The existence of evil has never been a philosophical problem for me. How can there be wickedness in a world created by a good God? Because he gave his creatures the freedom to rebel. Or at least the angelic and image-bearing ones. We did (rebel, that is) and here we are. That’s enough explanation for me. It’s the problem of faith that I struggle to get my head around. If you have the faith of a mustard seed (ie a very little), Christ told his disciples in Matthew 17, you can say to this mountain, move from here to there and it will obey you. Or in the less poetic and well-known rendering from Luke: If you have the faith of a mustard seed, you can say to this mulberry tree, be planted in the sea, and it will. Though we might question the practical value in transporting mountains or planting trees in the ocean, the basic takeaway seems pretty clear. If you have faith, the normal laws of nature are no longer binding.

Some years ago, my wife and I planted a small tree in the corner of our backyard. But then we decided we wanted it smack dab in the middle. So with tremendous faith, I approached the tree and told it in no uncertain terms to move from here to there and be planted in the center of the yard—which should be far simpler than planting itself in the sea. And do you know what happened? Nothing, of course, because I’m jesting. It never dawned on me to command the tree to move. And every time our dogs dig holes in that same backyard, we don’t command the mounds of dirt to relocate. We send our 12-year-old out with a shovel. “Faith Can Move Mountains,” is a message that adorns all manner of Christian kitsch, but when it comes down to it, I don’t even have the faith to move a sapling 30 feet or flatten a pile of dirt. I could easily argue that it would be sacrilegious to employ prayer in such silly, self-serving ways—for things I am perfectly capable of doing myself, but that doesn’t solve the bigger problem.

I John 5:13 is a verse I hear quoted fairly often—including this past Sunday. “I write these things to you who believe in the name of the Son of God, that you may know that you have eternal life.” Verses 14 and 15 are quoted with less frequency. Same goes for verse 18. The gist of them is this. We can know we have eternal life if we receive “whatever we ask” in prayer and “[do] not keep on sinning.” A few chapters after Christ rebuked his disciples for lacking the faith to cast out a demon (which prompted his moving mountains quip), Jesus returned to the same word picture—this time after cursing a fig tree and witnessing its demise. “If you have faith and do not doubt,” he told them in Matthew 21, “you will not only do what has been done to the fig tree, but even if you say to this mountain, ‘Be taken up and thrown into the sea,’ it will happen.” And just to make perfectly clear that this authority goes beyond casting inanimate objects into large bodies of water, Jesus added the following. “Whatever you ask in prayer, you will receive, if you have faith.”

I am perfectly willing to accept the existence of evil in a world made by a good God, but how can evil exist in a world where believers with even a modicum of belief are promised anything they ask for in prayer? That’s the question that does a number on me. Because the implication is that nobody has the faith of a mustard seed. I heard Francis Chan say back in 2011 that his life, since he was a little boy, has been one long string of answered prayers. “Everything in [my life],” he said, “is just this crazy, supernatural answer to prayer.” He went so far as to modify the world’s most famous Sunday school song as follows: “Jesus loves me, this I know, because [his answered prayers] show me so.” I was tremendously encouraged by Chan’s testimony, but I don’t think it mirrors the experience of most Christians. Because if it did, how could there still be such a thing as Planned Parenthood? Or Mifepristone? Or “gender affirming care?” Christians who claim to receive everything they ask for in prayer are either being less than honest, or they’re praying for the wrong things.

There is no shortage of whatever you ask for promises in Scripture, and they come almost exclusively from the mouth of Christ. The only qualification for nearly all of them is faith. “Whoever believes in me,” Jesus said in John 14, “will also do the works that I do.” Then he takes it further. Whoever believes in me will do even “greater works than these… (for) If you ask me anything in my name, I will do it.” Jesus makes statements like these throughout the gospels. I’ve already referenced Matthew 17:20, Luke 17:6, and Matthew 21:22. Here are a few more:

