Why wont GOD heal amputees?

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NOTE BEFORE YOU READ THIS TEXT HAS BEEN TAKEN FROM ANOTHER SITE WITH THE OWNERS PERMISSION . I THOUGHT THIS TEXT WAS INTERESTING AND BELIEVED I SHOULD SHARE IT WITH THE COMMUNITY. Chapter 5 - Why won't God heal amputees? Does God answer prayers? According to believers, the answer is certainly yes. For example, at any Christian bookstore you can find hundreds of books about the power of prayer. On the Internet you can find thousands of testimonials to the many ways that God works in our lives today. Even large city newspapers and national magazines run stories about answered prayers. God seems to be interacting with our world and answering millions of prayers on planet Earth every day. God's power often can be quite dramatic. Take, for example, this story from Marilyn Hickey Ministries: Prayer is a communication system we have available to fellowship with our heavenly Father and which activates His promises in our lives. No one can beat this system. It's quick. It's efficient. And it's available to you right now! Prayer reaches our heavenly Father instantly. Years ago my mother's doctors found a tumor in her brain. When I heard the news, I was out of town so I could not lay my hands on her. That night as fear swept over me, the Lord quickened Psalms 107:20 to my spirit: "He sent his word and healed them, and delivered them from their destructions." I sent God's Word long distance to my mother's brain. When she was X-rayed again by her doctors, there was no evidence that any tumor had ever existed! Hallelujah! Our prayers are swifter than any medical technique. Only born again believers who have accepted Jesus Christ as Lord can have a relationship with the Father and prayer is the communication method you must use to develop that relationship. [ref] Stories like these can be easily found all over the Web. How Prayer Works For believers, it is obvious why so many prayers are answered. In the Bible, Jesus promises many times that he will answer our prayers. For example, in Matthew 7:7 Jesus says: Ask, and it will be given you; seek, and you will find; knock, and it will be opened to you. For every one who asks receives, and he who seeks finds, and to him who knocks it will be opened. Or what man of you, if his son asks him for bread, will give him a stone? Or if he asks for a fish, will give him a serpent? If you then, who are evil, know how to give good gifts to your children, how much more will your Father who is in heaven give good things to those who ask him! Ask and you will receive. What could be simpler than that? In Matthew 17:20 Jesus reiterates that same message: For truly, I say to you, if you have faith as a grain of mustard seed, you will say to this mountain, 'Move from here to there,' and it will move; and nothing will be impossible to you. Since a mustard seed is a tiny inanimate object about the size of a grain of salt, it is easy to imagine that the faith of a mustard seed is fairly small. So, paraphrasing, what Jesus is saying is that if you have the tiniest bit of faith, you can move mountains. Jesus says something similar in Matthew 21:21: I tell you the truth, if you have faith and do not doubt, not only can you do what was done to the fig tree, but also you can say to this mountain, 'Go, throw yourself into the sea,' and it will be done. If you believe, you will receive whatever you ask for in prayer. The message is reiterated Mark 11:24: Therefore I tell you, whatever you ask for in prayer, believe that you have received it, and it will be yours. In John chapter 14, verses 12 through 14, Jesus tells all of us just how easy prayer can be: "Truly, truly, I say to you, he who believes in me will also do the works that I do; and greater works than these will he do, because I go to the Father. Whatever you ask in my name, I will do it, that the Father may be glorified in the Son; if you ask anything in my name, I will do it. In Matthew 18:19 Jesus says it again: Again I say to you, if two of you agree on earth about anything they ask, it will be done for them by my Father in heaven. For where two or three are gathered in my name, there am I in the midst of them. Jesus is actually in our midst and God answers our prayers. The miracle of Jeanna Giese There are so many examples of the power of prayer, but one in particular deserves special consideration because it is so well documented. In December of 2004 a girl named Jeanna Giese survived a bite from a rabid bat through prayer. Hundreds of newspapers (including the Raleigh News and Observer in my home town) ran stories about the miracle of her recovery with headlines such as "Rabies girl in miracle recovery." In Raleigh, the headline was "Web weaves global prayer circle - Petitions circle the world as girl beats rare case of rabies." [Source: by Sharon Roznik, Raleigh News and Observer, December 