Dear Friends of "Dial Daily Bread,"
Why do we pray? Does prayer move the hand of God so that He would do things that otherwise He would not do? What does prayer tell us about the character of God?
The second question is nearly correct, but not quite. If we change the "would" to "could," we get closer to the truth. God wills to do all the good things for us that we ask Him to do when we pray, even long before we pray. He wants to; but our prayers make it possible for God to do things that He wants to do. So it's not a matter of what God would do for us, but what He could do for us.
The question is, "Why?" Well, look at those people in Acts 12 praying all night for Peter to be released from the murderous hand of King Herod Agrippa I. He had been appointed king of Judea and Samaria by the Emperor Caligula of Rome--a legal appointment. Rome was the ruler of the world. That had not been God's plan; in the New Covenant God made with Abraham, Abraham's descendants should rule the world and there would not have been an evil empire of Rome; Israel would have ruled the world under the New Covenant. But Israel had abandoned the New Covenant and embraced the Old Covenant. So God was forced to respect the autonomy of Rome because Adam had sold out to Satan, who is "the ruler of this world," says Jesus (John 14:30).
But Christ legally wrested the sovereignty of this world from Satan by virtue of His sacrifice; therefore He can respond to prayers from His people who pray to Him in the name of Jesus. All the while Peter was in jail, God wanted to deliver him; now when His people seriously asked Him to do so "in the name of Jesus," He was free to act and He did.
Conclusion: our prayers do not "move" God to do what otherwise He would not want to do or is too indifferent to do. They bring us into heart cooperation with God, they put us on the side of God in "the great controversy between Christ and Satan." The problem is, that same "cooperation" may mean much more than the tiny little thing we happen just now to be praying for!
--Robert J. Wieland
From the "Dial Daily Bread" Archive: August 29, 2000.
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