Devotional 109: Prayer in a Known Tongue: The Understanding Must Be Engaged

The Confession Read

Prayer is to be made for things lawful; and for all sorts of men living, or that shall live hereafter: but not for the dead, nor for those of whom it may be known that they have sinned the sin unto death.

— Westminster Confession of Faith, Chapter 21, Section 4

Introduction

God is searching. Through the mouth of Ezekiel He looks upon a people whose wall has been breached, whose watchmen have slept, whose land lies open to judgment; and He utters a word that lays bare the very heart of His dealings with a guilty world: "And I sought for a man among them, that should make up the hedge, and stand in the gap before me for the land, that I should not destroy it: but I found none" (Ezekiel 22:30). The Lord of hosts, the God who needs nothing, who is served by no hands as though He lacked anything, stoops to speak as a man who looks for one honest friend, one soul willing to step between His holiness and a people's ruin. And the devastating word at the end of the search is this: I found none. Here, beloved, is a window thrown open upon the dignity of intercession. The God who could have spoken the word of destruction and been righteous in doing so was pleased instead to look for a man who would pray. In that searching glance we discover how highly He esteems the prayer of one soul for another. Our section today sits precisely at this point. Having taught us in the previous section what prayer is, in whose name it is offered, and upon what conditions a sinner's petitions are received, the Divines now turn to a humbler and yet more searching question: For whom may we pray? Whom does God summon us to carry before His throne upon our hearts, and for whom has He closed the way? The answer comes to us as a double fence: a broad and open field of intercession on one side, and two solemn prohibitions on the other. For the reach of prayer is wide. We are bidden to pray for things lawful, for all sorts of men now living, and even for those who shall live hereafter, for generations whose faces no one has yet seen. But the field is not boundless in every direction. We may not pray for the dead, whose state is fixed; nor for those of whom it may be known that they have sinned the sin unto death. To understand why the Divines drew each line where they drew it, we must let Scripture speak first, for here as everywhere the Confession claims no authority but the Word of God.