17, 2004] The summary of the story goes like this. Jeanna was in a church service in Wisconsin when a brown bat fell into the aisle. She picked the bat up and carried it outside. No one gave it a second thought. A month later it was obvious that something was wrong. Soon Jeanna had a full case of rabies. No human has ever survived this disease without being vaccinated. Up until 2004, full-blown rabies had been 100% fatal. According to the article, a global prayer circle helped Jeanna survive. Once she got sick, Jeanna's father called friends and asked them to pray for Jeanna. People around the world heard about her story through the press and by word of mouth. They prayed. They sent emails. They passed the word along. Millions of people heard about Jeanna's plight and they said prayers for her. And the prayer circle worked. Through the power of God, Jeanna recovered. Jeanna was the first human to survive rabies without the vaccine. Dr. Charles Rupprecht of the CDC in Atlanta called Jeanna's case a miracle. The family and everyone in Jeanna's huge, global prayer circle know that God heard their prayers and answered them. This is amazing stuff. The dictionary defines a miracle as "An event that appears inexplicable by the laws of nature and so is held to be supernatural in origin or an act of God." [ref] So we must ask a fundamental question: Did an all-loving, all-powerful God hear the prayers from Jeanna's worldwide prayer circle and then reach down from heaven to help Jeanna? Did God actually interact with Jeanna's body, making the impossible happen and curing her case of rabies through a divine miracle? Or did something else happen? We can actually answer this question with a simple experiment.... A simple experiment For this experiment, we need to find a deserving person who has had both of his legs amputated. For example, find a sincere, devout veteran of the Iraqi war, or a person who was involved in a tragic automobile accident. Now create a prayer circle like the one created for Jeanna Giese. The job of this prayer circle is simple: pray to God to restore the amputated legs of this deserving person. I do not mean to pray for a team of renowned surgeons to somehow graft the legs of a cadaver onto the soldier, nor for a team of renowned scientists to craft mechanical legs for him. Pray that God spontaneously and miraculously restores the soldier's legs overnight, in the same way that God spontaneously and miraculously cured Jeanna Giese and Marilyn Hickey's mother. If possible, get millions of people all over the planet to join the prayer circle and pray their most fervent prayers. Get millions of people praying in unison for a single miracle for this one deserving amputee. Then stand back and watch. What is going to happen? Jesus clearly says that if you believe, you will receive whatever you ask for in prayer. He does not say it once -- he says it many times in many ways in the Bible. And yet, even with millions of people praying, nothing will happen. No matter how many people pray. No matter how sincere those people are. No matter how much they believe. No matter how devout and deserving the recipient. Nothing will happen. The legs will not regenerate. Prayer does not restore the severed limbs of amputees. You can electronically search through all the medical journals ever written -- there is no documented case of an amputated leg being restored spontaneously. And we know that God ignores the prayers of amputees through our own observations of the world around us. If God were answering the prayers of amputees to regenerate their lost limbs, we would be seeing amputated legs growing back every day. Isn't that odd? The situation becomes even more peculiar when you look at who God is. According to the Standard Model of God: * God is all-powerful. Therefore, God can do anything, and regenerating a leg is trivial. * God is perfect, and he created the Bible, which is his perfect book. In the Bible, Jesus makes very specific statements about the power of prayer. Since Jesus is God, and God and the Bible are perfect, those statements should be true and accurate. * God is all-knowing and all-loving. He certainly knows about the plight of the amputee, and he loves this amputee very much. * God is ready and willing to answer your prayers no matter how big or small. All that you have to do is believe. He says it in multiple places in the Bible. Surely, with millions of people in the prayer circle, at least one of them will believe and the prayer will be answered. * God has no reason to discriminate against amputees. If he is answering millions of other prayers like Jeanna's every day, God should be answering the prayers of amputees too. Nonetheless, the amputated legs are not going to regenerate. What are we seeing here? It is not that God sometimes answers the prayers of amputees, and sometimes does not. Instead, in this situation there is a very