Phil Johnson agreed with me that it is correct to speak of answered prayer outside of a miraculous context:
I appreciate the prayers and the well-wishes, and I agree that God’s answer to Adrian’s prayer (by sending rain that eliminated the high pollen counts) was just as much an answer to prayer as a miracle of healing would have been. I also agree that it would have likewise been an answer to prayer if He had called me home.
He did point out (on reflection, I think correctly) that I was perhaps in danger of underemphasising an important distinction between the miraculous and providence before stating what I wish I had said myself-
The faith that sees the hand of God in the natural outworking of divine providence (and understands that God is sovereign over every detail of everything that happens) is not a lesser faith than the kind of belief that can only see God at work when He intervenes in spectacular, supernatural, and miraculous ways.
Pyromaniac also has four assertions that I have no problem agreeing to:
1. There is a monstrous potential for evil in blithely assuming that all your private imaginations are supernatural promptings that come to you as divine revelations from the Holy Spirit.
2. Those who order their lives by such an assumption are being willfully gullible and sinfully superstitious, and they have no biblical warrant for the practice. In fact, such a mindset is hostile to the biblical concept of discernment.
3. Claiming God told you something when in fact He did not is a profoundly wicked kind of presumption whose fruits are always evil. In fact, it was a capital crime under Moses’ law.
4. That kind of presumption, paired with a declining concern about biblical doctrine, has unleashed an untold amount of mischief in the visible church over the past century.
I am a little connection-challenged at the moment (just a rather ropey dial-up – no broadband for a week or two!) so I leave you still waiting for any (not just phil) cessationist to come up with some biblical arguments – I get the feeling I may be waiting a long time, but perhaps I have missed a cracking post somewhere……
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