Scripture Foundation

The great charter of intercession stands in the first verses of Paul's second letter to Timothy, and no text so fully expounds the doctrine of our section as this one. 1 Timothy 2:1-2: "I exhort therefore, that, first of all, supplications, prayers, intercessions, and giving of thanks, be made for all men; for kings, and for all that are in authority; that we may lead a quiet and peaceable life in all godliness and honesty." Notice, first, how the Apostle piles word upon word. He names four distinct acts of devotion: deēseis, supplications, the cries of a creature pressed by need; proseuchas, prayers, the settled converse of the soul with God; enteuxeis, intercessions, from a verb that means to fall in with another, to meet with him, to converse freely face to face; and eucharistias, thanksgivings. The third of these, enteuxis, is the beating heart of our passage. It speaks of a bold familiarity, the ease of one who has been granted access to a great personage and speaks to Him without reserve. The same word is used of Christ, who "maketh intercession" for His own; it is used of the Spirit, who "maketh intercession" with groanings that cannot be uttered. Here it descends to us. Because our great High Priest intercedes for us in heaven, we are drawn up into His intercession and bidden to intercede for others upon earth. Prayer is not a solitary sigh; it is a ministry of the whole body of Christ, a work in which every member bears every other member before the throne. Then observe the breadth of the command: "for all men." The little Greek phrase hyper pantōn anthrōpōn, "on behalf of all human beings," sweeps aside every boundary that our fallen hearts would draw. We are not to confine our prayers to the pleasant, the like-minded, the deserving, or even the believing. Paul grounds this in the very next verse, where he reminds us that God "will have all men to be saved, and to come unto the knowledge of the truth" (1 Timothy 2:4). God's desire for the salvation of men is not a narrow thing, and therefore our prayers must not be a narrow thing. We may not know who among the lost belongs to the secret number of the elect, and we are not asked to know; we are simply bidden to pray for all, and to leave the secret things to the Lord. Nor does the Apostle stop at "all men" in general. He descends at once to the hardest, most specific case: "for kings, and for all that are in authority." Why does he fasten upon rulers? Because they are the men for whom the human heart is least inclined to pray. A king sits high; he does not seem to need our petitions, and in the days when Timothy read these words the king was no friend of the church. It was almost certainly the Emperor Nero who wore the purple when Paul wrote. Yet the very man whose name would be a byword for persecution was to be the object of the church's prayers. The reason given is bracingly practical: "that we may lead a quiet and peaceable life in all godliness and honesty." We pray for the magistrate, not merely for his soul, but that under his government the gospel may have free course and the saints may worship without hindrance. Prayer for those in authority is thus a prayer for the spread of the kingdom, a petition that the gates of heaven be not shut against a nation by the fury of its rulers. The duty of intercession runs as a golden thread through the whole of Scripture's story. James commands it plainly: "Pray one for another, that ye may be healed. The effectual fervent prayer of a righteous man availeth much" (James 5:16). And lest we think the promise too high, he adds the memory of Elijah, a man "subject to like passions as we are," who prayed and the heavens withheld rain, and prayed again and the heavens gave rain (James 5:17-18). The emphasis falls on the word righteous. It is not the eloquence or the length or the loudness of a prayer that gives it power, but the character of the one who prays, justified by faith and walking in humble obedience. A righteous man, however ordinary, is a man whose prayer God hears. The Old Testament is full of the same office. When Israel demanded a king, Samuel could have retired in wounded pride; instead he took up the very burden that had been thrust aside, and said, "God forbid that I should sin against the LORD in ceasing to pray for you" (1 Samuel 12:23). To stop praying for the people was, in Samuel's accounting, a sin against God Himself. Abraham stood before the Lord and bargained for Sodom; Moses fell upon his face for a stiff-necked people and cried, "forgive their sin — and if not, blot me, I pray thee, out of thy book" (Exodus 32:32); Job's captivity was turned only "when he prayed for his friends" (Job 42:10). The whole history of redemption is a history of men standing in the gap. And if the duty reaches to all men, it reaches with special tenderness to the very place where God has set us. Through Jeremiah the Lord commanded His exiled people, "Seek the peace of the city whither I have caused you to be carried away captive, and pray unto the LORD for it: for in the peace thereof shall ye have peace" (Jeremiah 29:7). Through Isaiah He declared that He would set watchmen upon the walls, men who "shall never hold their peace day nor night" (Isaiah 62:6-7). The intercessor is a watchman, and a watchman does not choose his own post or his own hours. He prays for the city where God has placed him, for its peace and for its repentance, and he does not grow silent merely because the answer is long in coming. Before we pass on, mark also the first clause of our section, for it sets a boundary around every petition we offer: prayer is to be made for things lawful. Our Lord's own model prayer teaches us to ask, "Thy will be done" (Matthew 6:10), and a request that runs against the revealed will of God is no prayer at all. We may ask for grace and holiness, for daily bread, for the peace of the church, for the salvation of men; we may not ask for success in sin, for the satisfaction of lust, or for any end that His Word forbids. A petition must be lawful in its object and conformed to His will in its desire, else it is presumption wearing the garments of devotion. But if Scripture throws the door of intercession wide for the living, it closes it firmly where our section closes it. First, we may not pray for the dead. The reason is not hard-heartedness but a plain fact of revelation: "It is appointed unto men once to die, but after this the judgment" (Hebrews 9:27). Death is not a doorway into some waiting-room where the prayers of the living may yet amend a soul's condition. It is the threshold of judgment, and no petition from this side of the grave can reach a verdict already settled. Our Lord sealed the doctrine with the parable of the rich man and Lazarus, in which Abraham declares, "between us and you there is a great gulf fixed: so that they which would pass from hence to you cannot; neither can they pass to us, that would come from thence" (Luke 16:26). The Greek there is chasma mega, a great chasm, a yawning abyss over which no voice of intercession can carry. The state of the departed is fixed, and prayer for the dead is a prayer that God has nowhere promised to hear. Second, we may not pray for those of whom it may be known that they have sinned the sin unto death. The phrase comes from John's first epistle: "If any man see his brother sin a sin which is not unto death, he shall ask, and he shall give him life for them that sin not unto death. There is a sin unto death: I do not say that he shall pray for it" (1 John 5:16). The Greek is hamartia pros thanaton, a sin toward death, a sin whose end, whose fixed destination, is death. What is this sin? Our Lord Himself taught of a blasphemy against the Holy Ghost which "shall not be forgiven unto men" (Matthew 12:31-32), a settled, deliberate, final rejection of the Spirit's witness to Christ, hardened into hostility until the very organ of repentance is dead. Such a sin cannot be known except by its marks, and John does not forbid us to pray for every staggering backslider; far from it, he bids us pray for a brother who sins and receives life in answer. He forbids only what cannot be prayed: the sin that has passed beyond the reach of prayer because the one who commits it has passed beyond the reach of grace. Here the church bows her head and leaves the case to God.

