Some ways to think about prayer.

If prayer changes things, how exactly are we to trust God’s sovereignty?

If the course of events finally turns on the wisdom, perspicacity, perseverance, and intercessory fervor of our prayers, then apparently there are many things that could go on in one fashion that only go on because of our intercession.

So is prayer changing something then, and if so, does that mean God’s sovereign sway over the whole is so contingent on our intercession that God’s sovereignty itself cannot, finally, be trusted?

I doubt if there are many here who can live with that interpretation of things.

On the other hand, if prayer doesn’t change things, if, in fact, exactly the course of events is all determined before the foundation of the earth, precisely why are we supposed to pray?

If we simply have a formula, “Well, we pray because God has ordained not only the ends but also the means, so God has ordained that we pray.”

Then somewhere along the line, the tenor of prayer in Scripture dissipates.

There is a passion in intercessory prayer in Scripture that does not feel like, “Okay, well I’m supposed to pray now to get this thing to come out right. I know this has been ordained from before the foundation of the earth. So here we go.” So now we pray. It just does not sound like that.

Prayer changes things.

There’s Jacob wrestling with God, refusing to let God go until he, Jacob, receives a blessing. There’s David giving testimony in Psalm 40. Psalm 40 really needs to be read in conjunction with Psalms 37 to 39. In Psalm 37, there is this strong exhortation to “Wait, wait on the Lord.” In 38 and 39, there is instruction about how to wait on the Lord and testimony in that respect, and then in 40, testimony: “I waited, waited on the Lord; he heard me and delivered me. He set my feet on a hard place. He took me out of the miry bog.”

There’s Elijah, praying for drought and praying for rain. James reminds us, after all, that he was an ordinary man. He prayed fervently, and the Lord heard his prayers.

Jesus taught us, in what we call the Lord’s Prayer, to ask, “Your will be done,” which sort of covers it, doesn’t it? In Gethsemane, the heart of his own prayer was, “Not as I will, but as you will.” Paul prays fervently three times for the removal of this messenger of Satan, this thorn in the flesh. Sometimes when Paul prays along such lines, people are healed. In this case, God simply adds grace. “Well, one way or the other, God answers, and God’s will will be done.”

Even those who cry, in an intercessory fashion, under the throne in Revelation 6 are basically told, “Well, you can ask for relief all you like for those who are still on earth, but the time is not right. When that time comes, it will come.” After all, isn’t God portrayed as “the one who does all things according to the counsel of his will, to the praise of his glorious grace”? “Not a bird falls from the heavens apart from his sanction.” Prayer changes things.

Or should we say prayer change us?

That is often another formula that is used to address this sort of thing. Inevitably, there is truth to that, but if prayer simply changes us, why don’t we simply pray that God would change us? There are many instances in the Scripture where we are praying for something else. If we say that in such praying, the prayer changes us but does not affect the course of anything else, then it really does seem like a peculiarly twisted fashion in which to ask God to change us.

All of us struggle as to how to word such matters. Most of us here have been praying for quite a long time, and we have wondered how to put these things into words

Here is a particularly challenging instance in Scripture, this first of four intercessory prayers in Exodus 32–34, This setting, Exodus 32 is well-known.

From Aaron’s perspective, he is going to marry something of pagan influence, something of God’s self-disclosure, and form one happy religion that will keep everybody happy, but the Lord says to Moses, “Go down, because your people, whom you brought up out of Egypt, have become corrupt.” The amount of divine self-distancing from the exodus is remarkable. Not, “My people, whom I brought up, have become corrupt,” but “Your people, whom you brought up, have become corrupt.”

The nature of his arguments is stunning. Lord, why should your anger burn against your people, whom you brought out of Egypt with great power and a mighty hand? Does Moses have to remind God of the ultimate realities? I’m a little nervous about your reputation. If you wipe them out now, the Egyptians might infer that you took them away from the land of Goshen in order to have a big laugh at their expense.

You either weren’t strong enough or you weren’t good enough really to save them. You brought them out into the desert yourself in order to destroy them. Is that what you want the pagans to say? That’s the form of his argument.

