God devised prayer “as a means of enlisting us as participants in the work he has ordained, as part of the outworking of his sovereign rulership over all.” Our prayers do in fact make a difference. Yes, God is God, lacking nothing. Yet he has chosen to work through his people and their prayers. This is mind-boggling stuff. It is all about participation with God.
My title question is not a rhetorical nor a theoretical one. It is a very real question, and one that all believers should contemplate. Many matters come to mind here. Part of the issue has to do with the fact that if God is omniscient and knows all things, then why pray? He already knows everything about us and what we need. He gains no new information and insights from us when we engage in petitionary prayer.
So why pray? Zillions of great books have been written on prayer, many of which deal with these very sorts of questions. Here I want to look at just one volume, and only part of it deals directly with prayer. It has actually been out for a while now, but I recently revisited it. I refer to God’s Greater Glory: The Exalted God of Scripture and the Christian Faith by Bruce Ware (Crossway, 2004).
You might recall that this author had previously penned God’s Lesser Glory (Crossway, 2004), in which he took to task the openness theologians who say, among other things, that God does not have exhaustive knowledge – certainly not exhaustive foreknowledge as is normally understood.
In God’s Greater Glory he looks further at some of these matters, especially focusing on the providence of God. Those wanting a helpful and thorough biblical and theological treatment of the issue of God’s sovereignty and how it ties in with human moral culpability and responsibility will find much of value here.
But even if you do not buy his theological stance on these issues, his closing chapters are both pastoral and practical. Thus Chapter 7 has to do with how all this ties in with prayer. And there we get the questions I already mentioned, such as: ‘If God already knows everything, why even bother to pray?’
He begins his chapter by reminding us of some basic biblical truths. While God made us and the world, he did not have to. He is complete and sufficient in himself. Indeed, the three persons of the Trinity have always enjoyed fellowship and community within the godhead. So God did not NEED to make man. As Ware writes:
God exists eternally independent of creation, possessing within himself, intrinsically and infinitely, every quality and perfection. All goodness is God’s goodness, and he possesses it in infinite measure. All beauty is God’s beauty, and he possesses it in infinite measure. All power and wisdom and every perfection or quality that exists, exists in God, who possesses each and every one infinitely and intrinsically. Therefore, God needs none of what he has made, and nothing external to God can contribute anything to him, for in principle nothing can be added to this One who possesses already every quality without measure. Instead, everything that exists external to God does so only because God has granted it existence and has filled it with any and every quality it possesses (Acts 17:24-25).
But God did create us. Not because he had to but because he wanted to. And Ware reminds us of this basic truth: while God is fully and perfectly self-sufficient and dependent on no one, we are fully dependent on God. Like a newborn baby, we are completely helpless and unable in the least to survive and thrive on our own. We owe everything to God.
Prayer
This is where the amazing biblical truths about prayer come into play. Although God is perfectly sovereign and complete in himself, he has chosen to use the prayers of his people for his purposes. Again, he need not have even created us, let alone deign to take into account and make use of our prayers.
And again, God knows all about us and all about our needs. As Jesus said about our need of daily bread and clothing, “your heavenly Father knows that you need them all” (Matthew 6:32). So is prayer a waste of time then? Jesus did not think so.
Says Ware, “Clearly, Jesus doesn’t see a conflict between 1) our complete and total inability to inform God of anything, and 2) our prayers being meaningful, significant, and necessary.” He offers two major reasons why God has designed that his people pray. The first is this: he devised prayer “as a means to draw us into close and intimate fellowship with him.”
At this point let me interject with a quick personal story. Last night as I was looking at my Jilly dog, I thought that she too misses and is sad that Averil is gone. The trouble is, she cannot reason it through and properly process it all. She simply has a hole in her doggie soul.
But then I thought, ‘Am I really much different?’