-Oliphant Olds-
The truth of God's sovereignty is such an important part of prayer that it needs to be mentioned and defined at the very outset. I do not believe it is possible to pray properly without believing the truth that God is sovereign.
This is a truth that is almost universally denied. One writer, for example, commented on a prayer made at the funeral of the boys of Susan Smith, who had drowned her sons in John D. Long Lake. The prayer quoted was, "We'll never know why you took them from us, O Lord." The writer commented on this prayer in a blasphemous way:
Huh? It wasn't God who sent the car into John D. Long Lake: it was Susan Smith. God doesn't go around drowning little boys. The week after his twenty-four-year-old son died in a car wreck, William Sloan Coffin stood tall in the Riverside pulpit and proclaimed: "Nothing so infuriates me as the incapacity of seemingly intelligent people to get it through their heads that God doesn't go around this world with his finger on triggers, his fist around knives, his hands on steering wheels."
It is true, of course, that taken as it stands, this tirade against God has in it an element of truth. The sinner is always responsible for his own sins and cannot blame God's sovereignty for his evil deeds. It is true that God did not put His hands on the steering wheel of that car as if He were the driver. But in another, more profound sense God does indeed go around with His hands on steering wheels, for He created the hands on the steering wheels and He gives life and movement to the hands that turn the wheels so that the wheels are turned where the Lord has determined. All such language as that of Coffin denies the sovereignty of God over evil.Even among today's evangelicals, not only is the truth of God's sovereignty never mentioned, but it is openly and freely repudiated. To cite another example, from a transcript of a "Larry King Live" program, not one of the clergy present would come to the defense of this truth. All specifically repudiated it. It was to be expected from a Jewish rabbi; perhaps it was not surprising that a Roman Catholic priest should oppose this doctrine, either; but when an outstanding and well-known evangelical expressed his disagreement with the truth of God's sovereignty, we raise our eyebrows. The discussion was the terrible attack of terrorists against the United States on September 11, 2001. All the panel speakers on Larry King program specifically repudiated the notion that God had had anything to do with this tragedy, except perhaps to assist in saving as many of New York City's firemen and policemen as he could.
The Scriptures are absolutely clear on the truth that God is sovereign in all His creation. It is not my purpose to argue the point here. We shall assume it, for Scripture is clear. We are interested in how this truth touches upon prayer.
The Relation Between Sovereignty and Prayer
I cannot understand how anyone can make a single petition in prayer to God without confessing God's sovereignty. We are commanded by the Lord to pray for our daily bread. Why ought we to pray for our daily bread unless we believe that God sovereignly gives us our bread or sovereignly withholds it? Why should I ask a man for fifty dollars if it is not in his power to give it? Why should I seek the things I need from a God who may or may not be able to give me what I ask? Yet such is the position of so many who piously speak of prayer.
These might answer my questions by saying, as some do, that good things come from God but bad things do not. They would say that God gives food ad drink, health and life, but God does not send starvation and thirst, cancer and death. But how can that be? If God gives health, God withholds health. And if God withholds health, God gives sickness, for it is impossible to withhold health without sending sickness.
In any case, why pray? Does sickness come from somewhere else- perhaps the devil? Does health come from heaven? Are we caught in a life and death struggle between God and Satan, the outcome of which is always uncertain? Are we the helpless inhabitants of a battlefield where the forces beyond our control fight to the death over our lives and souls? What kind of a world is that?
Yet, as Larry King himself, in the interview mentioned above, readily detected, the main question is, "Who is your God?" He saw, even if his panel did not, that if these men believed in God, it was difficult, if not impossible, to speak of God in any real sense of the word without maintaining that He is in control even of the events that took place in New York City. Yet not one of these clergy dared to raise his voice in defense of God. Whimpers and mindless statements were all we heard.
Prayer presupposes the truth of God's complete and absolute sovereignty, but it also determines the character of our prayer. God is God alone; He does all His good pleasure. He holds the hearts of kings in His hands and turns them whithersoever He will (Prov. 21:1). If even the hearts of kings are in is hand, everything else is as well. We pray because God is sovereign. If He were not, there would be no point in praying.
God is sovereign in the work of salvation of His people through the perfect work of Christ. If all salvation is the sovereign and irresistible work of God, then it follows that God also works our prayers in our hearts.
The blessing of prayer which God gives includes the privilege of prayer, the right to pray, the knowledge of how to pray, and the ability and power to pray. It is all of God. God works in us both to will and to do of His good pleasure (Phil. 2:13). He, as it were, carries us into the throne room of prayer and puts our prayers in our hearts by His Holy Spirit. Our prayers are earned for us on the cross and worked in us by the Spirit.
God's sovereignty in prayer means even more. It also means that God has determined all our prayers from eternity, that God has determined all the answers to these prayers, and that God has so determined all the pathway of our life that not one thing happens to us but what He has decreed. Your heavenly Father, Jesus tells His disciples, knows what you have need of before you ask (Matt. 6:8). He knows not merely because He can anticipate our needs, but because He so rules in our lives that He creates all our needs by His own sovereign and providential control of the whole of our pathway.
