What is the point of prayer?

In a previous article on predestination, I acknowledged that what is going to happen to us in the future is already known and willed by God. This is a necessary belief from our understanding of God as the ground of all being, the reason for everything, beyond space and time, and therefore incapable of being either surprised or disappointed.

Being, as He is, outside time, God must also be incapable of changing His mind. Change is something that takes place in time, and God, being eternal, must also be changeless. And indeed, if we could change God’s mind in any way, then we would have some power over Him, which is not to be thought of.

And yet the Bible repeatedly portrays God as changing His mind. For example, in the passage about the forthcoming destruction of Sodom, Abraham seeks to persuade God that He should relent of His decision if He can find just a handful of good people in the city – though of course, in the end, the city is destroyed.

Or consider the prophet Jonah: his remarkably successful preaching among the Ninevites has the result that “God relented of the disaster that He had said He would do to them, and He did not do it” (Jonah 3:10). It must be said that the original Hebrew does not exactly say that God “changed His mind”, as some translations have it.

The point is, though, that it cannot literally be the case that God changes His mind. He cannot have literally been pleasantly surprised at the repentance of the Ninevites. And yet not only do we have these passages (and many like them) in the Old Testament that speak – figuratively, we would have to say – about God changing His mind and relenting; we also have passages in the New Testament where Christ Himself very clearly instructs His followers to petition God: “Ask, and it will be given to you” (Matthew 7:7); “if two of you agree on earth about anything they ask, it will be done for them by my Father in heaven” (Matthew 18:19). Most importantly, the very prayer that Christ taught His disciples as the model of prayer is simply a list of requests: “give”, “forgive”, “deliver”.

If we exclude the possibility that our prayers literally change God’s mind, then what are we left with? Let us take a concrete example: Aunt Mabel is sick; we pray for her to get better, and she does. We have ruled out the possibility that God had decided to let her die, but has now been persuaded otherwise by our incessant petition. Shall we say instead that Aunt Mabel was always going to get better, and our prayer has made no difference? Or at least, as a sceptic might suggest, did it have some kind of placebo effect, or make us feel better even if it did nothing for Aunt Mabel herself?

Such an answer is clearly ruled out by Christ’s instruction that we should pray, on the assumption that He is not simply playing on us a cruel joke. Rather, we have to say that, yes, Aunt Mabel was always going to get better – that was both known and willed by God from all eternity. And, crucially, our prayer for her was also both known and willed in the same way. Moreover, it was always the will of God that our prayer for Aunt Mabel should be part of the reason she got better.

This is not to claim that prayers have magical powers. I warned last time against the danger of casting God as the “big wizard in the sky”; we should be equally wary of thinking that praying makes us sky-wizards too. Rather, our prayer makes us participants in Divine Providence. It is not – or at least, not usually – that God gives us the ability to interfere in the natural order of things, but rather that by His will and knowledge all natural causes take place. When we pray out of love, our natural concern for others – or indeed for ourselves – is elevated to the level of the divine, the supernatural.

In short, we should pray for things we want because to do so raises our human wills up to participate in God’s loving care for the world and for all His children. We do not change His mind, but He changes ours, and if we pray honestly for the things we care about, we open ourselves to the possibility that He will shape our minds to care about the things that really matter.

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