does not tell us. This is what James says about Elijah. First of all he says –

The effectual fervent prayer of a righteous man availeth much. Elijah was a man subject to like passions as we are, and he prayed earnestly that it might not rain, and it rained not on the earth by the space of three years and six months. And he prayed again and the heaven gave rain, and the earth brought forth her fruit.

What 1 Kings didn’t tell us, we might have the impression that God simply appeared to Elijah and said, “Go tell them there’s not going to be any rain.” That’s actually not what happened. Apparently, Elijah looked at the apostasy and said, “This is covenant breaking.”

He knew the law well enough. He knew Leviticus 26 and Deuteronomy 28. The passages say basically that when God’s people go into idolatry, into apostasy, God will withhold rain. The heavens will be brass, the earth will be iron, and basically the crops aren’t going to grow. God will shut down your agricultural system. So Elijah actually prayed that Israel would get no rain, and God honored the prayer.

God apparently came to Elijah and said, “Well, you called for it and you’ve got to go tell them,” so for 3-1/2 years – and the number is not mentioned in 1 Kings, but both Jesus and here James do mention the exactly length of time, 3-1/2 years – there’s no rain. The grass dies and the cattle begin to dehydrate and die, and people don’t have water. It’s getting really, really bad.

We’ll see later what breaks that, how it comes to an end, but this is pretty clear from the text later on in 1 Kings that Elijah, satisfied that God’s sanctions have done their work, prays, and within a very short time God sends rain again.

The lesson here for God’s people, James tells us, is that the effectual fervent prayer of a righteous man availeth much, and he points to Elijah with regard to these very things – not raining, then raining. It’s that connection I think that some Christians have trouble with.

Now, we’re all good Calvinists and I believe we all agree that scripture is completed and there’s no more kind of special revelation going on. If you read the textbooks on theology you’ll probably find some definition of miracle that says that these were done to credential God’s servants, the prophets and the apostles, and particularly to credential their messages. And since the Bible is completed – and this is what you will hear – God does not do miracles anymore. I think there’s a problem with that formulation, and I think a lot hinges on what do you mean by miracle?

Right. Let’s define our terms here.

The Westminster Standards are really good actually on this, and unfortunately I don’t have them in front of me, but they speak very well of God’s sovereign power to work through means, without means, and beyond means, and the verbs are present-tense. God can still work beyond normal means we would expect. He can work without any kind of means. He has not abandoned that.

To put it a little differently, by completing the Bible he didn’t tie himself up with a straitjacket and bind himself to the laws of Newtonian mechanics. He did not lock himself into cause and effect to the point that, “Well, I’d love to give you rain, but there are no rain clouds coming for a long time. I’m sure they’ll get there.”

We’ve kind of picked up the idea, and it depends on who you are. This is not universal, but I’ve seen enough of it where we say, “Okay, the sign gifts are over, so there are no miracles.” Therefore, if you have, let us say, incurable cancer, then it’s incurable cancer and it would take a miracle, a reversal of natural laws, to cure it. Therefore, it cannot be cured. God will not have a miracle worker healer come in and heal you. We’d probably agree with that one. But neither can God heal you because it’s incurable cancer – laws of cause and effect and all that.

We know that it can’t be cured, because it’s incurable, so there.

There you go. And there are Christians who will not pray for someone with some disease that’s been labeled incurable, because that would take a miracle and God doesn’t do miracles. There’s a problem, because the very kind of thing that Elijah prayed for – both the stopping of the rain, and more particularly the return of the rain – looked pretty miraculous.

He did not consult weather charts or Doppler radar to see what the possibilities were like, or what statistical averages might be on rain during that season, or trace it back. “Okay, given weather patterns on the planet, is it reasonable to believe that in X number of months or years the rain will still not come? Okay, so I can now ask God to do something about that because now it’s easy for God. God can just muck a little bit with normal processes and…” What?

And then at the end when it’s time to ask God for rain, he simply bows or kneels down and starts praying. He sends his servant and says, “Go look at the Mediterranean. Is anything going on there?”

“Nope.”

“Okay, I’ll pray some more. Go look.”

“No.”

“I’ll pray some more. Go look.”

“No.”

Seven times, and the seventh time – “There’s this little cloud way out there, the size of a man’s hand.”

“That’s it. Let’s get out of here. Tell Ahab to get out of here. Rain is coming.”

A short time before there had been no rain clouds on the horizon, and suddenly there are rain clouds.

