01.04. PRAYER AND SOVEREIGNTY
4. PRAYER AND SOVEREIGNTY
I form the light and create darkness, I bring prosperity and create disaster; I, the LORD, do all these things. (Isaiah 45:7)
Some Christian ministers are fond of affirming the proposition, "God needs you," in one form or another. The immediate context may be an exhortation to greater dedication in prayer, evangelism, helping the needy, giving money to the church, or some other activity that would advance the kingdom of God. Although some of these ministers mean what they say literally, perhaps not all of them do, and certainly not all of them intend all that is implied when we say that God needs us. Nevertheless, the proposition is so unbiblical, and the implications so blasphemous, that we should stop saying that God needs us in all settings and contexts, and in whatever form the proposition may take.
Confronting the philosophers of Athens, Paul states, "The God who made the world and everything in it is the Lord of heaven and earth and does not live in temples built by hands. And he is not served by human hands, as if he needed anything, because he himself gives all men life and breath and everything else" (Acts 17:24-25). For a minister to say, "God needs you," or anything to that effect, is therefore a direct contradiction of Scripture. God is self-sufficient and all-sufficient. We need him for everything, but he does not need us for anything.
It is often to motivate their congregations that ministers say God needs them. The assumption is that the commands of God appear to be more meaningful if God actually needs these people to help him. But when we think this way, we are thinking of God as if he is a finite being, and so we are no longer thinking about the Christian God, nor are we thinking as Christians. Of course we should obey the commands of God, but we should not sustain our motivation for doing so with the idea that he needs us to obey them or his plans would somehow fail.
Since God commands us to pray, negligence in prayer is sinful. However, it does not mean that our failure to pray will hinder the plan of God. He does not need our prayers. Neither has he bound himself to a certain way of interacting with his creation, so that he will or can only act when certain conditions are met on the human side. Some have gone as far as to say that God has given dominion to man, so that God will or can only intervene if man grants "permission" for God to do so. This is plainly false. The Bible testifies that God controls all things, including the thinking and behavior of demons and humans. He sends even evil spirits to do his bidding, and he gives to or takes from his creatures whatever he pleases, whenever and however he pleases.
God possesses absolute sovereignty. This means that he determines all things, and he carries out what he has determined by his omnipotence. But he chooses to use means to accomplish his ends, and his means often involve human beings and their prayers. Nevertheless, he has not bound himself to use these means or any means at all in accomplishing his plans. In addition, the means by which he accomplishes his ends do not work autonomously, but they are themselves determined by his sovereignty, so that nothing in creation escapes his attention and control.
It follows that the proposition, "Prayer changes things," is false. Prayer does not change anything. It is God as a person who exercises his omnipotence to change things, and not the human act of prayer that changes them. Also, prayer does not change God, since he is immutable in all his attributes and decrees, and he has determined in eternity all that he will do.
Some passages appear to say that our prayers can change God’s mind until we examine them more carefully. For example, after the people of Israel had sinned by making and worshiping the golden calf, God says to Moses, "Now leave me alone so that my anger may burn against them and that I may destroy them. Then I will make you into a great nation" (Exodus 32:10). But after hearing the intercession of Moses (Exodus 32:11-13), Exodus 32:14 says, "Then the LORD relented and did not bring on his people the disaster he had threatened." Therefore, on the surface it appears that God changed his mind in response to the prayer of Moses.
However, the above interpretation contradicts the following two verses on the subject: "God is not a man, that he should lie, nor a son of man, that he should change his mind. Does he speak and then not act? Does he promise and not fulfill?" (Numbers 23:19); "He who is the Glory of Israel does not lie or change his mind; for he is not a man, that he should change his mind." (1 Samuel 15:29). Since these two verses explicitly state that God does not change his mind, we must conclude that the above interpretation saying that God does change his mind must be false, even without further argument.
