Hezekiah and the Plans of God

"So...God actually changed his mind as a result of Hezekiah's prayer?"

That's what a friend of mine asked as we were discussing 2 Kings 20. I've written about this before, and it really is one of the most important passages in my understanding of prayer and how it interacts with God's plan.

So: Back to my friend's question. Did Hezekiah's prayer cause God to "change his mind"? During the initial conversation, I responded almost off-the-cuff, saying "I don't know if God necessarily had a mind to change." And after a lot of further reflection, I think that might just hold up.

I don't think it's correct to say that God planned for Hezekiah in particular to die from that particular illness at that particular time. I definitely think that God knew that Hezekiah would die with all those particulars. And I think that God had worked that event into his plans for the future. But I don't think that God planned the event itself: I don't think he designed it, or desired it to happen, or had so constructed the universe in such a way as to render it certain.

Instead, I think that Hezekiah was going to do of that particular illness, at that particular time, as a result of the natural laws that God put into place at the creation of the universe, and as a result of the free will of humanity interacting with those natural laws, and likely as a result of a bunch of other things that don't directly have to do with God explicitly planning that event.

I don't think that God "changed his mind" in healing Hezekiah. I don't think that in this particular situation, God had a mind to change. Hezekiah was going to die not because God planned it or caused it to happen, but because that's what happens in a fallen world where our bodies break down and fall prey to sickness and disease. It does not happen outside God's knowledge or control, but neither does it happen as a result of God's sovereign plan and active will.*

God's working and plan first becomes evident not in Hezekiah's disease, but in his response to Hezekiah's prayer. That is where God first takes action: That is where God steps into history and changes what is supposed to happen. He breaks the chain of natural cause-and-affect, and as a result, Hezekiah lives for another 15 years. And I actually think this is a pretty great way of understanding how our prayers can affect genuine change in the world: It's a time where God takes not just his own purposes into account, but also our own desires.

*Did God have a purpose in using Hezekiah's illness? Almost certainly - and in the same way, he also has a purpose in using our own illnesses and misfortunes. And sometimes, that purpose may be more active and deliberate, as is the case with Job. But I think it's wrong to say with certainty that any specific misfortune is "planned" by God....nothing happens without divine permission, but not all things happen by sovereign decree.

Prayer in Uncertainty

Every day, at 1:00 pm, my phone goes off, with the word "Prayer" emblazoned across the screen. It's a remnant from my church's "Reach One" challenge: Every day, you were supposed to pray for one minute for one person who you wanted to reach, and the set time was meant to make it easier.

The challenge only lasted one month, but it never occurred to me to turn it off. So every day, at 1:00, I'm reminded to pray for my friend, and (almost) every day I pray for that one person. And I pray largely the same prayer. The periphery varies, but the core is consistent:

I pray that God will work the circumstances of  my friend for His glory, and for my friend's salvation. And I pray that if I have a role in that, that I will play it well.  

I've written a lot about free will, and Providence, and the possible relationship between the two. Entire theologies and denominations have centered on this relationship, this paradox. And I don't know how it all works out (although i do have some thoughts).

But here's the important bit: When I'm praying, I'm not thinking about all that. It's not super helpful at that moment. Because for the purposes of this prayer, it really doesn't matter. What matters is that we're told to pray, and we're told that prayer matters, and we know that prayer can even change the future... and that's good enough for me. I think there is a time for hypotheticals, for abstract reasoning and theoretical models of cause and effect, but that time is not during the act of praying.

I do not need to know how God will work my friend's situation for His glory and my friend's salvation. I do not need to know how God can providentially call my friend to Him, without violating my friend's free will. I only know that God can do that, and that is enough.

A Strange Prayer

For a long time now, a close friend of mine has been content to call himself agnostic. We don’t talk about it often, but we did a couple weeks ago. I had a long conversation with him via Facebook, going back and forth on various things. Nothing seemed to sink in: It seemed as though we ended the conversation in roughly the exact same place we had started it: firmly planted in agnosticism.

