I hear a lot of Christians saying that God basically chooses to answer or not answer prayers according to some overall greater agenda of his own. My question then is this: why pray at all? If God is Omniscient, then he a) already knows what you want so you don’t have to verbalize it. b) already knows everything that’s GOING to happen, so his “decisions” are already made.
To pray for something implies that God can change his mind (i.e. he WAS going to kill all those babies in the bus crash, but now he’s not because you prayed.)
If praying did nothing to prevent millions of innocent people (including babies) from being slaughtered by the Nazis, then why would prayer work for ANYTHING? If God is EVER going to intervene in human affairs, wouldn’t that be the moment? Eli Wiesel said on this topic that God’s lack of intervention in the holocaust proves at least one of the following: God is not all powerful and COULD not stop the holocaust, or God is not all good and did not CHOOSE to stop the holcaust. BTW the old “mysterious ways” bit is rejected outright by Wiesel. Essentially he says that there is no reason good enough, divine or otherwise, to allow children to be tortured and burned.
It seems that prayer as the primary means of birth control doesn’t work either. Maybe that’s why there are some many abortions.
Not necessarily because it affects what God is or is not going to do or allow happen, but because the act of praying is beneficial to us in recognizing that God is there & cares for us & we are accountable to Him/Her, whether or not God responds in the way we want.
CS Lewis said something like that, quoted in the film SHADOWLANDS but I’m not sure where it occurs in his writings.