“Turn from your fierce anger; relent and do not bring disaster on your people.” Then, as a second major theological thrust in the argumentation, “Remember your servants Abraham, Isaac and Israel, to whom you swore by your own self.” As Hebrews reminds us, “There is no one greater by whom to swear.” “I will make your descendants as numerous as the stars in the sky, and I will give your descendants all this land I promised them. It will be their inheritance forever.”

Implication: “Are you a promise-keeping God or are you not?

That’s what you promised on oath in your own name. This is one of about 40 passages where, in the Scripture, we’re told God relented, usually in connection with intercessory prayer.

in some theological circles this has generated what is nowadays called openness of God theology.

Yet when one looks at these relenting passages, one soon discovers some remarkable anomalies. Here’s Amos 7: “This is what the Sovereign Lord showed me: He was preparing swarms of locusts after the king’s share had been harvested and just as the late crops were coming up. When they had stripped the land clean, I cried out, ‘Sovereign Lord, forgive! How can Jacob survive? He is so small!’ So the Lord relented.” So here is God giving Amos a vison of judgment to come. Amos intercedes, and God relents. The visionary prediction of what will be will not take place.

Next, “This is what the Sovereign Lord showed me: The Sovereign Lord was calling for judgment by fire; it dried up the great deep and devoured the land. Then I cried out, ‘Sovereign Lord, I beg you, stop! How can Jacob survive? He is so small!’ So the Lord relented. ‘This will not happen either,’ the Sovereign Lord said.” So once again, God has given Amos, the prophet, some sort of visionary experience of what is threatened. Amos intercedes; God relents.

Then, “This is what he showed me: The Lord was standing by a wall that had been built true to plumb, with a plumb line in his hand. And the Lord asked me, ‘What do you see, Amos?’ ‘A plumb line,’ I replied. Then the Lord said, ‘Look, I am setting a plumb line among my people Israel; I will spare them no longer. The high places of Isaac will be destroyed and the sanctuaries of Israel will be ruined; with my sword I will rise against the house of Jeroboam.’ ”

Now in the flow of this passage, the intercession of Amos on the first two instances is really nothing more than the setup by which God finally says, “Stop interceding. It’s too late. A line has been passed.” That, of course, is found elsewhere in Scripture, where Samuel, for example, is told to stop interceding for Saul. It’s past a point of no return.

Or in 1 John 5 where there are certain people for whom we are not to intercede. A line has been crossed. I think something similar is going on in James 5 as well. In other words, you cannot suppose that you can definitively, decisively, on your own hook, change the course of history merely by interceding, and God is bound, then, to relent. In fact, it gets more complicated yet.

In Ezekiel, chapter 22, verse 27, “Her officials within her are like wolves tearing their prey; they shed blood and kill people to make unjust gain. Her prophets whitewash these deeds for them by false visions and lying divinations.

They say, ‘This is what the Sovereign Lord says’—when the Lord has not spoken. The people of the land practice extortion and commit robbery; they oppress the poor and needy and mistreat the foreigner, denying them justice. ‘I looked for someone among them who would build up the wall and stand before me in the gap on behalf of the land so I would not have to destroy it, but I found no one.’ ”

God is looking through the land for someone to intercede so that he would not destroy the land. Part of his theological condemnation is grounded in his sovereign perception that there is no one there to intercede, no one to teach the truth, no one to build up the wall. “I found no one.” If you take that back to Moses’ situation, God knows he has Moses with whom to reckon. God knows that. He has raised Moses up. He knows Moses will intercede, and he knows that he himself will relent.

Now, three controlling theological reflections.

1. God is utterly sovereign.

We simply must not duck that truth. You cannot take Ephesians 1 seriously and duck that truth. “He works out all things according to his purpose, for the praise of his glorious grace.” If you don’t believe this, you can either resort to very, very clever exegesis or use a pair of scissors and cut out Romans 8:28 from your Bible. Those are your choices.

The texts of Scripture insist that he can turn the heart of kings anywhere he wants. If he can turn the hearts of leaders (and anyone else for that matter) anywhere he wants, then you cannot even suppose that God is sovereign over macro events, but at the level of individual human decisions, God has reserved a kind of special place there that is so tied to our independence, to our freedom, that God himself declares hands off and doesn’t quite know how it’s going to turn out. It’s very difficult to believe that in the light of biblical texts.

So far as our praying goes, this even means the Lord Jesus himself can teach us, “Be careful about rambling on in your prayers. God knows what you need before you ask him.”

