The Non-Supporting Scriptures
Before anything else, I have to admit I had a great deal of
difficulty in deciding exactly how I would go about analyzing the claims you
have made regarding the scriptures that you insist support your “proofs”. Was
this because the claims you made, had, in my opinion, any real substance to
them? Not really. As far as I am concerned, your claims all remain close to
bordering on the ridiculous.
However, if I do accept that you are actually
sincere in any way at all, it is in the fact that you appear to honestly
believe that you are making solid, and justifiable arguments. Since it is not
in my nature to disqualify without a hearing anything one might have to say
about any subject, as long as that which they state is done so sincerely, I
finally decided I would make an honest attempt at explaining how you have,
perhaps inadvertently, mismanaged each of the scriptures in question.
The mismanagement I speak of may be attributed to many causes,
but I believe the main one relates to a scripture that I already quoted
earlier, and which deserves to be repeated yet again.
“The man without the Spirit does not
accept the things that come from the Spirit of God, for they are foolishness to him, and he cannot understand them, because they
are spiritually discerned.” (The
Scriptures, in their truest essence, came to us by the Spirit of God, and are
thus, spiritually received.)
1
Corinthians 2:14 (Emphasis and parenthetical statement mine.)
It is this inability of a
non-believer to ever understand the scriptures that I personally believe is the
driving force behind so many of the improperly used references that so often
appear within their arguments. For the sake of those young “seekers” of whom I
mentioned much earlier, however, I decided that an attempt to correct these
misused verses was in fact required, less they be misled by the unanswered
argument of one who is not even a believer. So let us begin.
You first claim that, “Jesus
makes specific promises in the Bible about how prayer is supposed to work”,
and in this you speak correctly. Jesus does make specific promises regarding prayer, but it these same specifics
that you seem to go out of your way to either alter, or avoid altogether. Let
us look now, at both your references, and your included comments.
Matthew 7:7
The first mistake we find is a minor one to be certain, but it
still deserves to be mentioned, for it shows the beginning of a pattern which,
I believe, will reveal the lack of concern for detail that will come to
highlight virtually all of your ensuing comments. The mistake I speak of is in
your reference itself. That which you have quoted as Matthew 7:7, is in
actuality 4 verses, Matthew 7:7-11.
“Ask, and it will be given you;
seek, and you will find; knock, and it will be opened to you. For every one who
asks receives, and he who seeks finds, and to him who knocks it will be opened.
Or what man of you, if his son asks him for bread, will give him a stone? Or if
he asks for a fish, will give him a serpent? If you then, who are evil, know
how to give good gifts to your children, how much more will your Father who is
in heaven give good things to those who ask him!”
You comment in regard to these scriptures:
“If "every one who
asks receives", then if we ask for cancer to be cured, it should be cured.
Right? If "our Father who is in heaven gives good things to those who ask
him", then if we ask him to cure cancer, he should cure it. Right? And yet
nothing happens.”
The first problem with your statement
is that it falls victim to one of the most common errors committed by
non-believers and believers alike, an error, I should add, that you commit
time and time again in these references that follow. The error consists of
quoting a particular Scripture without first considering the context within
which that Scripture is found. To discover the context of these particular
verses in question, you must go all the way back to the first two verses in
Matt., Chapter 5.
“Now when He (Jesus) saw the crowds,
He went up on a mountainside and sat down. His disciples came to Him, and He began to teach them, saying:...”
Since the verse clearly states that
Jesus began to teach His disciples,
it may be understood that all that follows was intended for those who believe. The teachings
contained in Matthew 5-7 (The Sermon on the Mount) are Jesus’ instructions for
how all Christians are to attempt to
lead their lives. This says absolutely nothing to unbelievers, and will never
even concern them until they, by
God’s grace, receive sufficient faith to be saved, and then demonstrate
acceptance of that which God has gifted unto them, through obedience to His
divine instruction, by their own free will. Only then, can they be considered
to be believers, and only then may they claim any promises made by Jesus in these
chapters, unto themselves.
There are even conditions attached to
the above-mentioned promises that a believer
must fulfill before these words can apply to him/her. What are these
conditions? To determine that, let us take a closer look at a few of the phrases
from Matthew 7:7-11, which you, on your web-site, inadvertently lumped together
under the reference of Matthew 7:7. If we appear to jump around somewhat, it is
only because there is so very much to be considered within the words in
question. At this time, however, I think Matthew 7:8 will serve adequately as a
starting point.
“For every one who asks receives, and he who seeks finds, and to him who knocks it will be opened.” (Emphasis
mine.)