To put it really simply, we have to ask ourselves does prayer change things? Now, that question can mean a number of things, so the question itself has to be defined. Does God change his mind? No. God’s immutable. We know this. Does God act in a way so that from our perception it seems that he has changed his mind? Yes, the Bible uses that phrase all the time – “God repented that he had done this or that.”

So what’s going on here? When we pray, are we simply aligning and tuning our thought processes to God’s will, with no expectation or hope that physical reality will actually be altered at all? That is, is prayer largely meditation without effect? Or if we ask God for X, like rain, will God give us rain? Whereas if we had chosen not to ask, he would not have? That is, does God listen to prayer to the point of changing the apparent course of things in response to what his children ask of him?

Absolutely.

Absolutely.

I think especially for people who acknowledge predestination and foreknowledge and the laying out of history by God, it seems like a trap, a trick question to answer that. It’s like, “I won’t answer! Aha!” But really it is that simple. Yeah, of course he does. Of course he listens, and of course what we think is going to happen in the future is not always what he even planned out from before time began. Sometimes he uses our prayers as means.

Does God work through means? Yeah, and sometimes those means are our prayers rather than anything in a domino sort of chain reaction, and that’s what we’re looking at. Is God a deistic sort of God who set up all the conditions, pushed the first domino over, and through history they fall? And he’s smart enough to know that the rain clouds will be there just before or just after we ask for them, and it was all set up from the beginning?

Yes, that’s true, but is it also true that God can – I don’t like to use the word intervene because that’s not what he’s doing. Can God, who has been running the universe after a certain fashion, by his personal immediate providence suddenly do a left-hand turn and say, “Yeah, I know the wind was blowing this way. Now it’s going to blow that way. Your weather scanners didn’t predict this at all, nor could they have. I’m changing things.”

Here's the thing, then. If we admit that, are we saying, “Well, then God does miracles and anything is possible and we’re not sure of any science, if God can just change anything randomly”? Or are we saying, “No, if we were as smart as God we could step back and we could see all of the chain reactions leading to this. God doesn’t actually run the universe. He set it up and pushed the first button and now it just goes on autopilot.”

This is something I thought of earlier. I don’t remember exactly what it was you said that triggered this thought, but when we think of God’s miraculous acts in history as, “Oh, now God is acting. Now he’s upset the natural law to bring about the intent of the fact,” you’re just treating God like he’s a very large superhero with a particular set of abilities to upset natural laws. It’s like, “Oh, he’s like Ironman at this point now and he lives in the clouds. That’s what he is,” even if you wouldn’t obviously put it that way.

The fact is that because God is running everything, he is intimately involved in every nanosecond of creation, upholding it by the power of his very word. He gets to do whatever he wants. He’s normally – we call it normative – he’s normally very, very faithful in making sure gravity works the way it does. It’s consistent everywhere. But when his glory is better suited for it, or his purposes are better suited for it, he will gladly change the way things work for the sake of his covenant people or for the sake of his own glory.

I think of when the sun was held at bay when Israel is battling one of the pagan tribes. I can never keep track of which battle that is. There are so many pagan tribes that they fight.

They were fighting quite a number at that point. They had all gotten together and were going to jump on Israel. God had drawn them out of their cities to all attack Israel, so Israel could destroy them.

I always think of The Hobbit and the battle of the five armies.

Somehow I never made that connection.

For that very purpose it’s for his own glory and it’s for the protection of his covenant people. He also includes a means, which is very prayer-like, at least in the way it is used as a means, where as long as Moses’ arms are up he’s ‘holding back time’ – who are the two? Was it Joshua and Aaron?

It was Aaron and Hur.

That’s right, so there’s that. To draw another comparison, the three-braided cord is there being used as God’s means for his own glory in the act of – from our perspective – upsetting the natural flow of time.

The word I had used before was intervention. God does not intervene in the sense that God set things up to run like an orderly computer program, say, but he can push pause and then do something and then back out and resume, as if the rest of the time he’s not running things.

It’s not like he has to let his mana recharge. He’s not a priest in D&D.

No, he is the one who personally runs the universe.

One of my favorite psalms is Psalm 104, which is just one long ode to the providence of God, where we’re told in no uncertain terms that he makes the grass to grow, he sends the showers, he feeds the animals. This is God personally doing these things. He did not set up a system. He doesn’t have an automatic sprinkler system. He himself pours out the rain by his hand, by his divine power, according to his divine and immediate purpose.

