An Open Letter on Good Friday

Dear Josh:

Thanks for sending me the two articles on prayer. The first found in USA Today of March 31, 2006 relates that prayer for heart-bypass patients didn’t aid recovery. This study involved asking strangers to pray for heart by-pass patients at six hospitals. The strangers were to pray that bypass patients would recover without complications. Volunteers were selected from one Protestant prayer group and two Catholic prayer groups. The study was called the Study of the Therapeutic Effects of Intercessory Prayer and is published in the American Heart Journal.

Also you forwarded to me a letter to the editor from a Steve Auvil disagreeing with the results of the study. I strongly agree with Mr. Auvil.

Science demands that God be subject to proof. The want to weigh and measure God and to reduce Him to a deity in a test tube, which is not much of a deity at all, I think.

Did the study weigh and measure the faith of the people praying. Did it quantify the love and concern of the people praying. And how do you measure faith and love. As I write this, it is Good Friday. This is the day we celebrate that Jesus went to the cross for us. How do we quantify love? The answer is the simple Bible verse: John 3:16. “For God so loved the world that He gave his only begotten son…” This is the very quantification of God’s faith and love for us.” This is as close as we get.

We do not otherwise measure and quantify God. Oh, people have tried for ages. Satan demanded that Jesus prove Himself by demanding that he make bread of stones, that he throw himself down from the temple. Others demanded that Jesus prove himself through miracles. But even though there were miracles, they still did not believe. They drank the water that became wine and ate the fishes and loaves and moved on with life without believing.

I can assure you that even if the study had come out to the contrary, those running the tests would still not believe. Finally, even as Christ was on the cross, those observing the crucifixion challenged Christ to prove himself by coming down from the cross. He refused the test. And later when He was resurrected, many still not believe.

The challenge of science is to nail down the proof, so to speak. We come to challenge God to live up to our tests, to crawl into our mental corrals, to encase deity in our test tubes in order that we might be satisfied and that God might live up to our expectations and demands.

When the Jews were defeated and the ark was taken to Philistia; all were certain that God was defeated. After all He had not given victory to his chosen people. He had failed the test. And so the Ark of the Covenant was placed in the temple of the victor’s god Dagon as a trophy. Without help of man, the statute of the god Dagon was found at the feet of the ark with head of the statue severed. The Philistines soon found that they were plagued with hemmrhoids for their trouble and were happy enough to ship the ark back to the Jewish people.

In short we do not measure God. He is the Potter --- not the clay. He does the molding and he does it as He chooses and when He chooses. If He chooses to heal, He heals and He does it when and where He pleases. Quite frankly this particular test was doomed to start with. Its premise was to make God prove Himself to the scientists and doctors. God was invited to come down from Heaven and prove Himself to the medical and scientific community.

Well, quite frankly it “ain’t happening.” God does not show up for our pop quizzes. He is after all God. He does the measuring and He does the testing. And to be frank, like some ancient societies, I think modern man and scientific man has already been weighed and found wanting. Now we wait for the divine finger to write on the wall the ancient words of Mene, mene, teckel parsin (Dan.5:25-28).

DAD