What the Divines Meant

When the Westminster Divines sat to write these words, they wrote with two errors firmly in view, and both of them were alive in their own day. The first was the Roman doctrine of purgatory, with its attendant practice of prayers and masses for the dead. Rome taught that many believers die with the guilt of temporal punishment still upon them, and that the prayers of the living, offered at the altar and often purchased at a price, could hasten the soul's release. The whole structure rested upon a single verse from the Apocrypha, where Judas Maccabeus is praised for making an offering for the dead, "for in doing this he acted very well and honorably, taking account of the resurrection... therefore he made atonement for the dead, that they might be delivered from their sin" (2 Maccabees 12:43-45). The Council of Trent would later solemnly decree that the souls in purgatory are helped by the suffrages of the faithful. The Divines knew that the Apocrypha, as our own Confession had already established in its opening chapter, is not Scripture and can establish no doctrine. They knew, moreover, that the finished work of Christ leaves nothing for any mass to complete; and that prayer for the dead, whatever tenderness may clothe it, is a prayer with no promise beneath it. It was not coldness but faithfulness that moved them to write, "but not for the dead." And what comfort lies beneath their firmness! The believer who dies in Christ does not pass into a dim waiting-place dependent upon the prayers of men; he is "absent from the body, and present with the Lord" (2 Corinthians 5:8). The refusal to pray for the dead is, at bottom, a refusal to doubt the sufficiency of Christ and the blessedness of those who sleep in Him. The second error is less spoken of today but was urgent then: the conceit that a man's election could be known with certainty, and that prayers ought therefore to be narrowed to the company of the elect. Against this the Divines wrote "for all sorts of men living." The phrase is deliberately sweeping. It embraces kings and paupers, friends and foes, the converted and the unconverted, the near and the far. The Directory for the Public Worship of God, drawn up by the same Assembly only a year before the Confession, spelled out the same burden in its directions for public prayer, and it did so at a moment when the instruction was politically explosive. England was tearing itself apart in civil war. Yet the Directory commanded the churches to pray for the king, for the Parliament, for the magistrates, for the whole people, precisely because these were the men whom the flesh would rather curse than bless. The Divines understood that intercession for one's own enemies is the clearest proof that our prayers are shaped by Scripture and not by our resentments. They also guarded the matter of prayer with the words "for things lawful." A man may ask with great fervor and yet ask amiss. James had warned, "Ye ask, and receive not, because ye ask amiss, that ye may consume it upon your lusts" (James 4:3). Prayer is no blank cheque drawn upon heaven. It must be offered for what God has promised to give and for what His Word permits us to desire, for grace and holiness, for the peace of the church, for daily bread, for the salvation of men, and never for what His law forbids. A prayer for success in sin is not prayer at all; it is impudence dressed in devotion. Here the regulative principle that governed Section 1 reaches its full flower: even in the closet we are not lords, but children who ask according to the Father's will. The whole section, then, is a lesson in two directions of obedience. We must not be narrower than God, refusing to pray for those He commands us to carry; and we must not be broader than God, presuming to pray where He has closed the way. The first is the sin of coldness; the second is the sin of superstition. Both dishonor the Lord, and the Confession guards us against both.

