This past Saturday at Faith in Prayer (biweekly prayer meeting) we prayed for our Sr. Pastor and his wife who had been at the BGC conference the past week. Some of the prayers were for the Conference–the speakers, attendees, and decisions. However, the whole thing had already finished and Pastor K. had already returned home.
This brings up the question of Prayer and Time. Can/Should we pray for events that are completed? God is timeless, so this should be acceptable, maybe even encouraged. I know a lady who prayed for someone long after they had died because she had never heard of the death. Were all those prayers wasted? I think not. However, I think there are some important factors influencing our prayers for past events. 1) You must believe that your prayers are still effective and God in his foreknowledge, omniscience, omnipotence can bring about change, in the past, as a result of your present prayers. 2) Knowledge of those past events affects how you pray, to the extent that you can’t pray for something to change twhen you already know what did or did not happen.
August 18, 2006 at 4:24 pm
Hey Nate ~
God is timeless? Are you sure about that? I would tend to disagree for several reasons which I won’t go into unless you want. However, I don’t think his relationship with time plays in as much here as his foreknowledge. If something happens and you pray after, he still knew before the event that you would pray. And your point (2) is an interesting thing I think about a lot. We are far more willing to pray about past events that we don’t know the outcome of than events which we do. But really, does it matter? Should it?
August 18, 2006 at 7:45 pm
I guess I’m a bit confused in how while denying timelessness you still uphold foreknowledge…unless his foreknowledge is based on perfect predictions. Or maybe you have Him outside our meager three dimensions of time and therefore makes Him not timeless.
In expanding on the relation with foreknowledge and time, I would tend to the view that every moment of time are all happening in God’s presence (God’s Now). Of course our language struggles to describe it, when we pray “in the future” God hears those prayers in the present OR as I put it in my original post, when we pray in the present, God hears them in the past, for they all are the same moment for Him.
August 19, 2006 at 5:09 am
I think that God’s temporality is the only thing that allows for foreknowledge. After all, how can He know something “before” if He is outside of time? If he’s timeless, you can’t used tensed words like “before” when speaking about any aspect of him. I think he is definitely outside of space, but not outside of time. I have a paper that I prepared for a Sunday School class on this, if you’re interested in reading it. Then perhaps we can talk more. Or, you can not read it and we can still talk more about it.
August 19, 2006 at 8:17 am
FOREknowledge is a word loaded with temporal meaning, thus just using it to describe God is bringing him into our time dimensions. I’d be similar to saying God is everywhere. If He’s outside of space that word doesn’t really work, but for our space-time understanding those kind of words are necessary.
Biblically, I think the timelessness of the I AM is well established, but I would be interested in reading your paper.
August 19, 2006 at 3:55 pm
All right. You can download it here: http://www.geocities.com/rettlerb/GodAndTimeSSDoubleSpaced.doc