• Whatever you ask in my name, this I will do, that the Father may be glorified in the Son. (John 14:13)
• Truly, I say to you, whatever you ask of the Father in my name, he will give it to you. (John 16:23)
• Therefore I tell you, whatever you ask in prayer, believe that you have received it, and it will be yours. (Mark 11:24)
• I chose you and appointed you that you should go and bear fruit and that your fruit should abide, so that whatever you ask the Father in my name, he may give it to you. (John 15:16)
• And I tell you, ask, and it will be given to you; seek, and you will find; knock, and it will be opened to you. (Luke 11:9)
• Again I say to you, if two of you agree on earth about anything they ask, it will be done for them by my Father in heaven. (Matthew 18:19)
• If you abide in me, and my words abide in you, ask whatever you wish, and it will be done for you. (John 15:7)

Collectively, the conditions for receiving whatever we ask for in prayer include asking in faith, without doubt, in Jesus’ name, in agreement with another, for the purpose of bearing fruit, while abiding in Christ (as his words abide in us). And sometimes, according to the mostly-redacted Matthew 17:21, it must be accompanied by fasting. James and John may well have had these prerequisites in view when they approached Jesus to demand, “Teacher, we want you to do for us whatever we ask of you.” Their request, you’ll remember, was that they should each sit next to Jesus in his coming kingdom—which didn’t sit particularly well with the other disciples. Matthew’s account attributes the question to their mother, but when the sons were asked if they were able to drink the cup prepared for Christ, they said without hesitation, “We are able.” They boldly asked in faith, but their request was denied. “You do not know what you are asking,” Jesus responded.

Years later, another James warned against the dangers of requests motivated by “selfish ambition.” The reason “you ask and do not receive,” he wrote, “(is) because you ask wrongly, to spend it on your passions.” Prayer is not intended nor authorized to be a means for achieving selfish gain, so maybe we can write off the Sons of Thunder for being nakedly self-interested in their request. But what do we do with Paul’s petition for the removal of his proverbial thorn in the flesh? “Three times I pleaded with the Lord about this,” Paul wrote, “that it should leave me. But he said to me, ‘My grace is sufficient for you, for my power is made perfect in weakness.’”

There’s no indication that Paul’s request was selfish or devoid of faith. And perhaps if he’d continued making it, he could have finally worn God down. Isn’t that the lesson of the persistent widow in Luke 18? Whatever the case, Paul did not get what he asked for because it was not in accord with God’s intentions—which means it was not within Christ’s purview to grant. This was the second problem with the request made by James and John. “To sit at my right hand or at my left,” Jesus told them, ”is not mine to grant, but it is for those for whom it has been prepared.”

John himself would make this caveat explicit in his first epistle. “If we ask anything according to [God’s] will,” he wrote, “we know that we have the requests that we have asked of him.” He further asserted that obedience is also necessary. “Whatever we ask (of God),” it says in I John 3, “we receive from him, because we keep his commandments and do what pleases him.” In like fashion, James would assert that it is only “the prayer of a righteous person” that has power. David and Solomon said the same. “When the righteous cry for help,” we read in Psalm 34, “the LORD hears and delivers them out of all their troubles.” Proverbs 15 adds that “the LORD is far from the wicked, but he hears the prayer of the righteous.” In the words of Peter, “[the Lord’s] ears are open to [the] prayer(s) (of the righteous), but his face is “against those who do evil.”

Is it possible, then, that the reason why even the apostles did not get everything they asked for is because there was disqualifying sin in their lives? It’s possible but not likely. Because we know of one man who prayed in faith, without any sin, but was still not granted that which he requested. “My Father, if it be possible, let this cup pass from me; nevertheless, not as I will, but as you will.” Those were the words of Christ in the Garden of Gethsemane. So not only was Jesus tempted in every respect as we are, he also had the experience of not receiving what he asked for in prayer.

On the one hand, Jesus said whatever you ask for in faith is yours. On the other, not even Jesus got whatever he asked for in faith. Nor did the apostles. What should we make of that? Was Jesus being hyperbolic in his over-the-top promises? It doesn’t feel that way. Here’s one theory. If there is a risk in both asking too much and asking too little, Jesus would prefer we error on the side of asking too much—even as he modeled an explicit yielding to the unknown purposes of God. “Nevertheless, not my will, but yours, be done.” That’s how the close of Christ’s prayer is rendered in Luke. One of the tensions here is that James explicitly warned his readers against asking for something with doubt. The person who doubts, James wrote, should not expect to receive anything from the Lord. But how can you pray for something without doubt while also declaring, not my will but thine be done? Isn’t the declaration itself an expression of doubt—an allowance for the possibility that you might not get what you ask? The key, I believe, is this. In yielding to the wisdom and authority of the Father, Jesus was not doubting his ability to do what was asked of him. Jesus was merely doubting the merits of his own request. There’s a Josh Garrells song I’m quite fond of that includes this line: “Let every man be considered a liar, if he doubts the goodness and faithfulness of God.” That is the doubt we should be guarding against.