Yes, he planned everything, absolutely. I remember the first time I heard a lecture on this. It was by R.J. Rushdoony on a tape. It was the first time I’d ever heard a discussion of providence. I was in ninth grade or something, and it was a turning point in my thinking.

I had been taught to be a good Calvinist and believe in predestination, but my idea was, “So God planned everything and then let it go, and everything runs according to the plan.” Notice everything runs, and God just dropped out of the equation. He set it up. He maybe pushed it down the hill and it’s running, and then we’re back to, “And a miracle is when God intervenes and breaks a natural law.” No.

This is a question I’ve asked a number of times, mostly in educational settings in lectures to some teachers or something. I always say, “This is a trick question,” and no one ever pays attention to, “so don’t give the answer you think you should.”

The question is, “True or false? God created the natural laws that run the universe.”

Who runs the universe?

Exactly, but everyone hears the word ‘created’ – God created. “Oh yeah, I’m a 6-day creationist. I believe God created…yeah.”

I stop them after they’ve all raised their hands and agreed, “Yes, God created.” I warned them it was a trick question. “God created the natural laws that run the universe.” I say, “You’re all wrong.”

“What?”

“There are no natural laws that run the universe. God runs the universe, personally and immediately by his providence,” whereby as it were by his hand, the catechism says. All things come to pass not by chance but by his fatherly hand – his personal oversight, his personal providence, his personal power applied in time and space at every given moment and every given point of space. He is the one actively bringing these things to pass. Jesus is actively upholding all things by the word of his power, 24/7, everywhere in the universe, all the time.

People are like, “What’s natural law then?” Natural law, as Bryan said earlier, is simply God’s faithfulness. God is so faithful that we can measure out his providence in terms of predictable relationships, so predictable we can put numbers to them. The force exerted on an object is equal to its mass and acceleration, because that’s the way God runs the universe.

I remember several years ago in an astronomy class at the local community college, the teacher was, to an extent, blatant but he was couching it in some very hand-wavey language in criticizing Christianity and criticizing theism in general. One of the things he was talking about was like, “You get these people that go around and say, ‘Oh, this thing we don’t understand in science, that’s the thing that God is doing.’ Then we figure out how that works and they go, ‘Okay, but he’s still doing this other thing we don’t understand yet.’”

It was playing into that very same idea that it’s natural laws that run the universe, and obviously the ones we don’t have natural laws for and we haven’t understood scientifically, we have the God of the gaps who fills in the gaps of our scientific understanding.

I never got much of a chance to talk with him one-on-one about that, just because of the virtue of the class, but I remember thinking, “This isn’t a problem. This is not the problem that he thinks it is, or the people who make those claims think it is.” It’s like, “Oh no, there’s so little that God’s doing, because he only takes care of these things that we don’t understand,” and that’s just patently false. He’s running everything.

If you talk to some physicists they’ll be like, “We don’t know what makes gravity work. We can describe it, but we don’t know what makes it work. It’s this weird thing,” but there are other things that we do understand how they work and we can express in mathematical terms and in logical rational terminology, and God runs those things, too. Just because we can describe them rationally doesn’t mean that it’s suddenly the domain of faith.

Was it Kierkegaard who did the leap of faith thing? I don’t know that that’s necessarily the most accurate interpretation actually of what he was saying, but still if you take it that way, we’re not like that.

It reminds me of Terry Pratchett’s line, “Just because you know how it works doesn’t mean it’s not magic.”

Yes. And just because we can describe the pattern and predict the outcome does not mean it’s not God. It just means God is very faithful, which is what he told Noah after the flood. I’m going to go ahead and read this for the sake of people who may not know the passage as well. God had just destroyed the planet with a flood. That was kind of a big deal. Facing a new world, it would be easy to think, “Is that going to happen again? Is our future at all predictable? Is it stable?”

“Should we bother building a city if it’s going to be wiped out with a flood?”

Yeah, all that, and God says this –

While the earth remaineth, seedtime and harvest, and cold and heat, and summer and winter, and day and night shall not cease.

First of all, God makes promises. This means he does control all of these things. He promises to maintain a relative faithfulness. The day and night thing – there were a couple times when the day/night thing slid a little for God’s own purposes.

Can I interrupt and maybe push back on that phrasing. I would have a hard time saying God’s faithfulness is relative. I think his faithfulness is absolute, but the way in which he administers it might change to suit his purposes.

Yeah, he said day and night shall not cease. Well, they didn’t. They just got extra-long on one occasion. People could point at that and say, “Well…” Again, he is not binding himself to the point where he can’t do unusual things, including sign miracles, but also including very odd and radical answers to prayer if he wants to.

