We run our website the way we wished the whole internet worked: we provide high quality original content with no ads. We are funded solely by your direct support. Please consider supporting this project.
If God is already doing the most he can do, how does prayer increase his influence?
Question: If God always does the most that he can in every tragic situation, as you claim in Satan and the Problem of Evil, how can you believe that prayer increases his influence, as you also claim? It seems if you grant that prayer increases God’s influence, you have to deny God was previously doing the most he could do before people prayed.
Answer: I don’t believe there’s any inconsistency believing that God always does the most God can do, on the one hand, and believing that prayer sometimes changes God’s mind, on the other, if one believes, as I do, that God has bound himself to work within the variables the condition free will. One of the most important of these variables, I believe, is prayer. As I argue in Satan and the Problem of Evil, because God wants a “bride” who co-rules with him on earth (Rev. 5:10), he has set up things such that, to some degree, his will shall not be done except when his bride aligns her will with his in prayer. Since he’s all good, God is always doing the most he can do to maximize the good and minimize the evil. But God’s involvement in the world is genuinely conditioned by the prayers of his people. When they prayer, God can do more than he was doing previously. This isn’t about him gaining more power. It’s about God creating a world in which agents genuinely share power and responsibility with him.
Category: Q&A
Tags: God, Prayer, Problem of Evil, Providence, Q&A
Topics: Defending the Open View, Hearing God, Prayer, Providence, Predestination and Free Will
Related Reading
What is the significance of Deuteronomy 30:19?
After establishing the terms of the covenant he was entering into with Israel, the Lord says, “I call heaven and earth to witness against you today that I have set before you life and death, blessings and curses. Choose life so that you and your descendants may live.” This passage represents the most fundamental motif…
Warfare and Sickness
Is sickness something we should come against as spiritual warfare or is sickness just something that is part of our life until the Kingdom of God comes? Greg deals with the answer to this question.
Tardy
This is the sermon clip entitled Honest to God that should have appeared last week. Sorry. Sometimes life gets a bit busy. In this short sermon clip, Greg introduces the idea that one of our base needs is to be understood and loved fully for who we are. The full sermon discusses how in order…
Why a “Christocentric” View of God is Inadequate: God’s Self-Portrait, Part 5
I’m currently working through a series of blogs that will flesh out the theology of the ReKnew Manifesto, and I’m starting with our picture of God, since it is the foundation of everything else. So far I’ve established that Jesus is the one true portrait of God (See: Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4).…
Prayer Matters
Martin Sharman via Compfight Jesus taught us to pray in a way that recognizes that God’s will isn’t manifested in evil; it’s manifested when he and his people revolt against it. Jesus tells us that the cry of our heart is to be for God’s kingdom to come and his will to be done “on…