Defying our Experience

Last updated on: November 11, 2015 at 12:11 pm by John Mark N. Reynolds

Defying our Experience 2015-11-11T12:11:59-04:00 John Mark N. Reynolds

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I keep a prayer journal ever since JP Moreland, philosopher and mentor, pointed out it was good to keep track of what you prayed in the past so you can see what God had done in the present. There is a pattern to life in Jesus Christ, but we can lose the flow of His actions in the day-to-day. Our God cares for even the sparrow, so He cares for us, but as a result of the care for the sparrow, the stars, and the sea, what God is doing can be hard for me to see. One human lifetime is too small to catch the full pattern of history, but we can catch glimpses of the goodness of God over the years.

God sometimes answers prayers quickly and sometimes over a long period of time. We are broken so badly that if He were to repair all that was damaged, there would be too little of us left to keep our personality intact. Slowly, over years, He heals the wounds, replaces the broken places, and brings comfort to pain. The operations my heart requires may be more painful at first than the disease, but God is looking toward eternity not my immediate pleasure.

So my prayer journal contains two kinds of answers to prayer: immediate and over years. I have prayed for a sick child and seen them get better immediately. I have asked God to remove a stubborn failing and now can look back over years of my journal and see that it has gone.

What does this prove?

Nothing to a certain foolish kind of skeptic because such things could be the work of some natural cause. I pray and see healing immediately, but perhaps if I had not prayed the healing would have happened in any case. I pray and give myself to God and in those areas moral improvement begins to take root. Am I just self-healing? It does not feel like it as I sense God working. “Isn’t this all in your head?” this stubborn skeptic claims.

“Yes,” I respond, “all my experiences are in my head, including the experience of hearing you tell me it is all in my head.” When I feel God at work, then it has a quality of an external being contacting me that is similar to though not the same as a human person speaking to or working with me. God tells me to love my enemies and commands me to pray for the people who use me. That is not something I want to do, but over time I have found it liberating!

So if a person begins with the assumption that God is highly improbable, the “burden of proof” regarding my experience of God can get very high. But I do not accept the assumption that God’s existence is unlikely. In fact, I think that there are decent arguments for His existence and that a (nearly) universal human experience of the “other” makes God the best explanation for my experience.

I have gone ahead with that assumption and have seen His work. God’s work is real, but when I am stubborn, and stubbornness is not just the preserve of foolish skeptics, I try to ignore reality. Steve Jobs famously had a “reality distortion” impact on people: they would deny what they knew to be true if Steve told them something else. Of course, if what they thought was true wasn’t really true, merely a belief about what could or could not be done, then Jobs could often defy their expectations and get his team to do more than they thought possible. What Jobs could not do was ever change a fact or the hard edges of reality.

God exists. We are not God. We must die and then face judgment. These are truths Steve Jobs had to face and is facing. We pray mercy on his soul as we hope for mercy. Jesus told a story about a man in the place of the dead who looked up to Abraham and asked that his brothers be warned of his fate.

The story contains an important truth:

And he said, ‘No, father Abraham; but if one goes to them from the dead, they will repent.’31But he said to him, ‘If they do not hear Moses and the prophets, neither will they be persuaded though one rise from the dead.’

This turned out to be true: Jesus raised Lazarus from the dead and the result was a desire of the ruling class to kill Jesus and Lazarus. There are numerous accounts of people dying and coming back from the dead, but skeptics simply work harder for elaborate explanations of what could happen naturally. When one explanation fails, they look hard for another making the logical error that any natural explanation must be better than any explanation that includes God or the supernatural. Such people live closed off even from their own experiences . . . many have had real religious experience, but chose to explain them away. Of course, if one decided to do so, one could explain away any experience because every experience is “just in our heads” and could be a deception, wishful thinking, or wrong.

I choose to stick to the sensible path: I have a body and I have a mind. My mind deals in ideas and ideas are not physical. My body deals in matter and matter is physical. Science tells me truths about matter while philosophy and religion explore the non-physical realms. Ideas suggest immaterial mind and immaterial mind opens me to the plausibility that my experience of God, sensed apart from any argument, may be just what it seems.

God is and He is not silent.

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