Seedtime and harvest, that’s binding together the biological processes in plants with the orbit of the earth around the sun and its tilt on its axis – the seasons. Cold and heat – the movement of cold and heat is called thermodynamics. It’s the foundation of both physics and chemistry. If we don’t know that things move from hot into cold, the whole universe goes upside down. Summer and winter again is the tilt of the planet on its axis and the constant planetary spin, and so with day and night too.

These are basic astrophysical and thermodynamic realities that God promises. These will be relatively consistent, or he will faithfully execute them, though not always the way you might think. Again, my point is – and to James’ point – he’s not putting himself in a straitjacket to the point where he has to do it exactly this way every single time. One time he stopped the sun and the moon in the sky.

So he was smarter than the Medes and the Persians – to write a law and then not be able to do anything about it.

Yeah. As Bryan said earlier, it’s about God’s glory and the good of his people. So if changing things a little bit, or maybe even a lot, can help those things along in such a way that he deems to be really good – we may or may not agree. We may think that prayer needs to be answered this way right now, but no, actually it doesn’t. Sometimes we may say, “I prayed this, but it’s not like God’s going to instantaneously cure cancer or something…”

“How about I do that, just to jump you out of your lethargy and remind you who you’re dealing with.” This is God’s prerogative. We can’t dictate to him. We can’t force him.

Again, prayer is not magic. It’s his children asking the one who is absolutely sovereign, omnipotent, and all-wise to minister to us in ways that we, with our limited understanding and weak faith, believe we need help. Sometimes we’re right-on. Sometimes we’re a little bit off. Sometimes we’re way off, but he has promised as a good father to give us good gifts, and he has not limited himself in general as to what that may mean.

The one exception I think I can argue in the light of scripture is from Hebrews 9:27, “It is appointed unto men once to die, but after this the judgment.” God, for a sign miracle, did on a number of occasions overthrow that one.

This is the part of James I did not read, but I think I will because I think it’s relevant. What are the limits on what we can ask for? “My little daughter just died. Can I ask for resurrection?” He has said this –

Is any sick among you? Let him call for the elders of the church and let them pray over him, anointing him with oil in the name of the Lord. And the prayer of faith shall save the sick, and the Lord shall raise him up, and if he have committed sins they shall be forgiven him.

He doesn’t say, “If any of you are dead,” so I think there is one limitation. We shouldn’t probably be asking for resurrections once it is very clear the body has gone into deterioration. But as far as sicknesses, he does not limit it to cold and flu, although of late flu would be a deal, I guess, or a broken wrist or an owie on the face or something. He leaves it wide open that if you’re sick you can ask for healing, and he promises on some level to raise up that person.

Again, it’s not a blanket thing – “Every time you will feel perfectly well within 24 hours” kind of promise, but neither is it, “Okay, if anyone is sick – unless he has cancer or tuberculosis…” No, if he’s sick you can pray.

Clearly because they were not medically advanced, they didn’t know about things like terminal diseases, because no one had died from a disease before.

Yeah, that had never happened, and so we go.

Let’s look at the big picture again. Yes, we confess the sovereignty of God, and it’s an interesting thing. The sovereignty of God – from that we deduce that God can do anything and, in fact, will do anything according to his good pleasure. God is sovereign. Therefore, God can’t do anything because he’s already committed himself to a plan and we can’t possibly alter that plan, because we have to factor in his omniscience and eternal plan. So prayer does change things. Prayer does not change things. Both deduced from the sovereignty of God and his other attributes.

This is why we read the Bible.

It’s a manipulation of the word ‘sovereignty’ into something it doesn’t mean in any other context. You have a mighty king who has authority over all things. His sovereignty compels you to come and ask him for the things that you desire. It does not compel you to say, “Oh well, he’ll do everything and I’ll just go along with it,” like Eli, “the will of the Lord.”

Or Hezekiah. “There will be peace in my time.” That’s sometimes what we end up with.

I have heard this from certain strains of Calvinists. It’s not universal by any means, because I’ve heard very good sermons in the other direction from other Calvinists, but I have heard and seen people say, in the name of Calvinism, “Well, since you cannot possibly be altering God’s eternal plan, therefore what you’re altering is your own thought life and heart condition.”

But wait, isn’t that also altering God’s eternal plan? Isn’t anything we ask for, anything we do therefore a possible threat to God? Shouldn’t we just go with the flow, because whatever will be will be, because God’s ordained it?