As I am certain
you will recall, your question regarding this portion of Scripture went like
this: “If "every one who asks receives", then if we ask for cancer
to be cured, it should be cured. Right?” Well, though I myself am in no way an
authority on the Greek language, I have read, at quite some lengths, the work
of those who are authorities, and I have come to believe that the original
tense of the Greek verbs that we have translated as, “asks”, “seeks” and
“knocks”, were originally structured so as to imply “a continuing action”.
Perhaps our English translations should actually read, “For every one who continues to ask receives, and he who continues to seek finds, and to him
that continues to knock it will be
opened.” As I said a moment ago, though I am not an authority on the Greek
language, I can still offer at least some Biblical support for what I have said
regarding the three verbs mentioned above. Consider if you will, that which
follows.
The statement recounted above from Matthew
7:8, also appears in the Book of Luke, Chapter 11, in what is quite obviously a
remembrance of the same event by a different individual. Unlike Matthew,
however, Luke also recalls something else Jesus said, and he includes it in his
Gospel immediately prior to the verses we are considering, and directly
following his recollection of the Lord’s Prayer:
“Then he (Jesus) said to them,
“Suppose one of you has a friend, and he goes to him at midnight and says, ‘Friend, lend me three loaves of bread, because
a friend of mine on a journey has come to me, and I have nothing to set before
him.’
“Then the one inside answers, ‘Don’t
bother me. The door is already locked, and my children are with me in bed. I
can’t get up and give you anything.’ I tell you, though he will not get up and
give him the bread because he is his friend, yet because of the man’s boldness he will get up and give him as much as he needs…”
Luke
11:5-8 (Emphasis mine)
The word that appears as “boldness”
in verse 8 of the above quotation,
comes from a word, that in the Greek original, appears only once in the entire
New Testament. The word is “anaideia”, a word that in English may be translated
as “importunity”. Furthermore, importunity is defined as “persistence in asking; the act of demanding again and again.[1]”
And this is not the only example of Jesus teaching this particular lesson. Only
a few chapters further on in the Book of Luke, we have an accounting of Jesus
once again telling His disciples a parable…
“…to show them that they should
always pray and not give up. He said, “ In a certain town there was a judge who
neither feared God nor cared about men. And there was a widow in that town who
kept coming[2]
to him with the plea, ‘Grant me justice against my adversary.’
“For some time he refused. But
finally he said to himself, ‘Even though I don’t fear God or care about men, yet
because this widow keeps bothering me, I will see that she gets justice, so
that she won’t eventually wear me out with her coming!’”
Luke
18:1b-5
Both of the above parables highlight
cases where the person who receives that which they ask for, receives those
things because they persisted in the
requests that they were concerned with. The fact of the first parable’s
proximity to the disciple’s recounting of the Lord’s Prayer is a solid
indicator that Jesus was still engaged in teaching believers how they should pray when He told them
the parable. It is clear to any who have eyes to see that Jesus is telling His
followers that they should “persist in prayer’ if they truly desire that which
they ask for from their heavenly Father. This is but another reason why the
“prayer” which you have constructed, with the idea that it should be answered
because it was offered one time with no true depth of feeling, is not really a
prayer at all. The very first sentence in Luke 18 clearly states the entire
point:
“Then Jesus told His disciples a
parable to show them that they should always pray and not give up”. (Emphasis mine.)
Another error that you have fallen afoul of is best summed up
by the following statement: “Scripture must be proven by Scripture.” What this
means is that when the significance of one Scripture is called into question,
it should be weighed against what all other Scripture says about the subject at
hand. It is very rare, indeed, to find a particular verse in the Bible that
contains instructions, or a message, that is not supported, or even clarified,
by other Scripture within the Holy Word.
Therefore, since you apparently believe that God is obligated
to respond, in a positive manner no less, to every request made of Him, by
anyone, and since you, in this case, are using Matthew 7:7-11 as your “support”
of this belief, it becomes necessary that we see just what it is that other
Scriptures have to say about the subjects contained within your reference.
Since my own position is that the so-called “prayer” you have offered is simply
not worth the pixels you used to display it on the computer screen, I suggest
we first take another look at some of the biblical references regarding
“requirements for effective prayer”.
Having already dealt with this issue at some length during our earlier
discussion of John Bunyan’s definition of sincere (and effective) prayer, we
need here only touch again briefly on certain of these points, as well as a
couple that have yet to be mentioned. And that is where
we will pick up tomorrow.
TO BE
CONTINUED.......
[1] “Gage Canadian
Dictionary”, Gage Learning Corp., 1983, p.584
[2] The phrase “kept coming”
in the NIV version of the Scriptures reads “came” in some earlier manuscripts,
but before anyone claims that this means she appeared only one time before the
magistrate, it must be noted that the original Greek word “ercheto” is in the
“imperfect tense”, which implies that she returned quite frequently.