The Responsibility to Pray
We are commanded in Scripture to pray. We are even told to pray without stopping (1 Thess. 5:17). The Heidelberg Catechism insists that God will give His grace and Holy Spirit only to those who ask for them (Lord's Day 45, Q&A 116).
The question arises, Why are we under solemn obligation to pray when everything else has been determined already? We ought to say a word or two about this.
Various solutions have been proposed to this problem. W. Bingham Hunter comes very close to the truth of the matter. He mentions the very common view which teaches that God has determined all things in His counsel, yet the execution of His counsel awaits our prayers. He rejects this view as one that "makes the sovereign, omnipotent Creator dependent on the consent and willingness of his sinful, fallible creatures."
Hunter goes on to insist that "It seems better to think that prayer has been ordained by God as a means to accomplish aspects of His will." But then he adds, "Nevertheless, apparently there are some activities which God has chosen to accomplish in a way which allows men and women to cooperate through prayer in bringing His will to fruition."
He himself, however, senses the incongruity of this position. To his credit, he wants a God who is absolutely sovereign. "A major rub in the 'cooperation' approach is the priority of God's will. If God gives us the ability and impulse to pray for what He wants to accomplish, then our prayers are not the free expressions of responsible creatures. They are like the 'words' spoken by puppets whose strings are pulled by someone else."
The solution, Hunter thinks, can be found in a figure. Our relation to God in our prayers is not like a mother cat that carries her kittens by the nape of the neck, but is more like a mother monkey who carries her young on her back. The little monkey must hold on!
When God accomplishes His purpose in the hearts of His people, the work is so glorious and powerful that it is also mysterious and beyond our understanding.
In pondering the whole matter one soon realizes that the age-old question of the relation between God's sovereignty and the accountability of man is at the root of the problem. I do not want to go into that question as such, for it is hardly appropriate in this book. But it must be stated with all possible emphasis that God is completely sovereign and man is completely accountable before God for his sin. Whether one understands how both are possible, or whether he fails to understand, makes no difference at all. The potter has power over the clay (Rom. 9:21), and we perish for our sins (Matt. 11:20-24).
We will also understand the relation between God's sovereignty and our responsibility to pray if we remember that God is pleased to save His people in such a way that they experience their salvation. If I may put it into concrete terms, God wants us to know our salvation consciously because He saves us so that we may give glory to Him. "This people have I formed for Myself; they shall shew forth my praise" (Isa. 43:21).
In the work of saving His people so that they are conscious of their salvation, God works in them in such a way that they work. It is something like the grafting of a branch to another tree. The grafted apple branch lives out of the peach tree, draws its life from the roots of the peach tree, becomes a part of the peach tree, and brings forth its fruit in living connection with the peach tree. But its fruit remains apples. So all the power to do our work, a part of which prayer, comes from God and is ours only because we are grafted into Christ our life. The prayers we raise on high, though completely worked in us, are our prayers. we are profoundly conscious of them and of our work in making these prayers. So we become conscious of God's great grace in us.
Prayer is indeed an obligation and calling. The commands of Scripture that exhort us to pray come to us as commands, because God has determined to save us so that we become conscious of His blessings and learn to appreciate them for that they are.
God does not save us as stocks and blocks. He does not take us to heaven, as the pastor of my youth often said, in the upper berth of a Pullman sleeper. He does not tow us through this life to heaven as a child pulls a mechanical, quacking duck across the floor. He saves us as rational and moral creatures. And so He comes to us with commands, prohibitions, admonitions, threats, chastisements, and incentives, so that as He works our prayers within us, bringing us blessings, we may, through the great struggle with our sins, see the greatness of all God gives. He works in such a way that our prayers are inspired and wrought in us by the commands and injunctions of His word. He uses all the means of Scripture's pleadings and warnings, promises and threats, to work prayer in us. And the prayers He works in us become themselves a part of the blessings we receive through prayer. Never is the Christian so blessed as during those times when He is with his God in the secret places of the Most High. The prayer itself becomes the greatest blessing of all.
We may profitably learn to pray Augustine's well-known prayer: "Give what Thou dost ask, and ask what Thou wilt."
From this it follows that we strive earnestly to pray as much as possible. The very idea of striving means that we are very sinful and struggle to live a life of prayer. In this way, too, God demonstrates to us that He gives us the great blessing and high privilege of coming into His courts in heaven on the wings of our prayers even though we are not deserving of doing this, incapable of praying it in our own power, and devoid of His grace without it. IT is when we recognize what a great wonder God works in us that we may and can pray and that we persevere more faithfully in our calling to pray. God's sovereignty enhances and even works our responsibility.
With these truths before our minds, we are able to turn to prayer itself.
Herman Hanko
When You Pray, pp. 15-20
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