Signs and Wonders
Everyone is looking for signs and wonders, answers to prayer. I wonder how many actually ask the right way, and then see the results? There’s an often abused passage in the Bible that teaches one key ingredient to the process of prayer:
Therefore I say unto you, What things soever ye desire, when ye pray, believe that ye receive them, and ye shall have them. – Mark 11:24
Prosperity preachers try to tell us that this somehow relates to the words of power concept; that your belief somehow directs God’s will. Predestination people will tell you that you can believe it will happen because it was already planned to come out that way. Neither one of these answers is true.
In order to believe, really believe that prayer works, you have to trust in the person you’re praying to. That means relationship. This is the greatest sticking point for almost every person who’s ever taken up any form of spirituality. Most forms of spirituality look inward, towards self. It’s easy to do this, because we can easily believe that we can trust ourselves. If no one else in the world is on our side, at least we have ourself… right? Wrong. You can’t trust yourself, because as humans, we lie to ourselves all the time. It’s one of the strange peculiarities about being human. We find trust in having gained confidence in a communal experience.
Trust is not about self, it’s about community. We have trust that our homes aren’t going to get broken into because we trust in the neighborhood we live in. We have a lack of trust that someone is going to violate our home because of the neighborhood we live in. Trust is always an external, societal construct. Even in the cases of “self-confidence” we gain that confidence through external confirmation. No one is truly self-confident on their own. So, how can you possibly be confident in a self-driven spirituality?
That’s why all spirituality ascribes some external force of will. Buddhism has the eternal forces of yin and yang. Theism has the representations of literally millions of gods. These concepts are designed to provide external corroboration of one’s internal beliefs. The problem is, every single representation of god is false, except one. That one is the only one that actually played a physical role in the history of mankind. This is where relationship begins.
God gave us experience of himself. When the Bible talks about faith, it’s not talking about believing in something even if you don’t know it’s true. It’s talking about evidence and substance;
Now faith is the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen. – Hebrews 11:1
The key is in the “not seen” and the “hoped for.” We use these two criteria every single day. You hope for a boyfriend or girlfriend with whom you can spend your time, or the rest of your life. You hope for a promotion. You don’t see either of these things, yet you still hope; why? Because even though these things are not seen, they have substance. There are boyfriends and girlfriends. There are raises and promotions. The only mystery in this is how to obtain one, because you know that they exist.
With God, there is no mystery. When the Bible talks about mystery it uses “mysterion,” but even this isn’t a good analogy, because when Paul uses the word, he’s using the Hebrew meaning for “raz.” The concept of raz is not something secret that needs to be sought out, it’s simply something not commonly known, but which has been revealed. It is the idea that there is some information which is held by God and revealed only to those whom he chooses. The key here is that when Paul writes, he’s not writing to a select few. He’s writing to everyone. They mystery is out. God has revealed himself to the world, in the form of a person.
This is where we come full circle. In order to believe, truly believe that your prayers are going to be answered, you have to believe in and know God. The quantification “in” after the word “believe” changes it’s meaning entirely. You have to put your trust in a specific thing; in this case a person. There is only one person who has given good enough reason to gain your trust, but you can’t see him. So, when you pray, you have to ask yourself; who are you talking to?
I’ve seen prayers answers in small and dramatic ways. I have no doubt that they were answers to prayer, because the confirmations came in ways so astronomically improbable as to be impossible. I’ve even had persons who I had known in the past contact me out of the blue after years of separation, just to tell me the answer to a prayer. The only way this works is that I have a relationship with a living person. The only way this works is that I believe.
I may not always believe that my prayers will be answered. They may not always be answered. More often than not, they’re not answered in the way that I want them to be. Yet, when answers do come, they come in a way that cannot be denied.
If you’re looking for signs and wonders for the existence of God, stop. Stop trying to treat God like a genie in a bottle. Start thinking of him as what he really is; the maximal being. Fear God. Respect God. Approach God with humility and learn that God is a person, not a concept.
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