“That’s a dangerous valley you’re in, dude,” I told him.

“Well, that depends on who’s right,” he said. “But I understand what you mean.”

Then he said he had to go and thanked me for the talk. I told him I’d pray for him, and he said he appreciated it.

But I’m not so sure he would still appreciate it, if he knew what I had prayed for.

Later that day, I found myself  hunched over my steering wheel in a Bank of America parking lot, praying that God would give my friend notpeace, but an unsettling, uneasy, frantic desire for truth. I’d never prayed for something like that before (except for myself). I’d never prayed for someone to become less calm, to be more unsure about things.

I’d never thought about it before, but I think the prayer stuck me as so unusual because we tend to see “comfort” as something that’s always good, and nervousness and anxiety as something that’s always bad. “Don’t worry, be happy,” says the secular world, and Paul tells us, “Don’t be anxious about anything, but with prayer and thanksgiving bring your requests to God.”

The world tells us not to worry because worrying doesn’t really help much. It reflects a certain Ecclesiastical fatalism: Everything might not work out alright, but worrying won’t help it, so we might as well be happy. This may well be the best answer the world has, but it’s still not a good answer. But the Church tells us not to worry because of who and where we are, as Christians.

As Christians, worry over our outward circumstances betrays a fundamental misunderstanding concerning who and where we are.  We are Christians; we are, in a very real sense, in Christ, and our position in Christ is so completely and utterly secure that Paul can go on at length over the many and various things that can never separate us from the love of God, including all of creation visible and invisible, natural and supernatural.

The same cannot be said for the non-Christian. The same cannot be said for the one hedging towards agnosticism. And indeed, it seems to me that agnosticism is infinitely more dangerous for the subject that even outright atheism.

This is because an outright atheist is, in many important ways, closer to Christianity than an agnostic. Atheism is, at least, an active position. It requires an active affirmation of certain beliefs, a certain intellectual engagement with those beliefs. The atheist at least believes that the existence or non-existence of God is an important subject, one worth thinking about and arguing over.

Not so for the agnostic. The agnostic (at least, this particular agnostic) simply doesn’t care all that much. Atheism has points in its favor, as does Christianity: Further research into the matter may yield more information, but who has the time? The agnostic simply doesn’t care enough about the matter, can’t be bothered to think seriously about it. He is settled and at peace.

And so I prayed in the bank parking lot. I prayed not for peace on earth, but for unrest and discord in the mind and soul of my friend. I prayed for God to make him restless, uncertain, even frightened of his position. I prayed that he would care so much that it would drive all other concerns out of his mind. Only then, I think, will he be able to once again seek God and find Him.

How it works (predestination time!)

Note from 2014: This was written in 2012, two years before I discovered that in many ways, I'm pretty much Arminian. The Arminian view of corporate election does a pretty fantastic job of explaining all of this in a much more intuitive manner. This is one way to do it...but I think that corporate election is probably better.

A few days ago I posted a fairly large blog detailing my thoughts on the actual "mechanics" of prayer: How it interacts with the divine foreknowledge of God, as well as the divine plan for the universe. Today I want to talk about it some more, because I think it has a very important application for a very important--and divisive--topic: Predestination.

But we're not going to talk about Calvinism, or Armenianism, or any of the other "isms". We're going to talk about the possibility of a comprehensive and cohesive doctrine that ties the few verses speaking about predestination to the consistent, Bible-wide assumption of free will. 

I need to talk a little bit more about this. The assumption of free will extends throughout the entire Bible. From Job's ultimate steadfastness to Abraham's mingled faithlessness and faithfulness, from Moses' obedience and disobedience to Zechariah pissing off the angel Gabriel... all of these are portrayed as actions that may have happened differently, actions that are punished or rewarded precisely because the doer could have done otherwise. I pick my examples at random, off the top of my head, because I could literally open the Bible to almost any page and find that same implicit assumption of free will. From Adam to the seven churches in Revelations, the Bible clearly shows us that we can choose.

