Does God Hear Non-Believers?

In the Left Behind series, Chloe Steele is on a plane, and she prays that God might send her a friend at that moment to help her in her loneliness. She doesn't know if God will acknowledge her prayer because she is not yet a believer. But God does. Her friend and future husband, Buck Williams, shows up and sits right next to her.

Does God actually hear the prayers of unbelievers? Does he speak to them in any way? Does God even have anything to do with non-Christians?

I've heard different answers from evangelicals. Some talk as if God has nothing to do with non-Christians. This one woman on a Focus on the Family radio program for teens said that God does not acknowledge the prayers of unbelievers, except when they request salvation (the sinner's prayer). Her reason is that non-Christians are alienated from God because of his wrath against sin, so God does not show them favor. For her, God is pure and holy, meaning that he cannot even look upon sin, so people need to be covered with the blood of Christ for God to be involved in their lives.

On the other hand, I've heard testimonies from people who act as if God has always been there for them, even before their conversion. "I was rebellious and wanted nothing to do with God," they say, "But God didn't give up on me."

As is often the case, both sides can find prooftexts for their positions. For the "God-does-not-hear-unbelievers" side, Psalm 66:18 says, "If I regard iniquity in my heart, the Lord will not hear me." Isaiah 1:15 says, "And when ye spread forth your hands, I will hide mine eyes from you: yea, when ye make many prayers, I will not hear: your hands are full of blood." Proverbs 28:9 has, "He that turneth away his ear from hearing the law, even his prayer shall be abomination." And, in Leviticus, we find that everything associated with the worship of God had to be without blemish. For many evangelicals, this is because God is holy and will only accept perfection, which is why we need Christ's perfect righteousness to cover us when we stand before God.

At the same time, there are passages in which God blesses sinners. In II Kings 14, God blesses Jeroboam II, the wicked king of Northern Israel, in his military goals. Jesus says that God is kind to the unthankful and the evil (Luke 6:35). According to Acts 14:16-17, even when nations walked their own way, God bore witness to himself, "in that he did good, and gave us rain from heaven, and fruitful seasons, filling our hearts with food and gladness."

I think that God wants to communicate who he is to to everyone in the world. He wants all people to know about his love, his power, his justice, and his divinity so that they will accept him as God. His kindness to unbelievers has a goal, for Romans 2:4 rhetorically asks, "Or despisest thou the riches of his goodness and forbearance and longsuffering; not knowing that the goodness of God leadeth thee to repentance?" And, in my opinion, there may be times when God will answer the prayers of unbelievers to show them that he exists and is worthy of their worship. After all, was every request Jesus granted from a righteous person?

But what about the passages about God not hearing sinners? An important point to note is that God is actually talking to them. In Isaiah 1, for example, God warns the Israelites that he will not hear their prayers and then he explains why. So God is not avoiding sinners or choosing to have nothing to do with them; rather, he is still trying to communicate who he is and bring them to repentance. There is a dialogue between God and the sinners.

There are times when God may not acknowledge the prayers of the wicked. God doesn't want to bail people out of their problems all the time, for he wants them to learn valuable lessons about their sinful behavior. And there are times when God wants to demonstrate explicitly his hatred of evil, so he withholds blessings from the evildoer. God knows people's hearts and responds to them appropriately.

So I'm not sure if we can put God in a box or map out how God works. God works within the context of a relationship, so maybe he doesn't act the same way all the time. But we can be assured that righteousness underlies every one of his actions.