Nevertheless, for the sake of confirmation, we may directly deal with the passage from Exodus, and show we can arrive at the same conclusion, that God does not change his mind after all. Now, Jacob says in Genesis 49:10, "The scepter will not depart from Judah, nor the ruler’s staff from between his feet, until he comes to whom it belongs and the obedience of the nations is his." This is understood as predicting the lineage of the Messiah, finding its ultimate fulfillment in Jesus Christ.
Exodus 32:10 has God saying that he would destroy the Israelites and raise up a new nation through Moses. But Moses was a Levi, which means that God had never planned to raise up a new nation through Moses, and only several verses later, it turned out that he did not have to.43 W. Bingham Hunter is thus correct when he says, "My conviction is that references to God’s ’repenting,’ ’relenting’ or ’changing his mind’ in Scripture are figures of speech; technically speaking, they are anthropopathisms expressions which explain God in terms usually used to describe human emotions."44
God is sovereign, meaning that he determines and controls everything. Since this is true, it follows that everything about a person’s prayer has also been determined by God. If it appears that God is responding to a prayer, it is because God has decided that he would act in history by means of this prayer, and this prayer has also been determined and caused by him to occur in precisely the way that it occurs. Therefore, prayer does not change things, and prayer does not change God. From God’s perspective, prayer is an effect caused by God, which may lead to other effects that are also caused by God. Prayer itself is not a cause that causes God to act; rather, the person who prays does so because God is acting on him and causing him to pray.
Many people’s idea of prayer amounts to thinking that, "In prayer a human being seeks to assert self-will over the will of God."45 Stanley Grenz observes, "Some Christians fail to see this conflict as in any way problematic. They readily admit adhering to exactly this understanding of prayer. Certain evangelical and charismatic circles describe prayer as a technique for bending the divine will."46 To the extent that one’s idea of prayer resembles this description, he has altogether misunderstood the nature of God, Christianity, and prayer. We must completely abandon and clear away from our minds the idea that prayer is "for bending the divine will." The divine will cannot be bent, and it cannot be changed; our idea of prayer must correspond to this reality. Prayer is meaningful because "God has decided to include humans in the divine program for the world,"47 and not because he needs our permission or request to act.
Therefore, we must define prayer not as changing the will of God, but we must think about it from another perspective. A more biblical view of prayer is to think of it as one possible means in the process by which God gives us what he wants, or achieves some other purpose of his. This may include his plan to grant us some material goods, or it is part of the process that effects our sanctification.
Such a view of prayer is correct because it is what the Bible teaches, and it is consistent with other biblical doctrines. A view of prayer may appear to be derived from several isolated biblical passages, but if it contradicts the attributes of God or other biblical doctrines, then it must not be a biblical view of prayer, and those biblical passages must have been mishandled.
Failing to observe this, some have derived principles and definitions on prayer that they find meaningful, but by the time they are done, there is no room left for the Christian God in their theology of prayer, so that they have the "prayer" that they like, but no God. Such is the case with a view of prayer affirming that God changes his mind in response to our petitions, which fails to note the figurative intent of some passages, and the explicit scriptural statements that contradict their position.
Forming a proper conception of prayer brings us to note the implications of biblical prayer and its relation to divine sovereignty, namely, we must think, speak, and pray "as if" God is sovereign, because he really is sovereign. Divine sovereignty does not threaten the meaningfulness of prayer as long as we do not insist that meaningfulness depends on some weakness or deficiency in God, so that he needs us to pray in order to intervene or accomplish his plans. Rather, prayer is meaningful because it is a chosen means that plays a role in accomplishing the plans of God. Divine sovereignty also implies that there is never a need to assume that all is lost due to a failure to pray, although such failure is a moral problem that we must correct. We should realize that the fate of the universe does not depend on us. For this reason, referring to "the power of prayer" is misleading, since there is no power in prayer itself, but the power is only in God. If we insist on using this phrase because of habit, at least we should be aware of the truth, that the power is in God alone, and that we say such things as "the power of prayer" only as a manner of speaking.