Let's look at Jesus. The Jesus who does not believe in free will is a monster: He proclaims the good news to people who are fundamentally incapable of acting on it, and he does nothing to help them. When he speaks to a totally depraved humanity without free will, saying, "Come to me, all you who are weary and heavy-laden, and I will give you rest," it is no different than if he told the lame man to get up and walk, without first healing the man's lameness. It is taunting, mockery of the worst kind, telling a quadriplegic how great it is to be able to walk.  The Calvinist Jesus does not truly love the young man in Mark 10: He merely pretends to love him, with a love that could be effective but is not, that willfully chooses to not be effective and, in doing so, dooms the young man whom Jesus loved to hell. That is not the Jesus I read about in the gospels, no matter how you twist his words, no matter how you twist Paul's words, that is not the Son of God that walked Jerusalem 2,000 years ago.

Ahem. Pardon me.

But then you have the few verses that explicitly mention predestination. God hardening the pharaoh's heart in Exodus, God foreknowing, predestining, and calling in Romans, and a few others. They are puzzling, to be sure... but they are not in and of themselves troubling, exactly because of the assumption of free will present in the gospels and each and every one of Paul's letters. They only become troubling when they are used, by Calvinism, to overturn the entire tone and direction of the New Testament. To say that there are verses that clearly teach predestination is only to say that the Bible teaches that predestination somehow coexists with free will. To say that we should take the verses of predestination and use them to completely overturn free will is, quite frankly, ridiculous. 

So. We find ourselves in the position of trying to reconcile free will and predestination. Jesus and Paul both take free will for granted: In calling to people and telling them and asking them to do things, they assume that their hearers can do those things, but are not forced to do them. But both also mention predestination. One might well look at this predicament and say, along with some of the internet's greatest scholars, "What is this I don't even?"

But there is a solution. We return to my blog on prayer, which, in hindsight, I shouldn't have linked so early in the blog before. Essentially, prayer  interacts with God's plan for the world, which, from our perspective, he set down before time itself. The Bible tells us to pray. More than that, it tells us to expect results. It tells us that we can choose whether to pray or not, and that there are consequences to praying and consequences to not praying. In short, it tells us that prayer changes things. 

This only makes sense once you recognize that God does not, primarily, experience time. I'm just going quote a paragraph from my last blog: feel free to skip it if you've already read it:

"The way we experience reality is a series of successive events, one after another: 6:00 a.m. is followed without fail by 6:01 a.m., and no amount of effort can prevent the eventual progression to 6:02 a.m., nor wind the clock back to 6:00 a.m. But that is merely a way of seeing reality, not reality as it really is. God sees everything as it really is: NOT as a series of linear, successive events, but as one utterly cohesive NOW; Thus God does not have to "wait" to experience 6:00, 6:01, and 6:02 in succession: He experiences them all at once, without confusion. (This is important: Otherwise God would be bound by time just as much as we are.) Thus the results of an answered prayer for rain made at a particular point in world history--say, June 4, 2012--would be visible and present in the world long before the prayer was even thought of. Because we experience reality through time, it seems to us as though the effect comes before the cause. But in actuality, God has merely seen the prayer and adjusted reality in the same cohesive, unbounded, endless Now."

 That is the only way prayer can work: The only way prayer can be effective and free, which is how the Bible always portrays it. 

So why not apply it to salvation?

If reality is truly governed by Time, if God himself is governed by time, and exists and works only in time, then of course predestination must override free will. But if God is not bound by time, if time is merely the way we perceive reality and not the way reality actually is, then it immediately becomes obvious that the mechanics of predestination vs. free will present no greater problem than that of prayer. Having (apparently) found a solution for one, it seems as though we have found a solution for the other.

Can God  receive a prayer, made on June 7, 2012, for rain on June 8, 2012, and as a result of that prayer, shape the weather patterns for the preceding however many thousands of years so as to make it rain on that particular day? I see no reason why not: And is it not obvious that this case flawlessly allows free will to coexist with the divine predestination of weather patterns, without either being overridden by the other?