Since God, in the end, only acts according to his will, we might wonder what the point of praying is at all. Is it for the good of our own souls, or is God actually altering the normal course of cause and effect? In either case, there is something in the mechanics of prayer that honors God and is grounding for us. He could accomplish his purposes and give us all we need without prayer, but he inaugurated it none the less. Biblically, there is some wiggle room between what God intends to do and what he’s willing to do. And that, apparently, is where our prayers—and labors—actually make a difference. We see this in Abraham’s pleadings for Sodom, Moses’ pleadings for the Israelites, and on the negative side, in Jesus’ inability to do many miracles in his home town. Mark writes that “he could do no mighty work” in Nazareth “because of their unbelief.” Make of that what you will, but faith, it seems, operates as a sort of fuel for miraculous intervention.

For the last 30 years, I have been trying to harmonize what the Bible says about prayer with what I observe on the ground. It’s a difficult task because of this disconnect between the lavish promises we find in Scripture and the bitter disappointments we so often encounter in real life. But whenever I come up against something in Scripture that doesn’t match my experience, or the experience of those I know, I don’t assume Scripture is wrong. I assume my understanding is wrong, or worse—that my faith is simply deficient. A faith that can be aptly summarized by the words of the desperate father in Mark 9, “Lord, I believe. Help my unbelief.” I suspect all who claim the name of Christ live with this tension, just as all who came before us. Jesus spoke in very binary terms—no good tree bears bad fruit, nor again does a bad tree bear good fruit—but James notes that it’s more complicated in practice. “From the same mouth come blessing and cursing. My brothers, these things ought not to be so.” Jesus said it can’t be; James said it shouldn’t be. We find something of the same duality in Paul’s letter to the church in Rome. He praises them in chapter one for a faith known round the world, then follows it up in chapter two with a brutal tongue lashing towards those who presume upon God’s kindness and forbearance. Here’s how it looks side by side:

First, I thank my God through Jesus Christ for all of you, because your faith is proclaimed in all the world. (1:8) But because of your hard and impenitent heart you are storing up wrath for yourself on the day of wrath when God's righteous judgment will be revealed. (2:5) For, as it is written, "The name of God is blasphemed among the Gentiles because of you." (2:24)

What do we make of that? Was Paul speaking to good trees or bad trees? The answer is both, I suspect, since most all congregations are comprised of some unknown combination of sheep and goats. Good trees and bad. How do we recognize them? By their fruits. That’s what Christ says in Matthew 7. “A healthy tree cannot bear bad fruit, nor can a diseased tree bear good fruit.” In Luke 6, he makes it even more explicit. “The good person out of the good treasure of his heart produces good, and the evil person out of his evil treasure produces evil.” This brings us to the real difficulty because it’s not as if some people in the church are producing only good fruit and some people are producing only bad. We all seem to be producing a mix of both. When I examine my life, I do find what I believe to be genuinely good fruit. But there’s some bad fruit in there too, and good trees aren’t supposed to be able to bear bad fruit.

The standard explanation is that it’s the pattern of our lives that matters, not perfect obedience. I don’t disagree with that, but it does raise another problem. One of the things we evangelicals frequently assert is that Christianity is the only religion in the world that doesn’t require you to earn salvation. Every other religion, it’s argued, boils down to trying to do more good than bad. And yet here we are essentially saying that the way we can know whether our faith is genuine is if our good deeds outweigh the bad. They don’t outweigh the bad morally, of course. A single bad deed is disqualification, but we still wind up against a sort of Catch 22. We can’t do anything to earn salvation, but the only way to know we have salvation is to do something.