It’s complicated, but the very fact that Jesus himself can say, “Why are you rabbiting on as if you have to give instructions to the Almighty?” shows that, again, God understands full well that our praying is not to be conceived as something which somehow brings down blessings from heaven, which otherwise God would not have thought of, sort of slipped his notice.

2. God is personal.

Persons think, have emotions, formulate thoughts, speak, interact with other persons, and sustain family and other relationships (husband, wife, father, son, and so forth).

At the heart of this, is interaction, relationship with other persons. When they stop interacting person-to-person, personally with other persons, inevitably they become corroded, twisted, lonely, resentful.

God interacts with his image-bearers, with us, personally, using the attributes of what we normally consider personhood. when we first hear God addressing human beings, there is a person-to-person connection you do not get when God simply says, “Let there be light,” and there is light.

God says, “Adam, where are you?”

Even within openness theology they acknowledge, that God does know, because openness theologians say God does not know what happens in the future, but he certainly knows what happens in the present and what has happened in the past. He knows what Adam has done. He knows what Eve has done.

He knows, now, why he understands he is naked and ashamed, but God still asked the question. He interacts personally. As we run through Scripture, we discover that God is not only sovereign but God responds. He entreats. “Turn, turn. Why will you die? The Lord has no pleasure in the death of the wicked. Turn to me, all you ends of the earth, and be saved.”

As soon as we say these things, we immediately run into a difficulty, because in saying that God is a person we are using language that we use of all persons in our experience, and all persons in our immediate experience on this earth are finite, so that all of our personal relationships on this earth are with other finite persons, but God is presented as infinite; that is, transcending space and time, as utterly sovereign. What does personhood look like in God? The short answer is, “I don’t know.” The longer answer is my third point.

3. God is never less than all he is.

It is not as if he is sometimes sovereign and sometimes personal. It is not as if he is sometimes holy and sometimes loving. It is not as if God is sometimes sovereign and sometimes good. He is never less than all he is. Two things immediately follow. Now we come closer to our challenges, needs, privileges, and glories in prayer. The two things that follow are these:

There is admitted mysteriousness in all of this.

all of our personal relationships amongst ourselves occur in time, in sequence.

But God inhabits eternity, so what does it mean for God, the God of eternity, to interact with us, his image-bearers persons who are locked in space and time? This is part of what Calvin means when he speaks of accommodation. God discloses himself to us in the personal categories we understand, even while Scripture itself happily announces that God inhabits eternity.

we find ways to protect our theological speech from errors when we say God is utterly sovereign. He is utterly sovereign; therefore, in some sense, he stands behind absolutely everything. If we word it simply in those genetic categories, we smile happily and say, “Amen, Ephesians 1.”

But then when we tease out the implications and say, “Thus God stands behind Hitler and Pol Pot, and God stands behind the tsunami and war,” we instantly reflect, “Yes, there is some sense in which that must be true,” but surely to put it like that makes it sound as if God’s goodness is threatened, which is no less taught in Scripture than God’s sovereignty. Does not James 1 insist that “He is the God who has no shadow to him”?

God is sovereign, he stands asymmetrically behind good and evil. That is, he does not stand behind good and evil in exactly the same way.

He stands behind good in such a way that the good is finally, ultimately, creditable to him as good. He stands behind evil in such a way that what is evil in the event is credited only to the secondary causalities.

Genesis 50 with respect to Joseph being shipped to Egypt. “You intended it for evil, but God intended it for good.” In the very intentionalities of the brothers and of God there was a different end.

Suddenly, the whole discussion becomes very complex? Read Isaiah 10, verses 5 and following, where God says he uses the Assyrians as his battleax, as the sword of his wrath, as the saw by which he cuts up his people, but after he’s finished using them to chasten his people, just as tools, he will turn around and rend them, because they don’t recognize that God is sovereignly using them. So in their arrogance, he holds them accountable.

Suddenly, you perceive that in passage after passage after passage, God’s sovereignty is universally sweeping, but he stands behind good and evil asymmetrically, such that the evil is always creditable to secondary causalities without ever diminishing his sovereignty and the good is always creditable to him. Nowhere is that clearer than in the cross.

