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Pilgrim Bible Church Online
Preaching the Doctrines of Grace

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  The Prayer Of Jabez Revisited
by Pastor Bryan Pollock

  

    Big things very often come in small packages, as the old saying goes. But the slender volume on the one-sentence prayer of an obscure member of the tribe of Judah currently captivating the nation, is thin not only in size but substance.

    The Prayer of Jabez indulges in all of the popular evangelical nostrums while turning biblical hermeneutics on its head. It is for starters dangerously reductionistic in its approach. The author blatantly suggests in rhetoric reminiscent of the hype of a used-car salesman, or the "can-do" cant of a motivational pitch man that "Through a simple, believing prayer, you can change your future. You can change what happens one minute from now"(pg. 29). The glaring error in this lies in the fact that spiritual change never comes easily to sinful hearts. The mere mouthing of somebody else’s prayer has no power by itself to change a person’s heart. And, I hasten to add that in this popular approach to Christianity which reduces the faith down to the mere application of principles, sinful man, prideful man, capable man becomes the measure of success. He can do it! And all he has to do is to learn the secrets of success and apply them accordingly. This is the kind of Christianity that even unbelievers may practice with impunity!

    Man stands too tall in the author’s esteem, as a result, and God assumes a frighteningly reduced dimension. He is reduced to the "watching and waiting" God of popular evangelicalism who is virtually powerless until man makes the first and right move. On page 60, Wilkinson writes, "Like any loving dad at the playground (a reference to a personal anecdote), God is watching and waiting for you to ask for the supernatural power He offers." After quoting Second Chronicles 16:9 to prove this passive divine posture, the author then states, "He eagerly seeks those who are loyal to Him. Your loyal heart is the only part of His expansion plan that He will not provide." If this is true, then the prophet Jeremiah was wrong! The leopard can indeed change his spots and the Ethiopian the color of his skin (Jer 13:23)! But how can I provide loyalty to God when the Bible explicitly says that such loyalty is a human impossibility and must come to me by grace. Indeed if God waits for my loyalty, He waits for a "morning cloud" and for the "dew which goes away early" (Hosea 6:4). God, Himself, must storm the heart of the soul He determines to make strong for Himself and bestow upon it the grace of loyalty and prayerful dependence (Prov. 21:1; Zech. 12:10).

    Just how far the author goes in his reductionistic theology becomes painfully obvious on page 49. Wilkinson talks like a process theologian when he states that God "becomes great" through the person who surrenders his need to the Lord! And when theology goes out the window, so does a proper understanding of man’s relationship to the Almighty. On this very same page, the author blatantly says that "...seeking God’s blessings is our ultimate act of worship." Yet, in reality, our "ultimate act of worship" is to seek the glory of our great and mighty God! One wonders why any one would want to pray to such a God once authors like Mr. Wilkinson are done with Him. Perhaps this is why they must resort to someone else’s prayer uttered in a time and setting when men really knew Him and walked with Him!

    The author also gives us within the pages of The Prayer of Jabez a dose of the self-esteem gospel! According to Mr. Wilkinson, Jabez’s real problem wasn’t his sin nature inherited from Adam - a truth glaringly absent from the book even though a mere three chapters earlier in First Chronicles, the very genealogy, in which we later find the subject of this book, begins with Adam (I Chron 1:1)! No, Jabez’s real problem, according to the author, is to be traced to a "curve ball" thrown by his mother when she saddled him with a bad name, the name Jabez meaning, "He causes pain," undoubtedly a not-so-pleasant reminder of the mother’s birth experience. As the author himself puts it, "He (Jabez) grew up with a name any boy would love to hate. Imagine if you had to go through childhood enduring the teasing of bullies, the daily reminders of your unwelcome arrival, and mocking questions like, ‘So, young man, what was your mother thinking?’" (pg.21).

    This not only drips with self-esteem theology, it is drenched with a faulty hermeneutic. The author clearly reads back into a 3,500 year old context from our own time and setting and clothes Jabez in the thin-skinned mantle of a contemporary, milk toast American adolescent. But men, even young men, in Jabez’s day were made of sterner stuff! And, worst of all, it fails once again to deal with the most pressing of issues, the issue of human sin which could have been accomplished by linking the pain of Jabez’s birth to the curse of the fall (Gen 3:16). But perhaps this was a calculated avoidance on the part of the author, avoidance of an even deeper pain than the surface annoyance of injured self-esteem. The pain of the fall and of human sin is never a popular topic, even amongst evangelicals and would most certainly militate against the popularity of the author who would dare to raise them.

    Hermeneutical deficiencies are elsewhere apparent in this book, most notably in the violence the author’s interpretive approach does to the principle of proportion. This sadly neglected principle represents that great bastion of restraint against building interpretive castles on a foundation of thin air. It is summed up in a simple question: Just how much ink did the Holy Spirit deem it necessary for the human authors of the Scriptures to spill on any given topic? Those topics concerning which the Word is silent or virtually so, must not be turned into grist for a doctrine mill because in doing so, the interpreter must indulge in a potentially dangerous eisegesis, or a "reading between the lines" of the text due to the sheer paucity of evidence. This leads to hermeneutical license, and, in the words of one of my seminary professors, runs the risk of turning the Word of God into a "ventriloquist’s dummy." And Wilkinson verges breathlessly close to this practice on page 20 of his book.

