Why God Won’t Answer Your Prayers

The #LentChallenge asks you to read Matthew, Mark, Luke and John in preparation for Easter. To drink in the fullness of the story of Jesus, to immerse yourself in His teaching, miracles, arrest and resurrection.

But the challenge is to not read the familiar, but ask God to awaken you to the unfamiliar.

What are the things you least want to read but most need to hear?

We asked our friend, New Testament Bible Scholar, Dr. Craig Blomberg, to weigh in your questions:

1.Why won’t God answer my prayers?

Jesus is not offering his followers a “blank check” if they just believe hard enough. In the prayer he taught his disciples to pray (Matthew 6:9-13), he taught them to include the clause, “Your will be done on earth as it is in heaven.”

God’s will always overrides ours if those two wills are different, and no amount of trying to force ourselves to believe strongly enough will ever change that. But there are times that God chooses to work through our belief or faith to “move mountains” (the immediate context), in a proverbial sense, so we should always pour out our hearts and our desires to him.

One helpful way of summing all this up that I have heard is to say that the true “prayer of faith” will always leave room for God’s will to be different from ours. After all, even Christ experienced this in Gethsemane, when his desire was that he not have to go through the agony of the cross, but God had a greater positive purpose for him (and for us) through that suffering. If even Christ had to experience such agony, despite his desires and prayers (and he certainly had as much faith as anyone ever has had!), then we dare never think that we are exempt from suffering things that we would prefer not to undergo.

 

2. What's the difference between the Son of Man and the Son of God? 

The Son of Man was a name in the Old Testament that first of all referred to a person’s humanity, but could be used to contrast the difference between them and God. God frequently addresses Ezekiel as “son of man” in ways that make it clear it means “mere mortal.” But Daniel 7:13 describes one like a son of man coming on the clouds of heaven and being ushered into the very presence of the Ancient of Days, a title for God, and being given eternal dominion over the kingdoms of the earth.  This human is also an exalted, supernatural, Messianic figure.

Jesus’ use of Son of Man, at least most of the time and perhaps all of the time draws on this background. Son of God in Old Testament and intertestamental Judaism could mean a follower of God, an exalted human being,  an angel or the Messiah. In the first-century Greco-Roman world it was often used for humans who were believed to have been deified upon their deaths. We need to recognize a range of usages in the New Testament, therefore. When the Roman centurion used it of Jesus after he died, he may have thought of him like a noble philosopher or deceased emperor, now turned into a god.

When Jesus uses it, especially in John’s Gospel, of the uniquely intimate relationship he has with his heavenly Father, it reflects his divinity even while incarnate as a human being.

 

3. Why did God allow Jesus to be tempted?

Hebrews 4:15-16 supplies the answer. Christ was tempted in every way like we are, yet remained without sin. His sinless life, followed by his atoning death and resurrection to eternal life made him uniquely qualified to empathize with us in all our temptation. We can therefore come boldly before God’s grace-filled throne with confidence to find Jesus as uniquely qualified to help us in our times of need.