Paul said in the book of Acts that if you believe in the Lord Jesus, you will be saved. John said in his first epistle that we can know we believe in the Lord Jesus if we keep his commandments (I John 5:1-3). Since nobody is keeping Christ’s commandments perfectly, we’re left hoping that we’re keeping them enough. It’s an if-then equation of monumental proportions: If you believe, then you will be saved. But how do we verify the if when the then is still in the future (the one who endures to the end will be saved)? This is made more pressing by the fact that if we get it wrong, there is no opportunity for a redo (it is appointed for man to die once, and after that comes judgment). Jesus added a second means of testing our faith when he said, if you believe in me, ask me anything in my name, and I will do it. Taken together: If you believe, then you will obey the commandments AND you will receive what you ask for in prayer.

We can insist until we’re blue in the face that salvation comes through faith and not works, but where does that leave us if we don’t actually have the faith Christ describes as being requisite? The faith of a mustard seed. The faith to move mountains. My takeaway is this. We each of us have less faith than we’d like to imagine—which puts us in a bit of a precarious situation if we believe that faith and works can be cleanly separated. There is a sense in which we’re saved by faith, and there is a sense in which we’re saved by works. When we pound on one exclusively and ignore the other, all sorts of dangers arise. Paul writes that Abraham was justified by faith when he believed that God would provide him a son. James writes that Abraham was justified by works when he showed himself willing to sacrifice that son. Both are right, so long as we understand saving faith and saving works to be manifestations of the same Spirit.

Abraham’s near sacrifice of Isaac is one of those biblical stories that doesn’t shock us nearly as much as it should because we’ve simply grown familiar with it. And we know how it ends. But my youngest son has not yet been inoculated. So he asked me recently what I would do if God commanded me to sacrifice him. For my part, it’s hard to imagine a scenario in which I could be convinced that God wanted me to kill my child. Would even the appearance of an angel do the trick? Or would I assume it to be a devil in disguise? Imagine what that must have been like to live through as a father. Or a son.

I once walked out of a college art class because we were being shown a movie I deemed to be pornographic. It was about a suddenly disabled husband who insisted his wife have sex with other men. My punishment for vacating early was having to write an essay about Abraham and Isaac, which the professor deemed a parallel account. Namely, the instruction to act immorally as a sign of devotion. It’s been a few decades since I turned that paper in, but I believe my essential contention was that while God had the authority to make such a request of Abraham, the cinematic husband did not.

The bounds of God’s moral authority are stretched even further in the first book of Samuel—which has recently come alive for me through Jon Erwin’s streaming television series, House of David. It is an epic retelling of King Saul’s fall from grace and King David’s near-impossible rise to the throne. I cannot recommend it enough. That said, there is nothing feel-good about it. It is brutal and heartbreaking, but it has made Samuel, Saul, and David more real to me as people than they’ve ever been before. Ditto for Jonathan and Michal. How easy it is to forget that the characters we encounter in the Bible were real people, who lived through real trials, and had no idea how those trials would conclude.

By the end of season two, David is on the run. He has received shelter—and the sword of Goliath—from the priests at Nob. But he was seen there by the dastardly Doeg the Edomite, Saul’s chief herdsman. Though David had lied to the priests about his reasons for coming to them as he did (claiming to be on a secret mission for the king), Saul ordered the priests killed anyway for abetting his enemy. When his men refused to lift their swords against God’s anointed, Doeg was happy to oblige. The show’s depiction of the ensuing violence is not overly graphic, but the weight of what is happening is palpable. It’s even worse in the text:

And the king said to the guard who stood about him, “Turn and kill the priests of the LORD, because their hand also is with David, and they knew that he fled and did not disclose it to me.” But the servants of the king would not put out their hand to strike the priests of the LORD. Then the king said to Doeg, “You turn and strike the priests.” And Doeg the Edomite turned and struck down the priests, and he killed on that day eighty-five persons who wore the linen ephod. And Nob, the city of the priests, he put to the sword; both man and woman, child and infant, ox, donkey and sheep, he put to the sword.

House of David makes no reference to the slaughter of Nob’s women, children, and infants. Perhaps it would have been too much for the audience to bear, but that is what happened. And while killing the women and children might seem like next-level depravity, there is a complicated backstory to this saga. Do you remember what Saul did in the first place to lose God’s favor? His sin was failing to utterly destroy the Amalekites. These were God’s instructions to Saul through Samuel:

Thus says the LORD of hosts, ‘I have noted what Amalek did to Israel in opposing them on the way when they came up out of Egypt. Now go and strike Amalek and devote to destruction all that they have. Do not spare them, but kill both man and woman, child and infant, ox and sheep, camel and donkey.’”

