1. What Prayer Is
Charles Hodge
Prayer is the soul speaking with God. In prayer we are to express: our reverence, our love for His divine perfection, our gratitude for all His mercies, our penitence for our sins, our hope in His forgiving love, our submission to His authority, our confidence in His care, our desires for His favour and for the providential and spiritual blessings we and others need.
Religion (in the subjective sense of the word) is the state of mind which results from realising aright the character of God and our relation to Him as our Creator, Preserver and Redeemer. Prayer is the expression, uttered or unuttered, of all the feelings and desires which that state of mind produces. A prayerless person must be, by definition, thoroughly irreligious. There can be no life when there is no activity. As a body is dead when activity stops, so the soul is spiritually dead if it lives as if there is no God.
What prayer assumes.
(1.) God is a personal being.
Prayer assumes that God is a person because only a person: [1] can say I, or be addressed as Thou; [2] can be the subject and object of intelligent action; [3] can understand and answer, can love and be loved, or hold converse with other persons. If God is only a name for an unknown force or for the moral order of the universe, prayer becomes irrational and impossible.
(2.) God can communicate with us.
Although God is a person, He could dwell far off in immensity and not interact with His creatures on earth. So prayer not only assumes that personality of God, but also that He is near us, that He is not only able, but also willing, to communicate with us, that He knows our thoughts from a distance, and that unspoken desires are intelligible to Him.
(3.) God is personally in control of nature.
That is, prayer assumes that God has personal control of everything outside Himself, that He governs all His creatures and all their actions. It also assumes that He has not only created all things and given to matter and mind their forces and powers, but that He is present everywhere, controlling the operation of such forces and powers. Thus nothing occurs without Him directing or permitting it. When it rains, it is because He wills that it should happen and because He controls the laws of nature to produce the rain. When the earth produces abundant crops, or when a farmer has a disappointing harvest, it is not due to the blind operation of natural laws, but to God’s intelligent and personal control. God is not subject to any laws. He reigns and He orders everything in nature to bring about His purposes.
This does not suppose that the laws of nature are changeable or that they are set aside. There is scarcely any effect, either in nature or in human activity, which is due to the operation of one natural force. We produce effects by combining such forces. Similarly, in the ordinary operations of nature, God accomplishes His purpose by a combination of natural causes. When He wills that it should rain, He wills that all the secondary causes which produce that effect should be brought into operation. The doctrine of providence only supposes that, on the scale of the universe, God does what we do within the limited sphere of our activity. For effects outside ourselves, we must use secondary causes. We can act neither against them nor without them. God is not thus limited; He can operate without second causes as well as with them, or against them.
Scripture teaches that God is a personal Being, independent of the world, and that He has created it and endowed all material things with their various properties or powers, which He constantly controls as One who is omnipresent, omnipotent and infinitely wise. This doctrine is presupposed in prayer, for “prayer and the answer of prayer, are simply . . . the making of a request upon the one side, and compliance with that request upon the other. Man applies; God complies. Man asks a favour; God bestows it. These are conceived to be the two terms of a real interchange that takes place between the parties.”2
God’s rule includes our minds. Prayer also supposes God’s government extends over the minds of men, over their thoughts, feelings, and acts of their will. It also assumes that their heart is in His hands and that He can turn it even as the rivers of water are turned.
It is evident that atheism and every other system of thought which denies the existence or the personality of God are inconsistent with prayer; so also are all theories which do not admit that God has control over the operations of nature and the character and conduct of men. If there is no personal God, there is no one to pray to; and if God exists but has no control over nature or man, then there is no rational motive for prayer; nothing can be accomplished by it. The idea that the service would still be of value for its effect on those who pray is irrational, because this effect is due to faith in its objective effectiveness. If a man believes, for instance, that there is no God, he cannot make himself a better man by acting hypocritically and pouring forth his prayers and praises to a nonentity. Candid men therefore, who hold any of the theories referred to, do not hesitate to pronounce prayer superstitious or fanatical.
A large class of scientists claims that there never has been an event in the external world due to the exercise of any other force than the undirected operation of physical causes. This, of course, precludes the possibility of miracles. For a miracle is an event in the external world which cannot be referred to any natural cause, but which must from its nature be ascribed to the immediate action of God. When Christ said, “I will; be thou clean,” and the leper was cleansed, the only cause of the cure was His will. Similarly when He said, “Lazarus, come forth,” or when He “said unto the sea, Peace, be still. And the wind ceased and there was a great calm”.