If this is the case, then surely we can say that someone can make a decision to follow Christ, of his own free will, at a particular point in world history, and that God, as a result of and in conjunction with that prayer, foreknows that person and his decision to follow Christ: Before time yet in conjunction with that man's decision in time, God predestines and calls them... and yet free will, by the grace of our loving God, remains intact, remains perfectly consistent with God's loving and all-powerful governing of the universe and everything in it.

Clarification Edit: We've gotten really used to conflating a person deciding to follow Christ with salvation: The one logically leads to the other. But here's the thing: Accepting the freely-offered gift of salvation is NOT meritorious. It does not deserve the gift, it does not earn the gift. Therefore, without the grace of God, merely confessing Christ as Lord and believing that God raised him from the dead (as Paul says in Romans 10:9) would not naturally lead to salvation.

Without the grace of God, that decision would not lead to salvation. So let's go to Romans 8:29: "For those whom he foreknew he also predestined to be conformed to the image of His Son." Paul himself puts foreknowledge as a basis for predestination. But foreknowledge of what? I am saying that God's foreknowledge extends to the decision, the proclamation, the belief: In his endless NOW, God sees a man saying, "Christ is Lord, and God raised him from the dead." Knowing this, having already freely offered the gift of life to anyone who accepts it, God predestines the man to receive salvation, to be adopted and conformed to Christ's image.

I am no longer troubled with how to reconcile predestination and free will. This is a way in which they can coexist without conflict, without one swallowing up the other, and that is enough for me. I should clarify something: I have no doubt that the scope of predestination here will not be robust enough for entrenched Calvinists to accept. I do think, however, that it meets the biblical criteria for predestination. Entrenched Calvinists are not my audience here: This is for those who, like myself, have struggled to reconcile the concept of predestination with the belief that God has given us free will (as befits creatures made in his image).

How it works (I think)

If you haven't read my posts on prayer, you might want to skim them real quick before reading this one, because they're pretty integral to what I have to say. In this post, I talk about how awesome it is that prayer has the power to change the world: In this post, I go even further and talk about how prayer can even change the future. It's well established in the Bible that prayer changes things: Today I want to work through how that actually works.

So God has a plan for how the world is going to go, right? "God's in control" is what we say when the world is falling apart. We're comforted because we know that God has a plan that can't be derailed. "'For I know the plans I have for you,' declares the Lord, 'plans to prosper you and not to harm you. Plans to give you hope and a future.'"

But then there's prayer: Petitionary prayer, specifically. Where we ask God for something in the hope that he will give it to us. But wait. What about the plan? How does that work with prayer? Does prayer even matter? What's the point of asking for something if it's already been decided what's going to happen? But the Bible specifically links the answering of the prayer to the prayer itself (James 1:5, 1 John 5:14, Daniel 10:12). So what about the plan?

This is a problem (click there if you want to see the problem articulated by dinosaurs). In a nutshell, the question is this:

Does God already know that the prayers were going to be made? If so, was the prayer made out of free will or was it predestined from the beginning? How does prayer interact with God's predetermined will for human history? Does prayer really matter?


The only answer that seems to, well, answer the question has to do with time and eternity. The answer--the only answer I have found that is satisfactory--is found, as is so often the case, in the writings of C. S. Lewis.

In the Screwtape Letters, Lewis writes from the perspective of a senior demon advising a younger demon, and at one point he focuses on how to discourage people from their prayers by introducing to them this very problem. The answer, Lewis believes, is so very obvious once you stop thinking of Time--a series of successive events, some past, some future--as the way things actually are. One you realize that God is not bound by Time--that time is something that belongs strictly to created beings--the answer is clear.

Speaking of weather, in particular, then making the jump to time/reality/free will overall, Screwtape says:

"What he ought to say, of course, is obvious to us; that the problem of adapting the particular weather to the particular prayers is merely the appearance, at two points in the human's temporal mode of perception, of the total problem of adapting the whole spiritual universe to the whole corporeal universe; that creation in its entirety operates at every point of space and time, or rather that their kind of consciousness forces them to encounter the whole, self-consistent creative act as a series of successive events. 

