Old Testament justification for praying to the saints

Victor says -

Sure, here are some:

Gen. 20:17 - God responds to Abraham's intercession and heals Abimelech, and
also his wife and slaves.

Gen. 27:29; Num. 24:9 - blessed be everyone who blesses you. If we bless
others in prayer, we are also blessed.

Exodus 32:11-14, 30-34; 34:9; Num. 14:17-20; 21:7-9 - these are many
examples of God's response to Moses' saintly intercession.

1 Sam. 12:23 - Samuel says that he would be sinning against God if he didn't
continue to intercede for the people of Israel.

1 Sam. 28:7-20 – the deceased prophet Samuel appears and converses with
Saul, which is confirmed by Sirach 46:13,20).

1 Sam. 28:7; 1 Chron. 10:13-14 - Saul practiced necromancy. He used a
medium, not God, to seek the dead and was therefore condemned. Saul's
practice is entirely at odds with the Catholic understanding of saintly
mediation, where God is the source and channel of all communication, and who
permits His children to participate in this power.

2 Chron. 30:27 - the prayers of the priests and Levites came before God's
holy habitation in heaven and were answered.

Tobit 12:12,15 - angels place Tobit and Sarah's prayers before the Holy One.
This teaches us that the angels are also our subordinate mediators. We pray
to the angels to take up our prayers to God.

Job 42:7-9 - Job prayed for three friends in sin and God listened to Job as
a result of these prayers.

Psalm 34:7 – the angel of the Lord delivers those who fear him.

Psalm 91:11 – God will give His angels charge of you, to guard you in all
your ways.

Psalm 103:20-21; 148:1-2 – we praise the angels and ask for their assistance
in doing God’s will.

Psalm 141:2 - David asks that his prayer be counted as incense before God.
The prayers of the saints have powerful effects.

Isaiah 6:6-7 - an angel touches Isaiah's lips and declares that his sin is
forgiven. The angel is a subordinate mediator of God who effects the
forgiveness of sins on God’s behalf.

Jer. 7:16 - God acknowledges the people's ability to intercede, but refuses
to answer due to the hardness of heart.

Jer. 15:1 – the Lord acknowledges the intercessory power of Moses and
Samuel.

Jer. 37:3 - king Zedekiah sends messengers to ask Jeremiah to intercede for
the people, that he might pray to God for them.

Jer. 42:1-6 - all the people of Israel went before Jeremiah asking for his
intercession, that he would pray to the Lord for them.

Baruch 3:4 - Baruch asks the Lord to hear the prayers of the dead of Israel.
They can intercede on behalf of the people of God.

Dan. 9:20-23 - Daniel intercedes on behalf of the people of Israel
confessing both his sins and the sins of the people before God.

Zech. 1:12-13 - an angel intercedes for those in Judea and God responds
favorably. 2 Macc. 15:12-16 – the high priest Onias and the prophet Jeremiah
were deceased for centuries, and yet interact with the living Judas
Maccabeas and pray for the holy people on earth.

The Catholic Defense is as follows:-http://www.catholic.com/thisrock/1990/9007chap.asp
Most "Bible-believing" Christians object to the Catholic practice of praying to the saints. These critics worry that Catholics will go to hell for offending God with a neo-pagan system of worship. They have four main criticisms of the custom, all of which they push forward vigorously.
First, they accuse Catholics of worshipping Mary and the other saints. This violates the first commandment: "You shall not have any other gods before me" (Ex. 20:3).

Additional proof that Catholics worship the saints is that they make statues of them, in violation of the next commandment: "You shall not make for yourself an idol or any image which is in the heavens above or on the earth below or in the waters which are under the earth; you shall not bow down and serve them because I am the Lord your God" (Ex. 20:4-5). Catholics make statues of the saints whom they worship, thereby committing the double sin of polytheism and idolatry.

The second objection to praying to the saints is that, even if Catholics do not worship the saints, they are at least calling upon the spirits of the dead. Scripture explicitly forbids conjuring the dead in many passages:

"Do not turn to mediums and familiar spirits; do not seek defilement among them" (Lev. 19:31). "The soul who turns to mediums and to familiar spirits to go whoring after them, I will set my face against that soul and cut him off from the midst of his people" (Lev. 20:6). "The man or the woman who becomes a medium or a familiar spirit will surely die; they will cast stones at them; their blood will be on themselves" (Lev. 20:27). "Let there not be found among you one who makes his son or his daughter pass through fire, a diviner of divinations, an occultist, a charmer, an enchanter, one who casts spells, or one who questions mediums or familiar spirits, or one who seeks the dead" (Deut. 18:10-11). Since the saints are all dead, no one is allowed to consult them without breaking these biblical laws.

A third objection is that there is only one mediator with the Father, Jesus Christ. "For there is one God and one mediator between God and men, a man, Jesus Christ, who has given himself as a ransom for all, the testimony in its own time" (1 Tim. 2:5-6). Jesus Christ is fully satisfactory as the mediator between sinners and God. No one should ever ask the saints for intercession.