And then why prayer, of all the things you could do to adjust your attitude or get in a better head space or whatever?

How about go outside and jog for a while?

Touch grass.

In the original article I repeated two stories. They’re not original to me. One is from Francis Schaeffer’s book. I believe it’s from Death in the City, although he may use it a couple places. He’s talking about this reality, about God being real in the sense that we can talk to him and he can do real things in the universe that we can’t do, and that seem from our point of view to be impossible, and that many would call miraculous – not sign gifts, not authorizing new revelation, but God simply stepping in to help his people when they call upon him.

It was 1947. He was flying home to St. Louis across the North Atlantic. He was on a small DC-4, a 4-engine airliner, and something goes wrong with one of the engines. The pilot comes online and says, “Uh, we just lost an engine, folks. You might want to start getting ready for a water evacuation.” Then a short time later the pilot comes back on, “We just lost a second engine. We will be making an overwater landing.” The clock is ticking because with two of the engines on the same wing gone, they literally cannot fly. The plane is going to go down.

The plane had sent out an SOS, because going down in the middle of the Atlantic they’re going to hope there are going to be some ships nearby to pick up the survivors, if there be any. The signal reached Canada and the United States, and in those days this was a big thing. When some big story comes on, you flash it across the country, and within a very short time every radio station in the country is announcing this great message, because that’s how you draw people. If everyone else has it and you don’t have it, people stop listening to you. It was really easy in those days, if you can get on the system, everyone in the country is going to hear about it.

Way off in St. Louis, Missouri, Edith Schaeffer and her daughters heard this. This plane was going down and they thought very quickly, “That’s dad’s plane. That’s Fran’s plane,” so she gathers them together to start praying. Meanwhile, Dr. Schaeffer is praying diligently on the plane, and the plane is going down and going down and going down. They can look out the windows. It’s a moonless night, but they can still see the waves, they’re so close. Then just as the waves are coming up to smack them, the engines reignite, the plane lifts up, and goes on home, makes its way to Canada.

Dr. Schaeffer says that afterwards he sought out the pilot just to say, “What was that all about?” and the pilot said, “It’s the funniest thing. Sometimes an engine will go out. That’s happened before, but if you lose two on the same wing, the rule is the plane is done. It never makes a comeback. I don’t understand it. It’s impossible.”

Dr. Schaeffer said, “I can tell you why they restarted.”

“Why?”

“I was praying to my Father in heaven and asking him, and he restarted the plane for us.” He says, “The guy gave me the strangest look ever.”

We could say, “Oh, that was just a coincidence.”

God does not play dice with the universe.

The other is from a commentary I picked up ages ago. I haven’t made much use of it, although it’s a fine commentary. It’s part of a devotional thing by Earl Kelly. It’s called James: A Practical Primer for Christian Living, published in the ‘70s. I could not trace where the original story came from, although he footnotes it, but I couldn’t go back any further than his footnote.

This was in Nigeria with the [Yongaba? 36:08] people. Missionaries had been at work there for some time and it was a religiously-mixed country. There were pagans who worshiped idols, there were Muslims, and there were these new-fledgling Christians who were very excited about their faith and took it all as a matter of fact. This is the real God we’re talking about. This is the living God.

As in Elijah’s day, there was no rain, and after a time all of these groups began to realize, “We need rain.” So amongst themselves they began to say, “Well, we should call on our gods.” Sound familiar? The pagans went first. They picked a day and they appealed to their idol [Chengo? 36:51] The witchdoctor climbed a palm tree and began to shout to his god. On the ground, the people beat on drums and blew horns and shouted and screamed, and they cut their bodies with stones and knives. Sound familiar? This went on for four days. The witchdoctor was up in the palm tree so he could be closer to the gods and get their attention better.

On the fifth day, the witchdoctor came down from the tree, sacrificed a bull to [Chengo?], drank its blood and ate the whole animal, and there was still no rain. Magic failed them.

Now the Muslims are going to step in. They don’t believe in many gods, they only believe in one god, and Mohammed is his prophet, so they got together and they appealed to Allah, confident that they would be heard, because they didn’t worship idols.

They called for a week of fasting, and day and night they cried out the traditional creed, “There is no god but Allah, and Mohammed is his prophet.” At the end of the week, they sacrificed a ram at the river, and there was no rain.

Finally the Christians decided to pray. The native pastor made a suggestion during the worship service. I just have my notes in front of me, but as I recall the story he actually went to the white missionary and said, “We should do this,” and the white missionaries were playing devil’s advocate. “Why do you think? I mean their gods failed them.”