    First, he hedges his bets a bit with this eye-catching disclaimer, "As far as we can tell (italics mine), Jabez lived in southern Israel after the conquest of Canaan and during the time of the Judges." A phrase like this should alert the careful reader that the author is working with scanty evidence at best, and he should pay careful attention to what follows. And, unfortunately, what follows is even worse.

    In speculating as to the nature of the pain implicit in the meaning of Jabez’s name, Wilkinson demonstrates a fondness for skating on dangerously thin hermeneutical ice: "Perhaps the baby was born breech. Or perhaps the mother’s pain was emotional - maybe the child’s father abandoned her during pregnancy; maybe he had died; maybe the family had fallen into such financial straits that the prospect of another mouth to feed brought only fear and worry" (pg. 20). Not only is the author reading speculatively between the lines of the text, he does so utterly heedless of clear biblical teaching elsewhere that invalidates every one of these theories!

    Levitical Law knew nothing of "deadbeat dads" because it dealt severely with them, and the extended family in ancient Israel took seriously the welfare of every member. If an Israelite suffered crop failure and couldn’t recoup his losses, he had the perpetual hope of the forgiveness of debts which occurred every seven years during the Sabbatical Year (Duet. 15:1-6). If he suffered the seizure of property, he could look ahead to the Jubilee Year for its restoration (Lev. 25:28). Again, the author reads a modern phenomena into the text, and, as for the mother lamenting "another mouth to feed," the author my be imbibing the popular evangelical bias against large families which was entirely unknown in Old Testament times. Another mouth to feed in the agricultural setting of ancient Palestine would have meant a future farm hand to help plant and plow, and a daughter would have meant another needed domestic hand, a great blessing to home and hearth. Again, the book falls flat in its repeated failure to deal honestly with the entire scope of scriptural revelation on the subjects he raises.

    But perhaps Wilkinson’s gravest error is his appeal to pragmatic and subjective arguments to defend his thesis. "How do I know that it (his book) will significantly impact you?" Wilkinson asks rhetorically. "Because of my experience (emphasis mine) and the testimony of hundreds of others around the world with whom I’ve shared these principles" (pg.11). There is no appeal to the objective validity of the Scriptural witness, only to the experience of Wilkinson and others who’ve applied the requisite principles. I should not have to emphasize how fraught with potential danger this kind of subjective hermeneutic can be.

    How, then, should one handle a text like First Chronicles 4:9-10? First, it is vital to realize that this passage is historical narrative, and that it is essentially descriptive and not prescriptive. It tells us about a man God determined to bless through prayer, but not through prayer alone, because it also tells us that Jabez was "more honorable" than his brothers. And it is this great fact about the man that is the essential feature of the text. His prayer was only a means of blessing to him because he was rightly related to His God. And this fact that God honors those who honor Him (I Sam. 2:30) is abundantly testified to elsewhere in Scripture. "The prayer of the upright is His delight" (Prov. 15:8); "No good thing does He withhold from those who walk uprightly" (Psalm 84:11B); "The LORD is near to all who call upon Him, to all who call upon Him in truth. He will fulfill the desire of those who fear Him; He will also hear their cry and will save them" (Psalm 145:18-19). Though the author "nods" in the direction of the man’s honor, this topic is left virtually unexplored in comparison to the blessings of his prayer.

    Wilkinson misses another opportunity by failing to mention the fact that the name Jabez also attaches to a city in Jacob noted for the families of scribes who lived there (I Chron. 2:55). An ancient Jewish tradition preserved among the rabbis states that the Jabez of prayer fame was the founder of this city, and was himself a notable scribe who raised up many disciples skilled in the handling of the Law! If this is true, and it is more plausible than much of the author’s speculative musings, then Jabez was "more honorable" among his own brethren because he was an ancient Apollos, mighty in the Scriptures! And this is why his prayer was blessed.

    Though the author bobs and weaves his way through much of his book trying to distance himself from any appearance of a "health and wealth" gospel, in the end his disclaimers pack little punch. His own interpretive method and reductionistic theology have no muscle to deliver the author from these charges. In the end, he is doomed by his own appeal to popularity which renders any serious theological discussion of the prayer of Jabez nigh unto impossible. And what he ends serving up to the increasingly unthinking and credulous masses of popular evangelicalism is more of the same spiritual "junk food" which increasingly causes the true God and His true Word (when correctly explained) to leave a bitter after taste in the popular palate. Is it any wonder why serious theological discourse in this nation is on the wane when a very thin book with a very thin veneer of theology resonates so tellingly in the popular conscience?

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Copyright 2001 - Bryan Pollock