Does Prayer Change God?
by Philip Yancey
“I the Lord do not change” (Malachi 3:6).

“My heart is changed within me; all my compassion is aroused” (Hosea 11:8).

Those two statements, both recorded in the Bible as the words of God, frame a mystery. I could marshal other verses describing a changeless God and balance them with more passages that show God changing his mind. Truth to tell, we want some of both: a dependable God we can count on and yet an attentive God whom we can affect.

Not everyone worries about the philosophical underpinnings of prayer. For those of us who do, however, what we conclude about this issue may well determine how we view the utility—or futility—of prayer.

Origen was the first Christian writer known to mull over the paradox of praying to a God who does not change: “First, if God foreknows what will come to be and if it must happen, then prayer is in vain. Second, if everything happens according to God’s will and if what He wills is fixed and none of the things He wills can be changed, then prayer is in vain.” Origen came down solidly on the side of a changeless God, arguing that from the moment of creation God could foresee all that we would freely choose, including the contents of our prayers. Many philosophers followed the same track: Immanuel Kant, for example, called it “an absurd and presumptuous delusion” to think that one person’s prayer might deflect God’s plans.

Calvinism, with its emphasis on God’s absolute sovereignty, shifted the focus of prayer from its effect on God to its effect on the person praying. The devout Jonathan Edwards questioned petitionary prayer. He wrote, “It is not to be thought that God is properly moved or made willing by our prayers”; instead, God bestows mercy “as though he were prevailed upon by prayer.” (John Calvin himself, I should note, had no such doubts about prayer. He urged people to pray and included a chapter on it in the Institutes next to his chapter on predestination. About his more extreme followers he said, “It is very absurd, therefore, to dissuade men from prayer, by pretending that Divine Providence, which is always watching over the government of the universe, is in vain importuned by our supplications.”)

As discoveries in science explained away phenomena that people had always considered part of providence, sons and daughters of the Enlightenment saw less reason for prayer. The natural cycle of storms and droughts became more predictable, apparently less subject to the whims of God or those who prayed to God. Thomas Hardy described God as “the dreaming, dark, dumb Thing that turns the handle of this idle Show.” In the modern novel Slaughterhouse-Five Kurt Vonnegut mocks prayer in a scene where the main character, Billy Pilgrim, puzzles over the well-known Serenity Prayer:

God grant me the serenity to accept
The things I cannot change,
Courage to change the things I can,
And wisdom always to tell the difference.

Among the things Billy Pilgrim could not change were the past, the present, and the future.

Vonnegut had no need to point out the obvious conclusion: What good is prayer in such a predetermined world?

Turn to the Bible’s view of history, however, and you see a picture of God as a personal Being who alertly listens to prayers and then responds. Jesus filled in that portrait, and the disciples took up praying right where Jesus left off, making specific and personal requests for God to act.

The most famous prayer, the Lord’s Prayer (or, the Our Father), Jesus gave spontaneously in answer to his disciples’ request for help. Introducing this model prayer, Jesus acknowledged that God already knows our needs in advance:

And when you pray, do not keep on babbling like pagans, for they think they will be heard because of their many words. Do not be like them, for your Father knows what you need before you ask him. This, then, is how you should pray...

Some see God’s omniscience as a disincentive to prayer: Why pray if God already knows? In contrast, Jesus treated God’s knowledge not as a deterrent but as a positive motivation to pray. We do not have to work to gain God’s attention through long words and ostentatious displays. We don’t have to convince God of our sincerity or our needs. We already have the Father’s ear, as it were. God knows everything about us and still listens. We can get right to the point.

“Prayer holds together the shattered fragments of the creation. It makes history possible,” wrote Jacques Ellul, a modern French thinker who could not avoid the Bible’s direct statements that God acts in response to prayer. Indeed, the great events of the Old Testament—Abraham’s family, Joseph’s rebound in Egypt, the exodus, the wilderness wanderings, the victories of Joshua and King David, deliverance from Assyria and Babylon, the rebuilding of the temple, the coming of Messiah—took place only after God’s people had cried out in prayer.

Throughout, the Bible depicts God as being deeply affected by people, both positively and negatively. God “delights in those who fear him, who put their hope in his unfailing love.” Yet, as the prophets tell, at times God also feels wearied by disobedience and eventually God’s patience reaches an end point: “For a long time I have kept silent, I have been quiet and held myself back. But now, like a woman in childbirth, I cry out, I gasp and pant.”

The New Testament presses home that our prayers make a difference to God and to the world:

"Ask and it will be given to you."

"And the prayer offered in faith will make the sick person well.... The prayer of a righteous man is powerful and effective."