Theological Depth

Calvin, treating the matter in his Institutes, insists that intercession for all men is a fruit of love and a debt of the common brotherhood. Since we cannot know who among the mass of mankind is elect, we are to desire the good of all and to express that desire in prayer; and if we pray for all, our prayers are not therefore wasted, for God honors the charity of the heart even where His secret decree has determined otherwise. On the question of the dead, Calvin is unsparing. He notes that the early church, in the age of Chrysostom and Augustine, did in fact pray for the departed, but that the practice grew up without warrant from Scripture, and that Scripture must silence whatever antiquity may plead. Augustine himself, in his Confessions, records that he prayed for his mother Monica after her death; and Calvin's verdict is that this tender error of a great saint must yield to the clearer voice of the Word. The dead are in the hand of God, and there we must leave them, with grief but without petition. Thomas Manton, whose sermons upon the epistles are a treasury of this very doctrine, calls attention to the Apostle's "first of all." Before Paul instructs Timothy about public worship, about the qualifications of elders, about any other matter of church order, he sets intercession at the head. The reason, Manton argues, is that prayer is the great instrument by which every other duty is performed. We may preach and persuade and labor, but it is God who gives the increase, and the increase is asked for upon our knees. Intercession for all men is therefore not a secondary duty for the devout few; it is the first work of the church, the hinge upon which every other work turns. William Perkins, whose practical divinity shaped a generation of preachers, presses the same truth through the doctrine of conscience. If we truly believe that God "will have all men to be saved," then a heart that will not pray for its neighbor convicts itself. The man who rejoices in his own pardon and yet will not lift up the name of the unconverted has either never tasted mercy or has forgotten its taste. Prayer for others is the natural overflow of a soul that has been prayed for by Christ; and where the overflow is absent, Perkins would bid us question whether the fountain itself has ever been opened. Robert Shaw, in his Exposition of the Confession, arranges the section into its three movements: the matter of prayer, which must be lawful; the objects of prayer, which are all living men; and the two exclusions, the dead and the sin unto death. On the second exclusion he is careful to counsel moderation. Because the sin unto death is, by its very nature, secret and known only by its effects, the church ought to be slow to conclude that any particular man has committed it. Our default posture toward the fallen is prayer, not verdict. We are to ask life for a brother who sins, and only where the sin has ripened into that final, self-conscious hostility against the Spirit's witness to Christ, the kind our Lord described in Matthew 12, are we to withhold what John tells us not to offer. The rule, in Shaw's reading, protects us from two opposite temptations: from praying as though the apostate might yet be plucked back where Scripture gives no such hope, and from despairing of any penitent soul, however foul, for whom the mercy of God is always wide. John Owen, whose exposition of the Epistle to the Hebrews lingered long over the sin unto death, labors to keep the church from both despair and presumption at this very point. The sin unto death, he argues, is not the fall of a weak believer, nor even a long season of backsliding, for such a man may yet be recovered and his sin is "not unto death." It is that settled, final renunciation of the Spirit's testimony to Christ which Hebrews describes as crucifying the Son of God afresh and putting Him to an open shame. Yet Owen would have us notice that the phrase may also bear a lower sense: there are sins which God visits with temporal death, as when the Corinthians, profaning the Lord's table, were given over to weakness and sickness, and "many sleep" (1 Corinthians 11:30). In every case the church's duty is the same: to pray for the brother who sins, and to leave the final distinction to the unerring judgment of God. George Swinnock, meditating on the Christian's calling, sets the whole matter in the frame of love. Intercession is love at prayer. The tongue that praises God and the heart that longs for a neighbor's good are the two tables upon which the whole law of charity is written; and the man who prays for all men, friend and foe alike, is the man who has begun to bear the image of Him who prays for His enemies even as they drive the nails. Swinnock would have us observe that our Lord's most tender prayer was offered precisely for those who were killing Him: "Father, forgive them; for they know not what they do" (Luke 23:34). If the Master interceded for His murderers, what neighbor may the servant refuse? And beneath all these voices lies the deepest ground of the doctrine. Our intercession is a shadow and a participation of Christ's. He "ever liveth to make intercession" for His people (Hebrews 7:25), and the same Spirit who intercedes in us with unutterable groanings is He who teaches us what to pray. We dare not pray for the dead because the mediation of Christ is the only way to the Father, and that mediation is offered to the living, in this present day of grace. To pray for the dead is to reach for a mercy that God has not stationed on the far side of the grave; to pray for the living is to lay hold of the very ministry for which the ascended Christ sits at the right hand of God.