A fourth objection is that the Bible does not instruct Christians to honor the saints, seek their intercession, or keep their relics. Without any biblical injunction to perform these things, a Christian risks displeasing God.

The Catholic Church always has taught that a Christian can worship only God, Father, Son and Holy Spirit. No creature, no matter how good or beautiful--no angel, no saint, not even the Virgin Mary--deserves adoration.

This is the teaching of the creeds (Apostles' Creed: "I believe in one God"; Nicene Creed: "We believe in one God") and the catechisms (Baltimore Catechism, question 199: "By the first commandment we are commanded to offer to God alone the supreme worship that is due him") and the Church councils (Nicaea, in 325; Rome in 382; Toledo in 675; Lateran IV in 1215; Lyons in 1274; Florence in 1442; Trent from 1545-1563; Vatican I from 1869-1870).

The Catholic Church condemns polytheism and idolatry alike. Pope Dionysius condemned the division of the one God into three gods, for there can be only one God, not three (Letter to Dionysius of Alexandria, A.D. 260). Pope Damasus I condemned the worship of other gods, angels, or archangels, even when God gave them the name of "god" in the Bible (Tome of Damasus, approved at the Council of Rome, 382).

John Damascene's Apologetic Sermons Against Those Who Reject Sacred Images gives an authentic presentation of the Catholic attitude towards statues and pictures of Mary and the saints: "If we were making images of men and thought them gods and adored them as gods, certainly we would be impious. But we do not do any of these things."

The Baltimore Catechism, question 223, confirms this by teaching: "We do not pray to the crucifix or to the images and relics of the saints, but to the persons they represent."

Catholic doctrine absolutely rejects the worship of anyone but God and rejects all worship of statues, whether of Christ or the saints. What the Church does allow is praying to the saints in order to ask for their intercession with the one true God. The Church also allows one to make statues to remind a person of Christ or the saint:

"Further, the images of Christ, of the Virgin Mother of God, and of the other saints are to be kept with honor in places of worship especially; and to them due honor and veneration is to be paid--not because it is believed that there is any divinity or power intrinsic to them for which they are reverenced, nor because it is from them that something is sought, nor that a blind trust is to be attached to images as it once was by the Gentiles who placed their hope in idols (Ps. 135:15ff); but because the honor which is shown to them is referred to the prototypes which they represent.

"Thus it follows that through these images, which we kiss and before which we kneel and uncover our heads, we are adoring Christ and venerating the saints whose likenesses these images bear" (Council of Trent, Session XXV, Decree 2).

This mirrors the Old Testament attitude. Soon after they received the commandment prohibiting the making of images for worship, the Israelites were told by the Lord to "make two cherubim of beaten gold; you will make them for the two ends of the covering [of the Ark of the Covenant]" (Ex. 25:18). After many Israelites suffered punishment in the form of snakebite, at the Lord's instruction "Moses made the bronze serpent and he set it upon a pole, and it happened that if a serpent bit a man, and he looked to the bronze serpent, he lived" (Num. 21:9).

The gold cherubim and the bronze serpent were not objects of worship. The cherubim symbolized the presence of God's angels at the Ark of the Covenant, and the bronze serpent was God's means of healing the people of poisonous snakebite. So too do Catholics make statues to represent the presence of the saints and angels in churches, homes, and elsewhere.

The Bible teaches that the attempt to contact the dead through seances and mediums is a serious sin. The Catholic Church, being a Bible-believing Church (actually, of course, it's more than that--the Catholic Church is the one and only Bible-writing Church), condemns all forms of superstition and conjuring the dead.

The Baltimore Catechism explains the seriousness of the sin of superstition: "Superstition is by its nature a mortal sin, but it may be venial either when the matter is slight or when there is a lack of full consent to the act" (question 212).

Pt2

When the Catholic Church encourages devotion and prayer to the saints, in no way does it intend for its members to practice some form of superstition. Never does the Church instruct the faithful to conjure the spirits of the saints to carry on some two-way communication. There are no seances that try to make them appear, speak messages, tap tables, or anything of the sort.

The faith of the Church is that the saints are not really dead, but are fully alive in Jesus Christ, who is life itself (John 11:25; 14:6) and the bread of life who bestows life on all who eat his flesh and drink his blood (John 6:35, 48, 51, 53-56). The saints are alive in heaven because of the life they have received through their faith in Christ Jesus and through their eating of his body and blood.

The book of Revelation shows the saints worshipping God, singing hymns, playing instruments, making requests to Christ to avenge their martyrdom, and offering prayers for the saints on earth (Rev. 4:10, 5:8, 6:9-11).

Because they are alive, we believe that we can go to them to intercede for us with God. We do not need to see apparitions or hear their voices in order to believe they will pray for us in heaven. We trust that the saints will accept our requests for help and will present them to Christ for us.

The Catholic Church has always believed that Jesus Christ is the one mediator between God and man. It is the death and resurrection of Jesus alone by which people are saved.