The man thought for a minute and he lightened up with a bright smile and said, “Yes, because they worship sticks and stones, and Allah is no God, but we worship the living God. He will hear us.”

“Do you have any scripture to back that up?”

“Uh, yes. There is that wonderful passage in James that tells us to pray for rain, of all things,” so the missionary announced the pastor’s decision to the congregation. He called for corporate prayer, and the drums began to beat in the village and send out the message, “Now we are going to see the power of the God who lives. The Christians are going to pray for rain.”

Monday was hot. As evening came on and the bell tolled the call to prayer, there wasn’t a cloud in the sky. In the large church building, the pagans were on one side and the Muslims on the other. They had come to see the power of the God who lives.

The Yongaba believers had come with their wide-brimmed umbrella hats, because during the rainy season they wanted to have their hands free. They didn’t want to be carrying an umbrella like white people did, so they had these big wide-brimmed hats to keep the rain off, and they came wearing them.

The white missionary said, “What are you doing with those things in church?”

“White man, haven’t we come to pray for rain? We’ll need these when we leave.”

So the missionary read the passage from James, and the believers got down on their knees, and one by one they began to pray, “Lord, we need rain. Glorify your name among the pagans and the Muslims in the Yongaba country,” and the Christians prayed.

They prayed for five minutes. Nothing. For ten, nothing. Then 20, still nothing. After 25 minutes they heard the first few drops of drain plop against the iron sheeting that made up the church roof. After five more minutes they had to stop praying because they could no longer hear each other. Torrents of rain were falling from heaven.

It rained for four days and four nights, which was all right because they had their umbrellas with them and wore them on their heads, and went home rejoicing.

That’s clever. I think umbrellas are obsolete. We need these hats.

Yes, the new fashion statement.

This is the thing. Would we have this kind of faith? Would we go, “Oh yeah, we should pray,” and throw a line in about prayer and watch California go through another year of drought, or are we willing to get this serious and trust God this much?

Maybe we simply believe that California is under God’s judgement to such a degree that we don’t have any confidence, or maybe like Elijah we were the ones who called for drought in the first place. I don’t think so. We might have considered it, but we’re too comfort-oriented. I doubt that any Christians got together and did that one.

I know people who are praying that California will fall into the sea, but they don’t generally live here.

Generally in Texas, which is also dry.

People have said, “This is only anecdotal evidence.” What kind do you want? These are real testimonies of God’s people explaining when God did something unusual, something that maybe some people might call miraculous. Puritans would probably call it a special providence.

If you had an empirical study saying, “Ah, yes. Prayer to the living God works 92% of the time,” then you’re doing the same thing of putting God into the box of, “This is how he runs the universe. If you pray in this way for so long…” It’s defaulting to the same thing, so that kind of evidence would not actually testify to anything. It’s invalid.

A moment of personal anecdotal evidence then. When my eldest daughter, Emily, was a real little girl, probably around 3 or 4 or so, because these kinds of things happened more than once, one of her favorite mantras was, “Daddy, shouldn’t we pray?” You know you’ve done a good job, or somebody has, when every time something serious comes up and you’re looking hard at your wife, and she’s looking hard at you, and your little girl over here says, “Shouldn’t we pray?”

“Yes, we should. Thank you.”

The first one that comes to mind is the one that’s easily passed off as coincidence. She was looking out our back window and she saw a cat. She’s always loved cats and she really was fascinated by cats, and said something to the effect of, “Oh, there’s a cat out there!” Then after a while the cat went away and she expressed her sorrow. “The cat is gone.”

Kate was in the kitchen cleaning up and said, “Well dear, why don’t you pray to God and ask him to send you another cat to look at.” I’m laying on the couch kind of off to one side in another room, and I’m starting to talk and say, “Dear, don’t you think you should explain to her that prayer…” and I didn’t get very far, because in the meantime Emily had bowed her head and prayed and asked God to send her another cat.

Then she wandered over to the front door, as opposed to the back door, which was a glass door with a screen, and as I’m getting ready to say, “Don’t you think you should explain to her about prayer…” Emily says, “There’s a cat!”

I think she could explain to you a thing about prayer!

Exactly. I said, “Never mind,” and that was that. It was a different cat, by the way. The cat didn’t just go around the house, but it was a neighborhood of cats so it’s not that big a deal, right?