Puritan Application

First, then, take up the ministry of intercession deliberately, as a work and not an afterthought. It is a solemn thing that God should speak of looking for a man to stand in the gap, and that in Ezekiel's day He found none. He is looking still. Set apart a portion of your daily prayer, not for your own needs only, but for the church and for the world. Write down the names of those for whom you will stand before God: your pastor, your elders, your children, the missionaries, the unconverted neighbor whose name you have too long forgotten. Do not let your prayers be a circle drawn tightly around yourself; enlarge the circle until it takes in all men. For the promise is sure: the effectual fervent prayer of a righteous man availeth much. Second, pray for those in authority, and do it as an act of obedience before it is an act of affection. It is easy to pray for rulers we admire and hard to pray for those we despise; but the command makes no such distinction. Paul wrote it under Nero, and the church has never been released from it. Pray for your magistrates, your lawmakers, your judges, that God would incline their hearts to righteousness, that they would govern so that the church may lead a quiet and peaceable life in all godliness and honesty. This is not a political prayer but a gospel prayer, for it asks that the doors of the kingdom be not barred by the wickedness of those who hold power. Third, pray for your enemies, and let this be the test of your charity. You have perhaps been wronged, and the flesh whispers that the wrongdoer deserves no prayer of yours. But remember Stephen, who under a hail of stones prayed, "Lord, lay not this sin to their charge" (Acts 7:60); and remember that it was at the feet of that praying martyr that a young man named Saul stood, within a few years to become the greatest intercessor the church has known. You do not know what harvest your prayer for an enemy may yet reap. The man you bless upon your knees may be the very instrument by which God means to bless you, or the soul you were born to carry to the throne. Fourth, stretch your prayers forward, toward those who shall live hereafter. The Confession bids us pray for all sorts of men living and for those yet unborn. Pray for your children's children, whom you will never see; pray for the church that will gather when you are in the grave; pray that the faith once delivered to the saints may be kept by generations whose faces no man knows. There is wonder in this: that a man in his closet may influence, by prayer, the state of the church a hundred years hence. The mercies we ask today may be granted to souls not yet conceived, for the God who hears is not bound by time. Fifth, and with all tenderness, learn to leave the dead with God. When you bury one you love, you may grieve, you ought to grieve, but do not turn your grief into petitions that God has nowhere promised to hear. You cannot shorten a purgatory that does not exist, nor open a door that God has shut. What you can do is this: bless the Lord for the finished work of Christ, in whose merits your beloved died believing; and cast yourself upon that same mercy for the living who remain. And while you stand there, let the grave teach you urgency. The gulf is fixed, and none may pass it; but you are still on the praying side of the gulf, and today, while it is called today, you may yet lay hold of God for the living. Finally, tremble at the thought of the sin unto death, and flee from the very edge of it. It is not one fall that carries a man there, but a long hardening, a settled refusal of the Spirit's witness, until at last the conscience that once could be pricked can feel no more. If you fear you have committed it, that very fear is evidence you have not; for the man who has committed it no longer trembles. But let the possibility of it send you today to the cross, for it is the long-unused mercy that the Spirit withdraws. Come while the door is open; pray while prayer may yet be made; for the great gulf is fixed, and after death there is no intercession but the judgment.

Prayer

O Lord our God, who seekest a man to stand in the gap and who hast taught us to pray, we come before Thee as those who are themselves prayed for. We bless Thee for the intercession of Thy Son at Thy right hand, and for the Spirit who helpeth our infirmities and teacheth us to ask according to Thy will. Teach us, we beseech Thee, to pray for all men. Put upon our hearts the names of the living, kings and subjects, friends and enemies, the near and the far, the converted and the lost, that our prayers may be as wide as Thy mercy and as faithful as Thy Word. Give us the charity that blesseth them that curse us, that prayeth for them that despitefully use us, and that counteth it a sin, as Samuel did, to cease praying for Thy people. We pray for those in authority, that we may lead a quiet and peaceable life in all godliness and honesty; and we pray for generations yet unborn, that the faith once delivered to the saints may be kept among them, and that a people may be raised up to praise Thee when we are gone. And we ask, O Lord, that we may never pray where Thou hast shut the door. We leave the dead in Thy hands, trusting Thy justice and Thy mercy, and resting in the finished work of Christ. Keep us from the sin that is unto death; give us no rest until we have made our calling and election sure, and hold us fast to the end, that neither death nor life may separate us from the love which is in Christ Jesus our Lord. Amen.