Why that creative act leaves room for their free will is the problem of problems, the secret behind the Enemy's nonsense about "Love". How it does so is no problem at all; for the Enemy does not foresee the humans making their free contributions in a future, but sees them doing so in His unbounded Now. And obviously to watch a man doing something is not to make him do it."

The way we experience reality is a series of successive events, one after another: 6:00 a.m. is followed without fail by 6:01 a.m., and no amount of effort can prevent the eventual progression to 6:02 a.m., nor wind the clock back to 6:00 a.m. But that is merely a way of seeing reality, not reality as it really is. God sees everything as it really is: NOT as a series of linear, successive events, but as one utterly cohesive NOW.  Thus God does not have to "wait" to experience 6:00, 6:01, and 6:02 in succession: He experiences them all at once, without confusion. (This is important: Otherwise God would be bound by time just as much as we are.) Thus the results of an answered prayer for rain made at a particular point in world history--say, June 4, 2012--would be visible and present in the world long before the prayer was even thought of. Because we experience reality through time, it seems to us as though the effect comes before the cause. But in actuality, God has merely seen the prayer and adjusted reality in the same cohesive, unbounded, endless Now. 

Here's what is so unbelievably cool about this: God has so designed creation so that free will and divine providence can coexist without clashing or elimination. Free will is not absorbed into divine providence, making free will essentially meaningless because it was planned "from the beginning." But neither does free will overthrow divine providence and mean that God really has no control over anything. By the grace of God, they coexist in perfect balance--Our all-powerful creator designed the universe so that we, like him, could have free will. 

So God  receives the prayer, which was made of our own free will. He acts on that prayer in His divine sovereignty. And so, by the love and grace of God, the prayers of the saints find their way into the divinely ordained workings of the universe, ranging from celestial battles (Daniel 10:12) to the day-to-day requests of seemingly unimportant people (1 John 5:14). Here's the really important bit: This seems to be the only possible way prayer can work. This seems to be the only possible way prayer can matter, the only possible way prayer can be both free and meaningful. Any other way ultimately results in prayer being unmeaningful as something that was always going to happen, or as something meaningless because God's plan cannot be changed, and the Bible never treats prayer like that. Prayer is treated as something that may or may not happen, that has consequences for not being made and consequences for being made. It is always shown to be a free action that effects the will of God. And this, to me, seems the only way that is possible.

I appreciate you guys bearing with me on this. This was a tough post to write, and it is probable that some parts remain unclear, confusing, or outright erroneous. If you are unsure of something, or even if you vehemently disagree with me, let me know. Proverbs 27:17: "As iron sharpens iron, so one man sharpens another." I want to be sharpened.

So come at me, bro.

Changing the future

In a previous post, I talked about how prayer can change the world: How our prayers have the power to cause things to happen which would not have happened otherwise. The Book of Daniel is a good example: It's a book of the Bible which would not be there without Daniel's prayer. But in church the other day I realized that it actually goes even further than that: Prayer even has the potential to change the future.

This was something that troubled me: How God's foreknowledge and providence interacted with our own free will. Most of the time, they don't seem to clash: God knows what we're going to do, but we don't, and we are therefore free to choose. But what about when God tells us? The main example for me was Peter and Jesus. Jesus explicitly tells Peter, twice, that Peter will deny him. There is no room for interpretation, no room for misunderstanding: Jesus tells Peter what he (Peter) will do, in the future, and from that point on Peter's actions are directly influenced by that knowledge.

This seemed problematic. Had Jesus deprived Peter of his free will? Had Jesus, in saying that to Peter, somehow caused it? It seems as though the foreknowledge of God is "safe," in a way, when it remains with God, separated from us. But when it enters our experience, it seems to interact with our free will in an unfortunate way.Once Jesus tells Peter, "Before the cock crows, you will deny me three times," is Peter really free to not deny Jesus?