There were a couple more of these. There was a time when I had bought the girls a Dollar Tree copy of Lassie the Dog. It was $1, so we went to put it in, and what appeared was the whole thing was pixelated. I said, “Oh, I’m sorry girls. It looks like it’s not going to work,” and Emily of course said, “Shouldn’t we pray?”

So I punched the button and took it out and thought, “All right. Well, it’s obviously not going to work, but since she is willing to commit to prayer, my end is to do what I can do, which isn’t much,” so I blew off the dust inside the machine. I don’t know if that even does anything.

I think it makes it worse because you’re wedging dust inside the machine.

And I took the DVD and wiped it on my shirt, and I put it back in and we prayed, and suddenly…Lassie!

I think it was that same year that Christmas came along and we had put up strings of lights. You know the kinds of lights where if you lose one, you lose them all? For some reason we bought those. You no longer had to, but somehow we had managed to do that.

Emily was helping me trying to sort through lights, and we saw that the whole thing was dead because one of them doesn’t work. This was like 30 lightbulbs, and one of them was dead and there was no way of telling which one.

I didn’t want to mess with it and said, “Emily, it would take us too long to figure it out,” and she said…

“Shouldn’t we pray?”

At that point I said, “Emily, you have more faith than I do. You better pray,” so she prayed. Then we went to I think the second or third light in the strand, pulled it out and put a new one in, and the lights came on. This was like the first or second try. “Okay, thank you, Lord.”

“But this is technology. This is the part of the universe that surely God is shut out off, because technology is Newtonian electronics, if there is such a thing, or Maxwellian electronics I guess, based on Newtonian physics. There shouldn’t be any shuffle room. I mean if it doesn’t work, it doesn’t work. Sure, we might kick it and thump it and that could make it work, but praying to God, and God somehow having it turn on? That doesn’t work.” I’m sorry, but yes it does.

Computers are the devil’s machines. Only he has authority over them.

Sometimes you think, but it turns out God is the Lord of computers as well, of technology, of cars that won’t start, and all kinds of things. We look at them and say, “There’s got to be a scientific explanation,” and if there is, then it’s limited by that. If it’s a dead battery or if it’s a fuse that won’t work or if it’s a disconnected wire, then that’s what it is, and no amount of prayer can fix that, until it does.

That’s something that Christians – I think at least at the end of the 20th century – were really struggling with. Maybe New Agey-ness has kind of countered that and maybe we’re a little more open to possibilities than we once were, but we need to make sure the possibility is grounded in God’s Word and not just in, “Well, isn’t it wonderful? Anything can happen.” No, what can happen is what God wills to happen, and God again is sovereign.

That’s what sovereignty means. He can do what he wants, and he’s not limited by our understanding of science, whether it comes to asking for healing from something that seems incurable, or some device starting when we desperately need it to start.

Then of course again there’s always the possibility that he comes up with some completely different solution. If I’m praying for my car to start because I desperately need to get somewhere because I have medicine to take someplace, and it won’t start and won’t start, and up comes a guy on a horse and says, “Need a ride?” that’s a valid answer to prayer. What I really am after is not my car starting. What I’m really after is I need to get this medicine someplace, and if God provides a horse, okay.

Have you ever heard that old joke about the flood? I’ll just tell it for the benefit of anyone who hasn’t heard it. The rain is coming down and a guy is sitting on his porch and somebody comes up to him and says, “There’s a flood coming. You’ve got to get out of here. Come on, get in my car and I’ll take you out of here.”

He goes, “No, no, no. I’ve prayed to God and I’ve asked him to save me from the flood waters. I’m taken care of,” so the guy says, “Whatever,” and drives off.

The water has risen up a little bit and now he’s sitting on the roof of his patio, and this guy comes up in a little paddle boat and goes, “You’ve got to get out of here! You’re going to drown! Get in my boat with me and I’ll take you to safety.”

The guy goes, “No, I’ve prayed to God. I’ve asked him to save me from this. I’m good. I’m taken care of.”

Finally he’s at the very peak of his roof, and a helicopter flies by and they go, “Sir, climb onto the ladder, please! We’re going to rescue you and get you out of here.”

He goes, “I have prayed to God and he’s going to save me.”

So the flood waters rise even more and he ends up drowning. When he gets to heaven he asks God, “God, I prayed for you to save me from the flood waters. Why didn’t you save me?”

God goes, “I sent you a car and a paddle boat and a helicopter. What more did you want?”

Exactly. Does God have to do something really crazy and miraculous from our point of view? No, but can he? When everything seems against us and there doesn’t seem to be any way out, can God move reality in such a way that some people will say, “That’s a miracle,” and others will say, “God cheated on that one,” and we can say, “Our Father heard our prayers and that’s what he told us to pray.”

