Of course God will answer prayer! All we need to do is ask, and He’s right there, Johnny-on-the-spot – right?
Be careful! The question is carefully worded: not *does* God answer, or *can* He, but WILL He? Certainly God can and does answer prayer; but do we understand that sometimes He WILL not?
The Lord told ancient Israel how to behave. “Execute true justice, show mercy and compassion everyone to his brother. Do not oppress the widow or the fatherless, the alien or the poor. Let none of you plan evil in his heart against his brother” (Zechariah 7:9, 10). We might presume God’s covenant people would readily obey. In fact, however, “they refused to heed, shrugged their shoulders, and stopped their ears so that they could not hear” (7:11).
Because they refused to hear Him, God refused to hear them! “Therefore it happened that just as He proclaimed and they would not hear, so they called out and I would not listen” (7:13). God simply will not heed the prayer of an unrepentant rebel! They pleaded with God to save them from their enemies, “but I scattered them with a whirlwind among all the nations which they had known” (7:14).
Solomon summarized our point well: “One who turns away his ear from the hearing of the law, even his prayer is an abomination” (Proverbs 28:9). Now, God heard Cornelius’ prayers even before he became a Christian (Acts 10:4, 31). He answered them by sending Simon Peter to teach Cornelius how to be saved. But Cornelius was no rebel! Rather, he was “a devout man, and one who feared God with all his household, who gave alms generously to the people, and prayed to God always” (10:2). When Cornelius heard the gospel, he did not rebel, but obeyed without delay. This we urge everyone to do!
–Joe Slater