Problematic.

But then I went to church the other week, where the pastor talked about Hezekiah. In 2 Kings 20, Hezekiah falls ill from what has to be considered the worst boil ever. He's about to die. But wait! Here comes Isaiah! He probably has some good news, right?

Nope. Isaiah brings a message from God: Get your house in order, cause it's gonna be a bumpy ride. No. Wait. That's a song from Emery.

Never mind.

"Set your house in order, for you shall die. You shall not recover." From the very mouth of God comes a crystal-clear death sentence. Hezekiah is going to die. No if's, and's, or but's. Game over. No extra lives, no continue's, do not pass Go, do not collect $200. Checkmate. Mousetrap. Hezekiah's battleship is as good as sunk.

Here, again, we have a distinct instance of God's foreknowledge descending from heaven and influencing our actions. In Peter's case, it influenced him to denial, and even pride: "Though they all fall away, I will not. Even if I must die with you, I will not deny you." In Hezekiah's case, however, it moves him to prayer. He turns his face to the wall, weeps bitterly, and prays to God to save his life. But what's the point? God has already said it, right? Surely that means it's set in stone, unchangeable.

Here's where stuff gets crazy. Isaiah hasn't even made it out of the palace yet. He's in the process of leaving,  in the middle court, when God speaks to him again, mere minutes after pronouncing a death sentence on Hezekiah. Isaiah has a new message for Hezekiah: "Thus says the Lord: I have heard your prayers: I have seen your tears. Behold, I will heal you.On the third day you shall go to the house of the Lord, and I will add fifteen years to your life."

Holy crap.


What? Whaaaaat? This is amazing! Hezekiah is about to die: God knows the future, and in the future, Hezekiah dies. That is what happens in the future. God isn't wrong. He isn't mistaken. He isn't lying. That is what the future holds for Hezekiah. The timeline for all of human history has Hezekiah dying, right there. Then Hezekiah prays for, what, five minutes? Isaiah hasn't even left the palace yet, so it can't have been that long. And BAM.

God changes the future. How crazy is that? To rub in what he's just done, he says, "I will add fifteen years to your life." The timeline for human history now has Hezekiah living another 15 years. The future is now that Hezekiah will live.

Isn't that awesomely awesome? Freaking amazing, is what it is. God is ready and willing to change the future. God is prepared to set aside something that was going to happen in favor of something else. And that means that his foreknowledge is not some dead, cold, predestined, uncaring lump: It's alive, and more than that, it's lively, energetic, dynamic. It's a foreknowledge that has free will built in.

And that means that Peter was not predestined to deny Christ. The possibilities are endless. He might have prayed. he might have recognized his weakness and begged Jesus to make him stronger. And God might have changed the future. But Peter was proud, and frightened, and he wanted so badly to be cool and independent and to show Jesus how strong he could be that he forgot, for a crucial moment, how weak he truly was.

Bottom Line: God can change the future, and he does take requests. Isn't that awesome?

Addendum:
A friend of mine asked me if God knew that he would change the future, and if he did, did the future then really change? This is a good question, and it took me a while to come up with the answer to it.

To say that God cannot change the future in a meaningful, real way is to say that God is trapped in the universe and unable to change it. It's to say that the future is set, and God is as helpless as ourselves in going through history. Therefore, God must be able to change the future, with all the dynamic action and decision that the word "change" implies. The actual workings of that change  involves time, eternity, foreknowledge, election, free will... all of this stuff is to big to comprehend. What we can understand, and rest in, is this: God listens to our prayers, and those prayers can affect how the will of God comes to pass in our world. God can change the future for us.