"The eyes of the Lord are on the righteous and his ears are attentive to their prayer."

"You do not have, because you do not ask God."

Underscoring these lavish promises, the Bible tells of prophets and apostles praying for physical healings and even the resuscitation of dead bodies; Sarah, Rebekah, Rachel, Hannah, and Elizabeth praying against their infertility; Daniel praying in a den of lions even as his three friends had prayed in the midst of fire. When God sent the prophet Isaiah, the most God-connected person of his day, to inform King Hezekiah of his imminent death, Hezekiah prayed for more time. Before Isaiah had left the palace grounds, God changed his mind, granting Hezekiah fifteen more years of life.

In a sort of negative proof of the power of prayer, three times God commanded Jeremiah to stop praying; God wanted no alteration in his plans to punish a rebellious nation. Prayer had, after all, softened God’s resolve before. “Forty more days and Nineveh will be overturned,” the prophet Jonah proclaimed to a heathen city, but “when God saw what they did and how they turned from their evil ways, he had compassion and did not bring upon them the destruction he had threatened.” Four times the Old Testament reports that God “relented” or “changed his mind” in response to a request, and each shift forestalled a promised punishment.

How do we reconcile the changeless God described in the Bible with the responsive God also described in the Bible? The revivalist Charles Finney, who moved away from the strict Calvinism of his youth, grounded his belief in the power of prayer, ironically, in God’s unchanging character: “If you ask why he ever answers prayer at all, the answer must be, Because he is unchangeable.” To give an example, a God bound by unchanging qualities of love and mercy must forgive a sinner who prays repentantly. God changes course in response to the sinner’s change in course, and does so because of those eternal qualities.

The contemporary theologian Clark Pinnock follows a similar line of logic. Since God’s nature is love, he says, God must be impressionable and sympathetic: “Because God’s love never changes, God’s experience must change.” Pinnock contrasts two models of God’s sovereignty. We can picture God as an aloof monarch, removed from the details of the world. Or we can picture God as a caring parent with traits of love, generosity, and sensitivity—an infinite Being who personally interacts with and responds to creation. Accordingly, God considers prayers much as a wise parent might consider requests from a child.

C. S. Lewis seemed fascinated by the questions posed by prayer, especially how a sovereign God might listen and respond to our prayers. As a young Christian in England, he had felt embarrassed about praying for his brother Warren overseas when he heard of a Japanese attack on Shanghai. What difference might one puny prayer make against the inevitability of fate or providence? He went on to explore the topic in several of his books and many of his essays and letters.

Lewis once presented the problem in the voice of a skeptic akin to Kurt Vonnegut:

I don’t think it at all likely that God requires the ill-informed (and contradictory) advice of us humans as to how to run the world. If He is allwise, as you say He is, doesn’t He know already what is best? And if He is all-good won’t He do it whether we pray or not?

In reply, Lewis said that you could use the same argument against any human activity, not just prayer. “Why wash your hands? If God intends them to be clean, they’ll come clean without your washing them.... Why ask for the salt? Why put on your boots? Why do anything?” God could have arranged things so that our bodies nourished themselves miraculously without food, knowledge entered our brains without studying, umbrellas magically appeared to protect us from rainstorms. God chose a different style of governing the world, a partnership which relies on human agency and choice. God granted the favored human species the “dignity of causality,” to borrow a phrase from Pascal.

The skeptic, then, is objecting not merely to prayer but to the basic rules of creation. God created matter in such a way that we can manipulate it, by cutting down trees to build houses and damming rivers to form reservoirs. God granted such an expanse of human freedom that we can oppress each other, rebel against our Creator, even murder God’s own Son. Lewis suggests that we best imagine the world not as a state governed by a potentate but as a work of art, something like a play, in the process of being created. The playwright allows his characters to affect the play itself, then incorporates all their actions into the final result.

In this view, prayer as a means of advancing God’s kingdom is no stranger than any other means. Go into all nations and preach the gospel, Jesus told his disciples, thus launching the missionary movement with its harrowing history; would not a large banner in the sky have served God’s purpose just as well? Heal the sick, visit prisoners, feed the hungry, house strangers — Jesus also commanded these activities, delegating them into our hands rather than enlarging his own Galilean ministry to global scale. Consistently, God chooses the course of action in which human partners can contribute most.

Lewis sums up the drama of human history as one “in which the scene and the general outline of the story is fixed by the author, but certain minor details are left for the actors to improvise. It may be a mystery why He should have allowed us to cause real events at all; but it is no odder that He should allow us to cause them by praying than by any other method.” Prayer is a designated instrument of God’s power, as real and as “natural” as any other power God may use.

From Prayer: Does It Make Any Difference? by Philip Yancey