Asking and receiving

Nowadays, unbelievers who attack the Bible don’t even need to read the Bible for themselves—much less consult a standard commentary.

Rather, they can simply mouse over to The Sceptics Annotated Bible, click on a particular book or chapter of the Bible, pan down the right-hand column, and have objections spoon fed to them. Here’s one example:

***QUOTE***

[Mt](7:7-8) "Ask, and it shall be given you."
Mark Twain said there are "upwards of a thousand lies" in the Bible. But this is probably the biggest. How many desperate, frightened, broken-hearted parents have watched their children die while begging God to help?

http://www.skepticsannotatedbible.com/mt/7.html

***END-QUOTE***

Ever heard this sort of thing before? Sound familiar?

It bears an uncanny resemblance to George’s belabored version of the problem of evil.

Needless to say, the SAB is not a scholarly resource. Mark Twain was not a Bible scholar.

But Twain was very quotable.

The SAB is not designed to interpret the Bible according to the grammatico-historical method.

Rather, the purpose of the SAB is to seize on isolated versions and attack then with punchy one-liners.

So what about the relationship between faith and prayer?

Mt 7:7-8 is not a self-standing passage. For one thing, it’s part of a larger pericope—7:7-12.

In the pericope of which it’s a part, a distinction is drawn between giving good gifts and bad gifts.

If a child of God were to ask his Father for something harmful, like a venomous snake, God would not honor such a request.

In addition, 7:7-8 is part of the Sermon on the Mount. It forms a literary unit.

And it is, among other things, preceded by the Lord’s Prayer. In the Lord’s Prayer, our petitions are prefaced by our acknowledgement of God’s will and submission to his will (6:7-8).

So it was never meant to be a blank check.

Conditionality is also in view in other passages of the same type, such as Jn 14:13-14 or 1 Jn 5:14. Craig Keener has devoted several judicious pages to prayer in Jesus’ name. Cf. The Gospel of John (Hendrickson 2003), 2:447-50.

Even if no restriction were stated, the promises of Scripture inhere within a Biblical value-system.

Mt 7:7-8 doesn’t mean that we can reasonably call upon God to annihilate himself, or strike down our parents with a thunder bolt, or give us our own personal harem.

Jewish readers would understand perfectly well without being told that Mt 7:7-8 is not intended to chain God to our every whim, like a genie in a bottle.