Pwned by God

So it's the night before my wedding. I've ordered six pairs of glossy purple shoes for my groomsmen, and six pairs of purple socks. Three pairs of socks have gone missing, but that's no big deal, really. Three of my groomsmen--Aaron, Mickey, and Ollie--have the shoes already. Cameron had a pair previously, but could no longer find them. I go into my room and see three pairs of shoes in the box: "No problem," I think, "Cameron's shoes must have found their way back in here." So I give one pair to Cameron and put the other two into my car to give to my other two groomsmen, Peter and Steven. An hour later I get a text from Ollie: "dude, did you put my shoes somewhere? I can't find them." And so it began.

Were Cameron's shoes lost, and had I mistakenly given Ollie's shoes to him? Or were those indeed Cameron's shoes, and had I misplaced someone else's shoes? Where the crap was that last pair of shoes?

That question would haunt Ollie and I for the next hour. We completely tore up our bedroom, then we completely tore up the living room. We tore up every room that had any chance of containing the shoes. Then we did it again. 


No shoes. No shoes at all. And the wedding is at 12 the next day. Although, on the plus side, we did find the three missing pairs of socks. But we're still missing a pair of shoes. And then my mom, who's been helping us a while, suggests we get together and pray that God will help us find the shoes. Now, I don't really think that'll help. I've been praying on and off for the last hour and it hasn't shown any results. But we do it anyway. We stop what we're doing, gather together, and pray.

Immediately after we're done, I start thinking out loud about what to do, assuming the shoes hasn't been found by tomorrow. Because I've already pretty much given up hope. I do not think we're going to find the shoes. And then, not two minutes after we're done praying, my mom spots a tiny spot of purple poking out of one of the tuxedo sack things. And there are the shoes. We'd walked past the tux bag dozens of times during the previous hour and never seen it.

Here's the crazy thing. We would have found the shoes in the morning, when everyone was getting dressed. But if we hadn't realized they were lost, we never would have found those last three pairs of purple socks. I am confident in saying this is a God thing. God decided to give us a bit of excitement before the wedding, a little reminder that without him everything falls apart... but that he is both able and willing to fix it again, once we trust in him and ask him to do it.

Prayer

What is prayer? Talking to God. Every Christian knows that. But what are you talking to God about? What is your purpose in praying? That's where you start getting different answers depending on who you ask, and where and when you ask them. Because you can talk to God about anything, for any reason. But what I want to talk about right now is petitionary prayer: when you ask God for something.

Not the earliest, but probably the most well-known, instance of petitionary prayer is found in the Lord's prayer: give us this day our daily bread. Asking God to give you your food for the day. But there's more. James tells us "If any of you lacks wisdom, let him ask God, who gives generously to all without reproach, and it will be given him" (James 1:5). What's more, 1 John tells us that "If we ask anything according to his will he hears us. And if we know that he hears us in whatever we ask, we know that we have the requests that we have asked of him." (1 John 5:14). Possibly the coolest example of petitionary prayer is found in Daniel. Daniel sees a vision and fasts for three weeks, praying to God that he may understand the vision. At the end of the three weeks, an angel appears and says, "Fear not, Daniel, for from the first day that you set your heart to understand and humbled yourself before your God, your words have been heard, and I have come because of your words" (Daniel 10:12).

James links the giving of wisdom to the asking for wisdom, and John says God hears us "if we ask." Some Christians seem to think that the only purpose prayer has is to draw us closer, spiritually, to God. To align ourselves more closely with him. And that is indeed one of the main purposes of prayer, possibly the main purpose. But it is not the only purpose. Look at Daniel's prayer. The angel has come "because of [Daniel's] words." Daniel's prayer literally sets celestial events into motion, resulting not only in an answered prayer but also an angelic showdown between the "prince of Persia" and Michael the freaking archangel. That is unbelievably awesome.

Prayer has the power to literally change the world: without Daniel's prayer, we don't have that vision. We don't have the explanation--at least, not in the same way. The Bible would be different if the authors had not prayed.  And I think Christians every day operate on this basic assumption that prayer can change things, even if unconsciously. When you pray for someone to get well, what are you praying for? Are you asking God to merely watch something happen that was already going to happen naturally? Ludicrous. Why are you praying at all, if you are asking that? You are asking God to supernaturally heal someone. To change the world, or at least the small bit of the world that you and your friend inhabit. Christians have the unique privilege of talking to God, and the Bible teaches us that when we ask God to change the world, he will. We need to use that privilege.

