Praying For The Sick

Those of you who read the Dilbert blog will have recently read his post so entitled (and those that don't you can find it here). I found this article interesting because in one of bible college one my lecturers gave an example that proved precisely the opposite (the article is located here). So what happened? Did God decide that the group of patients that Scott Adams cites were not worthy to get better while those cited by my lecturer were? Is one test better than the other? If so which one, the one that had a greater group of patients or the one that used the triple-blind method (neither the doctors nor the patients knew if they were being prayed for and the prayer groups only knew the first names of the patients and never met them)?

I don't think I can answer these questions. I just have a few reactions to this whole thing. Firstly, the statement by the chief chaplain at the Mayo clinic, "The sense of community was not there. You could call it impersonal prayer rather than intercessory prayer." I don't like this reaction. Is he saying that the prayer groups didn't or weren't able to pray hard enough because they didn't know the people involved? Or was the effacy of their prayers somehow lessened for the same reason? Or maybe because the people being prayed for weren't Christians (and therefore part of the community) God decided they weren't worth saving? This doesn't fit with the G@d I know. I would see this as almost as a cop out answer, trying to get off the hook from not performing.

And that is what it is at the end of the day after all, performing. Bring G@d out of the box and get Him to dance on His hind legs. "He's not a tame Lion". We are trying to make God perform to make a point to the world that He is real. Somehow we have got the mistaken idea that if we can just prove that He exists then people will believe. They won't. People might use studies as Scott Adams does to prove that G@d doesn't exist or isn't thoroughly involved. Even if every study in every discipline shows incontrovertibly that G@d exists I doubt that any of these like Scott Adams will come to faith. As Jesus put it "Do not put the Lord your G@d to the test" (Matt 4.7). And at the end of the day this is what these people are doing. They are trying to test the Lord to make sure that He is there.

However, conversely, even if people are doing it for the wrong reasons the patients themselves are still sick so why wouldn't G@d heal them? Just to prove a point that He isn't subject to the whims of His people? This doesn't sound like the actions of an all-powerful all-loving Creator to me. At the end of the day I'm not going to rest my faith on any medical research. Not because I don't believe in their methods or what they are trying to do. Rather there are too many unknowns. I do not know the mind of G@d, I do not understand why He acts the way that He does. I do not understand the human body and the way it works. Just because we may be able to prove in this circumstance that G@d did not move in the way people expected or desired Him to does not negate His existence or the effacy of prayer.