Hence we read in Acts 4, “Pontius Pilate and the chief priests, the rulers of the Jews, conspired together against your Holy Servant, Jesus. They did what your hand had determined beforehand should be done.” Although we use such language to protect our theological speech from errors, and rightly so, there are limits to how far we can push. Why, then, the fall at all? In the mystery of God’s counsel, he determines that it will be to disclose the fullness of his glory in his Son in due time, and beyond that, I cannot speak.

We must allow each biblically revealed attribute of God (God’s sovereignty, God’s goodness, God’s compassion, God’s wrath) to function with respect to our prayer lives only as it functions within Scripture and in no other way.

Philippians 2:12. Here the apostle Paul writes to his readers, and he says in verse 12, “My dear friends, as you have always obeyed—not only in my presence, but now much more in my absence—continue to work out your salvation with fear and trembling, for it is God who works in you to will and to act in order to fulfill his good purpose.” God’s sovereignty in causing you to will and act is used as an incentive to working hard, not as an incentive to fatalism.

Well, God, if you’re going to do it, you don’t need my help. You’re sovereign; you’ll just do what you want.” No. Precisely the reverse. We are to work out our salvation with fear and trembling precisely because it is God working within us both to will and to do everything according to his purpose.

So Jesus instructs us about the sparrows. That’s true; God is sovereign. Then you find him weeping over the city. The fact that God cares even for the sparrows is used by Jesus himself to encourage us to trust God in his sovereignty to look after even the most miniscule details in our lives. “Do you not know that you are worth more than many sparrows?” Jesus says. It is not used to induce prayerlessness on the grounds of some sort of divine fatalism.

Then Jesus weeps over the city in Luke’s gospel. Is this because somehow he now holds that his heavenly Father’s sovereignty is in abeyance, so he’s discouraged, or is it a function of his own heavenly Father’s compassion? “As a father pities his children, so the Lord pities those who fear him. For He knows our frame; He remembers that we are dust.”

Jesus weeps over the city. Yes, yes, even in Gethsemane.… We focus all the time on the last part of the prayer, “Not my will but yours be done,” but never, ever forget the first part of the prayer. The Gospels show us that Jesus knows all through his ministry that he is heading to the cross. He knows that’s what the heavenly Father’s will is.

He has announced it to his own followers. He has predicted it again and again, in Matthew’s gospel, five times before the passion itself. He knows what the Father’s will is, and there you find him, in Gethsemane, saying, “Heavenly Father, if it is possible, take this cup from me.” I know he adds the second bit, and we glory in it, but to my mind what is really striking about that prayer is the first bit.

For although he knows what the Father’s will is … he knows he is going to the cross, he knows he comes as the Lamb of God to take away the sin of the world, he knows he comes not to be served but to serve and to give his life as a ransom for many … even in the agony of his prospective abandonment under the curse he begs that even now this cup should be taken from him.

This suggests that even in the mystery of the triune God there are degrees of personal relationship that must not be swept under the carpet of God’s sovereignty if the price that is paid is God’s personhood.

So in our praying we must never allow biblical truths to function in ways that tend toward the destruction of other biblical truths. Never, ever appeal to God’s sovereignty, God’s sovereignty even in election, to diminish your zeal in intercessory prayer that God would have mercy.

We sometimes hear stories like this: God is talking with the angels, and the angels are admiring God’s wonderful plan of redemption, now perfectly revealed in Christ Jesus. They ask him, “What is your plan to bring in all the number of the elect?” “Well, my sons and daughters, my regenerate people, they are the ones who will preach the gospel and carry the good news to the ends of the earth. By that means, people will be saved.” “Yes, but supposing they don’t do it?” God replies, “I have no other plan.”

Formally, that’s correct. Emotionally, it is profoundly mistaken because it sounds, now, as if God is somehow hostage to our obedience, whereas we still serve the Lord Christ who promises, “I will build my church, and the gates of hell shall not prevail against it.” So we return to the book of Esther. “God will save his people, but who knows whether or not God has raised you up for such a time as this?”

We should never, ever allow God’s sovereignty to function in our lives in such a way as to diminish the biblical mandate for intercessory prayer, pleading with a sovereign, holy God, even while we acknowledge full well that should we do so it is the fruit of God’s powerful Spirit at work within us. Let us pray.