Sifted like wheat

I have read through Luke at least twice, most of it more than that, but for some reason I never specifically noted Luke 22:31-34. I don't know why, since it's super cool and tells us something really important about Peter.

We haven't seen Peter in a while, not since the Transfiguration. He'll show up here and there asking a question or something, but nothing terribly important. That is, until the night of the Lord's Supper. According to Luke, Jesus sends Peter and John to prepare the room (Mark only records two anonymous disciples--likely an example of Peter's humility when Mark was recording it). They eat passover, and Jesus foretells that someone is going to betray him. After a brief discussion, Jesus turns him attention to Peter. I would imagine that they might withdraw from the general conversation, because what Jesus says to Peter definitely does not qualify as polite dinner conversation.

He begins with what is possibly the most ominous opener in the history of openers: "Simon, Simon, behold, Satan demanded to have you, that he might sift you like wheat" (Luke 22:31). Now, wheat is sifted by being put into a large basket with a mesh bottom and tossed into the air. This causes the wheat to separate from it's casing and other trash that might be in there. When applied to a person, this does not sound like fun times. At this time Peter may remember, as I did, the story of Job. Satan is poking at God, God responds by bringing up Job, and Satan immediately counters by asking to test Job--in essence, to "sift him like wheat." With Job, Satan is confident that when Job is sifted, he will turn out to be all trash and no wheat, and I get the feeling that Satan is trying the exact same thing with Peter.

"But," Jesus says, "I have prayed for you that your faith may not fail. And when you have turned again, strengthen your brothers." First part? Awesome. Second part? Not so awesome. I imagine Peter frowning at the initial piece of news, beginning to smile, then frowning again as the last line sinks in. When I have turned again? Is Jesus implying...

Yes, he is. And Peter recognizes this, which is why he immediately affirms his loyalty to Jesus. "Lord, I am ready to go with you both to prison and to death." I will not turn, Lord. I would die before that happens. And Peter genuinely believes this. Imagine his distress when, instead of smiling and patting him on the shoulder, Jesus sadly shakes his head and says "I tell you, Peter, the rooster will not crow this day until you deny three times that you know me." And then, without another word, Jesus turns and addresses the disciples as a whole, as if the previous exchange had not even occurred. And Peter is left to wonder what Jesus means, and he begins to be afraid.

This whole exchange is just incredibly interesting. Why Peter? Why has Satan demanded dominion over Peter specifically? Because Peter is the leader of the disciples. Always named first when the disciples are listed. Who dared to walk on water towards Jesus. Who named Jesus as the Christ, was given a new name by Jesus himself. Because Satan thinks (or hopes, at least) that if he can get Peter to break, demonstrate that there is no wheat, nothing solid, to Peter, than the other disciples will crumble as well. Jesus also acknowledges Peter's importance to the other disciples, telling him "when you have turned again, strengthen your brothers." And he will turn away. We know that, Jesus knows that, and Satan knows it as well. But he will also return and do as Jesus tells him. In a nutshell, that's the story of Peter's life. Turn and return. Fall away and come back. Always returning, always coming back. Because he really does love Jesus.

This post was written in 2011. And in 2014, I published my very own book, Simon, Who Is Called Peter. It's a First-Person narration, meaning it gets you inside the head of Jesus' most notorious disciple. However, it's also extensively footnoted, referencing dozens of commentaries and scholarly works on the life of Peter. CLint Arnold, Dean of Talbot School of Theology, calls it "an account that is both faithful to the biblical text and engagingly expressed," and Darian Lockett, Professor of Biblical and Theological Studies, describes it as "a comprehensive portrait of Peter that is delightfully and skillfully woven together with the fabric of the New Testament." If that sounds like something you'd like to read, check it out!