God on Mute

Engaging the Silence of Unanswered Prayer

Pete Greig

• Publisher: David C Cook
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9780830781980
• Topic: Teologia e religione
• Subtopic: Religione

Writing out of the pain of his wife's fight for her life, but also the wonder of watching the prayer movement they founded changing lives around the world, Pete Greig steps into the dark side of prayer and emerges with a hard-won message of hope, comfort, and profound biblical insight for all who suffer in silence. Fully revised and updated. Includes new 40-day devotional

Chapter One

Cappuccino and the Cosmic Problem of Pain

Courage does not always roar. Sometimes courage is the quiet voice at the end of the day saying, ‘I will try again tomorrow.’

Mary Anne Radmacher

If your deepest, most desperate prayers aren’t being answered, if life sometimes hurts so much that you secretly wonder whether God exists, and if He does whether He cares, and if He cares why on earth He doesn’t just do something to help, then you’re not alone. Surprisingly, the Bible reveals that Jesus—even Jesus—suffered the silence of unanswered prayer. The One who turned water to wine, healed the sick, and even raised the dead, was also denied and apparently abandoned by the Father. What’s more, as far as we can tell from the Gospel accounts, Christ’s unanswered prayers seem to have been concentrated on His time of greatest need: the four days of His Passion.

On Maundy Thursday, in the Garden of Gethsemane, Jesus asked the Father to spare Him from suffering, but every crucifix testifies to the agony of that unanswered prayer. Earlier that day, He had prayed repeatedly for Christian unity, but look around you! Tragically, that prayer also remains unanswered. Jesus lives with a divided church and an unanswered prayer to this day.

On Good Friday, we witness a third unanswered prayer—perhaps the most agonising of them all. Nailed to a cross and slowly suffocating, the Son cried out to the Father: ‘Why have you forsaken me?’ And there was no response from heaven. No dove descending. No booming voice. No answer to prove the question wrong.

On Holy Saturday, the hopes and prayers of every disciple lay dashed and broken in the grave. But God did nothing. Said nothing. No sound but the buzzing of flies around the corpse of the Son.

And then finally, on Easter Sunday, God broke the silence. He awoke. He spoke. And for those of us who find ourselves walking reluctantly in Jesus’ footsteps from Gethsemane and Golgotha to the garden tomb, Easter Sunday gives great cause to hope. That one ultimate miracle—the resurrection of the Son of God from the dead—assures us that every buried dream and dashed desire will ultimately be absorbed and resurrected into a reality far greater than anything we can currently imagine.

When I asked my friend Mike if I could share his experiences of unanswered prayer in this book, he laughed laconically and said he’d prefer to be featured in the Forbes Rich List. ‘Being held up as an example of unanswered prayer is not exactly what I dreamed about as a kid,’ he said, and I know how he feels. But however zealously we may pray for health, wealth, and a happy home, sooner or later life goes wrong.

We all get hijacked eventually.

One moment you’re cruising from A to B at 30,000 feet, watching movies and winning at life. The next you’re more scared than you’ve ever been before, caught in a situation you prayed you’d never be in, and heading somewhere that you never asked to go. The terror comes in many guises: a sudden trauma, a chronic illness, the death of a dream, the loss of something you lived for, the loss of someone you loved more than life itself.

And when we hurt, most of us turn to prayer. Way more than you might think. Way more than go to church, at any rate. The girl at the checkout hoping she’s not pregnant, the businessman staring at his sales figures, the teenager laying flowers by the roadside. Seventy-one percent of Americans pray regularly. ¹ Even atheists backslide from time to time. I read somewhere (but I find it hard to believe) that a whopping 20 percent of agnostics and atheists sheepishly admit to praying daily! Take Henry, a 64 year-old who describes himself as being ‘at the sceptical end of agnosticism’. In 2018 he told British pollsters ComRes, ‘I certainly wouldn’t classify myself as religious’ before describing a nightly routine of kneeling down by his bed to recite the Lord’s Prayer and pray for his loved ones. ²

‘It is not possible for us to say, I will pray, or I will not pray, as if it were a question of pleasing ourselves,’ observed the great theologian Karl Barth. Prayer, he noted, is ‘a necessity, as breathing is necessary to life.’ ³

But the brutal fact of the matter is that, while most of us pray, prayer does not always seem to work and it’s not easy to be honest about this.

At university, I knew a guy called Captain Scarlet (nicknamed after the lead puppet in a cult TV series to which he bore a striking resemblance). The Captain was the only nineteen-year-old I’ve ever known who viewed televangelists as aspirational role models. He was about as positive about positive thinking as it is possible to be.

One day, the Captain told me that he had been miraculously healed of a serious back complaint. I tried to give him a hug but he screamed. ‘I thought you’d been healed?’ I said. ‘Oh I have,’ he insisted, grinning furiously. ‘It’s only the symptoms that remain.’

I still don’t agree with Captain Scarlet’s view of faith. In fact, I think it’s potentially dangerous to put so much faith in faith that we ignore the facts and kiss our brains goodbye. However, I’m not a cynic. I believe in the goodness and greatness of God, and I’ve spent most of my adult life trying to help others believe too. Maybe that’s why, like Captain Scarlet, I sometimes find it so much harder to admit my disappointments and frustrations in prayer than I do to broadcast glad tidings of great joy to all the world.

I’m convinced that miracles great and small do happen more often than people realise and that when one comes to us we should shout it from the rooftops! But let’s be honest, too, about the reality of unanswered prayer so that we can think intelligently and relate sensitively around our darkest questions and secret doubts.

When our prayers aren’t answered and heaven is silent, there may be good reason to doubt God’s existence. I know plenty of people who’ve gone that route. But there is also good reason to believe. I’m told that the chances of life beginning by cosmic fluke are something in the region of 1 in 1x10 ^40,000. That’s a lot of zeros. Not impossible, of course, but cutting the Creator out of the equation takes an awful lot of faith. And if there is a God, there’s pretty good reason to believe in the power of prayer too. ‘Ask and you will receive,’ Jesus promises, ‘and your joy will be complete’ (John 16:24). But it is this very conviction—the belief that prayer works—that causes perplexity and pain when it doesn’t. Unanswered prayer is only a problem for those who believe. For others, it is simply a confirmation that they were right all along.

God Squad Claims First Miracle

In my book Red Moon Rising, I described a time on the Mediterranean island of Ibiza when an Anglican priest asked a bunch of young missionaries sent out by our organisation to pray for rain because the locals were suffering from serious drought. No one could possibly have been more surprised than me when, minutes after we prayed, the heavens opened and unseasonal storms began lashing the island. When we learned that it hadn’t rained so heavily on Ibiza in July since 1976, the timing of our prayer meeting seemed even more remarkable.

Somehow, a British journalist caught wind of the story and phoned for an interview. ‘So you’re the bloke,’ he sneered down the line, ‘who’s claiming you made it rain in Ibiz...