A scientific man has no idea how small he looks when, in the presence of Christ, he ventures to say that nature has never been crossed by spontaneous action, that Christ’s will was not a cause when, by a word, He healed the sick or opened the eyes of the blind or raised the dead, or when He Himself rose by His own power from the grave. It is infinite folly to say that these facts never occurred, simply because – according to the ephemeral theory of the moment – they could not occur. It is a thousand-fold more certain that they occurred than the best authenticated facts of history. Scientific men are prone to think that there is no other evidence of truth than the testimony of the senses. But a man might as easily set himself free from the operation of the laws of nature as from the authority of the moral law, or his responsibility to God.
The theory of the universe which underlies the Bible and is everywhere assumed or asserted in it, which accords with our moral and religious nature, is that God created all things by the word of His power, that He is everywhere present in the universe, co-operating with and controlling the operation of second causes on a scale commensurate with His omnipresence and omnipotence. Thus it is not irrational that we should pray for rain or fair weather, for prosperous voyages or good health; or that we should feel gratitude for the countless blessings which we receive from this ever-present, ever-operating and ever-watchful Benefactor. Any theory of the universe which makes religion or prayer irrational is false. As this control by God extends over the minds of men, it is just as rational that we should pray that He would influence our own hearts, and the hearts of others, for good, as that we should pray for health.
Thus the sequence of events in the physical and moral world is not determined by any inexorable fate. A fatalist cannot consistently pray. It is only on the assumption that there is a God, who does His pleasure in the army of heaven and among the inhabitants of the earth, that we can rationally address Him as the hearer of prayer.
Similarly, it is assumed that no foreordination of events is inconsistent with God acting according to the good pleasure of His will. When a man begins any great enterprise, he plans his operations beforehand, he selects and determines his means and assigns to each of his subordinates the part that he is to act; he may require each of them to apply continually for directions and may assure them that their requests for guidance shall be answered. Were it possible that every such request could be foreseen and the answer predetermined, this would not be inconsistent with the duty of making such requests, or with the liberty of action on the part of the controller.
This illustration may amount to little, but it is certain that the Scriptures teach both foreordination and the effectiveness of prayer. The two therefore cannot be inconsistent. God has purposed to accomplish His purposes by the use of means and, among those means, the prayers of His people have their appropriate place. If the objection to prayer founded on the foreordination of events is valid, it is valid against the use of means in any case. If it is unreasonable to say, If it is foreordained that I should live, it is not necessary for me to eat, it is just as unreasonable for me to say, If it be foreordained that I should receive anything good, it is not necessary for me to ask for it. If God has foreordained to bless us, He has foreordained that we should seek His blessing. Prayer has the same causal relation to the good bestowed as any other means has to the end with which it is connected.
The God of the Bible, who has revealed Himself as the hearer of prayer, is not mere intelligence and power; He is love. He feels as well as thinks. “Like as a father pitieth his children, so the Lord pitieth them that fear Him.” He is full of tenderness, compassion, longsuffering and benevolence. These declarations of Scripture reveal what God really is. If man was made in His image, God is like man. All the excellences of our spirits belong to Him without limitation, to an infinite degree. There is mystery here, as there is everywhere. But we are all used to mysteries, the naturalist as well as the theologian. Both have been taught the folly of denying that something is, because we cannot tell how it is. It is enough for us to know that God loves His people and cares for them and that, as a sparrow does not fall to the ground without His notice, so they are, in His sight, of more value than many sparrows. For the believer, all this is literal truth, having the highest kind of evidence to support it. The how he is content to leave unexplained.
It is often objected against the appropriateness of addressing prayer to God that it is inconsistent with His dignity as an infinite Being for Him to concern Himself with the trifling affairs of men. This objection arises from forgetting that God is infinite. It assumes that His knowledge, power or presence is limited, that He would be distracted if His attention was directed to all the minute changes constantly occurring throughout the universe. But this supposes that God is a creature like ourselves, that bounds can be set to His intelligence or activity. When a man looks out on an extensive landscape, there are too many objects for him to pay attention to them all simultaneously. But what is man to God? The absolute intelligence must know all things; absolute power must be able to direct all things. In Him all creatures live and move and have their being.
If the enemy surprises you and your heart smites you, do not stand astonished as if there was no help, nor give way to sorrow as if there was no hope, nor attempt to heal yourself; but away immediately to the throne of grace, to the great Physician, to the compassionate High Priest, and tell Him all.
John Newton
1Taken, with editing, from Hodge’s Systematic Theology, vol 3.
2Thomas Chalmers, Works, New York, 1844, vol 2, p 292.