National Apologetics Conference
‘Ask and you got it’ Bible verses don’t tell the full story
By Paula R. Kincaid, The Layman, November 20, 2011
CHARLOTTE, N.C. – “The most common question I hear today is ‘Why is God silent?,” Gary Habermas told those attending the workshop “The Silence of God,” given at the 18th annual National Conference on Christian Apologetics.
The conference was held at Northside Baptist Church in Charlotte and sponsored by Southern Evangelical Seminary. Approximately 1,800 people from 28 states and four countries attended the Oct. 28-29 conference.
Habermas said the question can come in many different forms: “Why is God speaking to other people but I never hear from him?” or “I used to hear from Him but not now,” or maybe “Why is God ignoring me?”
To put his talk into perspective, he said that he does believe that “God is more active in the world today then He has ever been before.”
He divided the way God is active today into two main categories; the first includes miracles and healings. The seconds category he said, “are the things God does in our lives … How many of you have ever been convicted of a sin, or felt you had to call someone and apologize, or drop to your knees and pray for forgiveness?”
His objective in the workshop was to answer three questions he frequently hears from others:
1. Does the Bible claim that if you pray, especially in a particular way, that God will always answer your prayers?
2. Doesn’t the Scripture say, “Do this and God will heal?”
3. How about events in the New Testament? God always took believers from tough situations in the New Testament. How come he makes us go through them?
In answering the first question, Habermas quoted three Scriptures from the book of John:
“Whatever you ask in my name, this I will do, that the Father may be glorified in the Son. If you ask me anything in my name, I will do it.” (John 14:13-14 ESV) (emphasis added)
“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 ESV)
“In that day you will ask nothing of me. Truly, truly, I say to you, whatever you ask of the Father in my name, He will give it to you.” (John 16:23 ESV)
“Those are three clear verses that say, ‘Ask and you got it,’” he said. But readers have to look at the whole context of the “ask and receive” verse.
Habermas said that John 14:13-14 has a condition to it, “ask in my name:” a condition that is repeated twice. This does not mean “close the prayer with ‘in your name we pray,’” said Habermas, but is the believer truly His?
As for the John 15 passage, a few verses later, specifically verse 20 says “… If they persecuted me, they will also persecute you. …”
And several verse before the 32nd verse, is verse 2 where Jesus says, “They will put you out of the synagogues. Indeed, the hour is coming when whoever kills you will think he is offering service to God.” Read to the end of John 16, and verse 33 says, “… In the world you will have tribulation. But take heart; I have overcome the world.”
The point Habermas hoped to make with the John passages was “Why do we take the verses that are easy to recognize and catchy and ignore the verse in the same context that say this is not the whole picture?”
2. Doesn’t the Scripture say do this and God will heal?
Habermas told of a phone call he received from a lady. She told him about having problems with her pregnancy, and how an elder in her church had come to her and said that God had told him that the baby would OK. The baby died. This lady called him to asked, “Is James 5 in your Bible?”
James 5:14-15 says, “Is anyone among you sick? Let him call for the elders of the church, and let them pray over him, anointing him with oil in the name of the Lord. And the prayer of faith will save the one who is sick, and the Lord will raise him up. And if he has committed sins, he will be forgiven.”
Habermas said he turned the question around and asked her, “Is James 1 in your Bible?” James 1:2 says, “Count it all joy, my brothers, when you meet trials of various kinds, for you know that the testing of your faith produces steadfastness.”
He said that was the beginning of a four-hour telephone conversation.
“Why do we isolate certain verses from other verses and think that’s all that counts?” he asked.
Habermas then turned to the book of Psalms, where he said that for every “you’ll get what you want” verse, there are three or four other verses that say, “we will have issues in life.”
He made the point that believers must read the full books of the Bible not just select certain verses for context.
In John 17:15, Jesus prayed to His Father, “I do not ask that you take them out of the world, but that you keep them from the evil one.”
Habermas said that Jesus did not say He would take His followers from the world but He would take them through it. Habermas asked why do people assume that an answered prayer is God taking them out of the pain or the bad situation? “Maybe if we go through it, we will get a better blessing. God does take us from circumstances, but many times God holds our hands through the circumstances.”
3. Doesn’t the New Testament say that believers are always taken from bad situations?
Habermas said that he decided to look through the New Testament and count how many times God took a believer out of a bad situation. How many did he come up with? “Almost never,” he said.
At an earlier conference, he said, a lady spoke up, using the Acts 16 story of Paul and Silas in prison as a time when God took His followers from a bad situation. According to Acts 16, Paul and Silas were in prison, praying and singing hymns, when the prison doors opened. The jailer, realizing the doors were open and thinking the prisoners had escaped, started to kill himself until Paul and Silas spoke up. The jailer took Paul and Silas to his house and he and his whole household were saved.
Habermas asked her, “OK, did that happen before or after Paul and Silas were beaten? What do you think Paul was thinking between the first lash and last?”
He pointed out that before Paul and Silas were put in that jail cell they stripped and beaten with rods. God did not take them out of that situation.
“And here is my question for you,” Habermas said to those in the workshop, “Where do we get the idea that we are always to be taken from suffering?”
He said that Jesus learned obedience from the things He suffered. Habermas quoted Hebrews 2:10 “For it was fitting that He, for whom and by whom all things exist, in bringing many sons to glory, should make the founder of their salvation perfect through suffering.” (emphasis added.)
Habermas looked to Luke 2:52 “And Jesus increased in wisdom and in stature and in favor with God and man.”
So the main question, Habermas said, “is if Jesus had to learn by His suffering, are we capable of learning without suffering?”
“Plan on suffering, then ask, ‘what is God going to teach me; how will I grow?’ And maybe the prayer should be, ‘how shall I grow?,’” Habermas said.
Gary R. Habermas, Ph.D., is the distinguished research professor and chair of the Department of Philosophy and Theolo
gy at Liberty University in Lynchburg, Va. He has published 36 books, 18 on Jesus’ resurrection. For more information about Habermas, visit his website.