Saul, apparently, executed all the Amalek men, women, children, and infants but stopped short of killing the king and the livestock. When confronted, he dubiously claimed to Samuel that he had only spared the sheep and oxen in order to sacrifice them to the Lord, to which Samuel famously replied, “To obey is better than sacrifice.” And then Samuel himself “hacked [the Amalek king] to pieces.” As someone who is in the business of trying to spare babies from the sword, I would much rather there weren’t passages in Scripture where God decrees their destruction. It offends my Western sensibilities. But what was God’s warning to Job and his friends? Who are you to question the wisdom and prerogative of the Creator? “I am the first and the last,” he told John, “I have the keys of Death and Hades.” God condemned the Amalekites to destruction because they were an exceedingly wicked people. The Amalek infants didn’t deserve to die for their own sins, but they were bound up in the sins of their fathers. And there is no greater punishment to be leveled upon a people than the annihilation of their progeny.

Abortion, as I’ve said before, is both deserving of God’s wrath and a manifestation of God’s wrath. If a foreign adversary was doing to our unborn children what we are doing to our unborn children, the full fury of the American war machine would be unleashed against them. But since it is not China, Russia, or Iran annually killing a million American babies in utero, we barely notice. Saul was commanded to devote the Amalekites to destruction. He didn’t. He wasn’t commanded to devote Nob to destruction, but he did. He would not annihilate God’s enemies, but he would annihilate God’s anointed. That is how perverse and corrupt the mind of Saul had become.

The reason I am bothered by the notion that God would decree that even the Amalek babies be put to the sword is because I do not sufficiently appreciate the holiness of God or the evil of men. Perhaps if I did, I would be more bothered by evil in the world. When God shut the door to Noah’s Ark, he condemned to death every man, woman, and child not on that boat. Including the born and unborn babies. The reason I am less troubled by this account, I suspect, is because God carried out their destruction himself. He didn’t lay the charge upon his chosen people. But why should it matter which tools the Creator uses to carry out his will? Didn’t Jesus say something to the effect of, “I have not come to bring peace (to the earth), but a sword”? This is a metaphorical sword, some will say, and maybe so, but there is nothing metaphorical about Luke 22:36.

One of the things that is missing, I believe, in the average evangelical church in America is fear. The fear of the Lord, to be precise. In the parlance of C.S. Lewis, we have contented ourselves to worship a very tame lion. We jauntily approach his throne without any sense that he has the power and authority to tear us to pieces. It is not the love of God that brings wisdom. It’s the fear of God—which we could probably all use a lot more of. Ours is a nation that poisons and mutilates its unborn children. Would any pending judgment be too severe? Have we somehow missed the standard by which we shall be measured? Believe it or not, this comes from the apostle Paul:

He will render to each one according to his works: to those who by patience in well-doing seek for glory and honor and immortality, he will give eternal life; but for those who are self-seeking and do not obey the truth, but obey unrighteousness, there will be wrath and fury. There will be tribulation and distress for every human being who does evil, the Jew first and also the Greek, but glory and honor and peace for everyone who does good, the Jew first and also the Greek.

“When the Son of Man comes, will he find faith on earth?” That’s the question Jesus asks following the parable of the persistent widow in Luke 18. It’s a rather haunting one, no? I’m not sure I’ve ever considered it in context. Here is the statement that immediately precedes it: “Will not God give justice to his elect, who cry to him day and night? Will he delay long over them? I tell you, he will give justice to them speedily.”

Not getting what we ask for in prayer may owe to any number of things. I’ve already laid them out from Scripture. But for men and women of faith, unanswered prayer is meant to be the exception, not the rule. That should trouble us on many levels, but here is an exceedingly tangible and practical point of application. Don’t ever stop crying out to God for justice, day and night. This is how faith manifests itself. From our perspective, nothing is happening. The judge is silent and indifferent. From God’s perspective, “[I] will give justice to them speedily.” Do not overlook this one fact, beloved, that with the Lord one day is as a thousand years, and a thousand years as one day. So it may simply be that the reason God is not answering more of our prayers is because we are giving up on them too soon.