So we looked at Elijah and he prayed. He prayed in terms of the covenant law. He prayed in terms of God’s written Word. He was not practicing magic. He wasn’t trying to manipulate God or twist his arm. He said, “God has said this. I’m asking God to keep his word,” and God did. And when the test was over, God was only too happy to relent and send the rain again, although it hadn’t had the effect that Elijah hoped for, but that’s the story for next time.

That’s a good place to wrap it up. Do we have recommendations this week?

Yes. I recommend The Runaway Bunny. It’s a beautiful children’s book.

I know about it, but why don’t you at least give the audience an idea what it’s about.

I am not aware of it. I wish to know.

It’s by Margaret Wise Brown of Goodnight Moon fame, and it’s the story of a little bunny who wanted to run away, so he said to his mother, “I am running away.” And each page has a lovely little black and white illustration of the bunny and what he’s going to do, and then the bunny’s mother and what she says she’s going to do.

She says, “If you’re going to run away, I’m going to run after you because you are my little bunny.” So there’s a picture of the little bunny, a picture of bunny’s mother, and then on the next page it’s a lovely color illustration with no words, just showing what they’ve done in their imagination.

He says, “I’ll become a flower in a secret garden so you can’t find me,” and his mother says, “Well, I’ll become a gardener and I will find you.”

The color illustrations sort of have references to classic paintings, which is really fun. It’s those things you don’t notice when you’re being read to as a child, that you notice when you are reading to your own kids.

It’s just a really lovely book and Gretchen really likes it. She doesn’t care for a lot of books, but she likes the colors in that one.

Bryan, do you have one?

Last weekend one of the events that happened was my birthday. Normally Emily and I do not get mornings to sleep in because she has Sundays and Mondays off, and Sunday we get up early and go to church, and Monday I get up early and go to work. On the day that I have off, besides those two days, which is Saturday, she gets up early and goes to her work because she works on the Saturday shift. So to celebrate for me, she took off work on Saturday and we got to sleep in, which was quite magical, honestly. So that’s Part 1.

Part 2 is after we slept in and had breakfast and did all sorts of other things, we also did yard work in the backyard, because in Wisconsin your yard is neglected for four months out of the year. Our neighbors had also been throwing garbage into our backyard and fun kinds of things like that. And of course we have two dogs, so there were a plethora of landmines spread throughout, if I can put it that way. So on Saturday we spent about 1-1/2 or 2 hours just making the yard look lovely, and it does look lovely.

We went to Aldi a couple different times. Aldi, by the way, is a magical place. We bought yard edging and food and also a tree, a little birch sapling that was about 2-1/2’ tall. So we did that and we made the yard look lovely, so I just recommend gardening. It’s a great way to spend an afternoon, to make your abode look lovely, if you have a yard or you have someplace that you can cultivate green things and bring beauty to your surroundings. It’s just wonderful for that.

Mary mistook Jesus for a gardener, and there is a kind of beauty in that to image Christ in that way as well.

Funny you should mention that, Bryan, because our family has been working on our backyard for some time. We actually kind of committed to it, after many years of saying we ought to but didn’t. Maryellen with a friend of hers bought a garden bed for tomatoes, and we just finished putting freshly-purchased dirt of various sorts in it. But I’m not going to talk about tomatoes. I’m going to talk about squash, zucchini in particular.

In past years when God has blessed us, zucchini is the one thing that does grow pretty well in our backyard. We don’t have a great backyard. It’s very clay sort of soil, but usually we can get that to grow. When it grows, it just comes on like gangbusters. It’s all over the place. It’s the kind of thing of, “Oh, who could have too much zucchini?” Well, when they start growing the size of clubs, you kind of wonder if maybe you can, but there’s so much you can do with it.

If you come from a family with a southern background like I do, you can fry it. It’s so good fried. You can put it into a vegetable medley. And this is what my wife and girls do – you can make zucchini bread which has lots of chocolate chips in it. It’s like dessert. You can’t even tell it’s zucchini. And other such things.

You know what? Even if you only get one or two plants to grow and they’re hardy enough to bring forth three or four zucchinis every week or so, that’s a lot of zucchini. And if nothing else, you can give it away to friends who will love you for giving them fresh vegetables. So let’s get on with the gardening this year.

All right. Thank you both so much for joining me on this episode, and thank you to you, our listeners, who joined us.

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