In 449 Pope Leo the Great wrote his Tome against Eutyches, who taught that Jesus Christ had only one nature, not two. (This was the heresy of monophysitism.) In the Tome, which the Council of Chalcedon accepted as the authentic Catholic teaching on Christ, he quotes 1 Timothy 2:5 as the authentic Catholic doctrine: "Hence, as was suitable for the alleviation of our distress, one and the same mediator between God and men, himself man, Christ Jesus, was both mortal and immortal under different aspects."

The fifth session of the Council of Trent (1546) laid out the belief in Jesus the one true mediator as the norm of Catholic faith: "[Original sin cannot be] taken away through the powers of human nature or through a remedy other than the merit of the one mediator, our Lord Jesus Christ, who reconciled us to God in his blood, having become our justice, and sanctification, and redemption."

The schema of the Dogmatic Constitution on the Principal Mysteries of the Faith, drafted for the First Vatican Council (1869-1870), includes the unique mediation of Jesus Christ as one of these principal mysteries: "Truly, therefore, Christ Jesus is mediator between God and man, one man dying for all; he made satisfaction to the divine justice for us, and he erased the handwriting that was against us. Despoiling principalities and powers, he brought us from our longstanding slavery into the freedom of sons."

These quotations from official Catholic documents give unambiguous proof that the Church believes Jesus Christ and no other is the one mediator between sinful humanity and the righteous God. How does the Church integrate this essential doctrine of the faith with the belief that we can pray to the saints?

First, God expects us to pray for one another. We see this in both the Old and New Testaments.

In a dream, God commanded King Abimelech to ask Abraham to intercede for him: "For [Abraham] is a prophet and he will pray for you, so you shall live" (Gen. 20:7). When the Lord is angry with Job's friends because they did not speak rightly about God, he tells them, "Let my servant Job pray for you because I will accept his [prayer], lest I make a terror on you" (Job 42:8).

Paul wrote to the Romans: "I exhort you, brothers, through our Lord Jesus Christ and through the love of the Spirit, to strive with me in prayers to God on my behalf, that I may be delivered from the disobedient in Judaea and that my ministry may be acceptable to the saints in Jerusalem, so that in the joy coming to you through the will of God I may rest with you" (Rom. 15:30-32).

James says: "Therefore confess your sins to one another, and pray for one another, that you may be healed. The prayer of a righteous man has great power in its effects" (James 5:16-17). Thus, according to Scripture, God wants us to pray for one another. This must mean that prayer for one another cannot detract from the role of Jesus Christ as our one mediator with God.

Second, the reason that Christians have the power to pray for one another is that each person who is baptized is made a member of the Body of Christ by virtue of the Holy Spirit's action in baptism (1 Cor. 12:11-13). It is because the Christian belongs to Jesus Christ and is a member of his Body, the Church, that we can make effective prayer.

The reason we pray to the saints is that they are still members of the Body of Christ. Remember, the life which Christ gives is eternal life; therefore, every Christian who has died in Christ is forever a member of the Body of Christ. This is the doctrine which we call the Communion of the Saints. Everyone in Christ, whether living or dead, belongs to the Body of Christ.

From this it follows that a saint in heaven may intercede for other people because he still is a member of the Body of Christ. Because of this membership in Christ, under his headship, the intercession of the saints cannot be a rival to Christ's mediation; it is one with the mediation of Christ, to whom and in whom the saints form one body.

Some Christians--most Protestants, in fact--deny that the Bible gives support for devotion to the saints, but they are incorrect. The Bible encourages Christians to approach the saints in heaven, just as they approach God the Father and Jesus Christ the Lord: "But you have approached Mount Zion, the city of the living God, the heavenly Jerusalem, and myriads of angels, and the assembly and church of the firstborn who have been enrolled in heaven, and God the judge of all, and spirits of righteous ones who have been made perfect, and Jesus, the mediator of a new covenant, and the sprinkled blood which speaks better than that of Abel" (Heb. 12:22-24).

It is clear the Christian has approached a number of heavenly beings: the heavenly Jerusalem, the angels, God the judge, and Jesus the mediator. "The assembly and church of the firstborn who have been enrolled in heaven" and the phrase "spirits of righteous ones who have been made perfect" can refer only to the saints in heaven.

First, they are spirits, not flesh and blood. Second, they are righteous people, presumably made righteous by Jesus Christ, "who is our righteousness." Third, they have been made perfect. The only place where spirits of perfected righteous people can dwell is heaven.

Furthermore, "spirits of righteous ones who have been made perfect" is a perfect definition of the saints in heaven. This passage is saying that, just as Christians approach the angels, God the judge, Jesus Christ, and his saving blood, so also must we approach the saints in heaven.

Does the Bible say we should approach the saints with our prayers? Yes, in two places. In Revelation 5:8 John saw the Lamb, Christ Jesus, on a throne in the midst of four beasts and 24 elders. When the Lamb took the book with the seven seals, the 24 elders fell down before the Lamb in worship, "each one having a harp and golden bowls of incenses, which are the prayers of the saints."

Similarly, in Revelation 8:3-4 we are told that something similar happened when the Lamb opened the seventh seal of the book: "Another angel came and stood on the altar, having a golden censer, and many incenses were given to him, in order that he will give it with the prayers of all the saints on the golden altar before the throne. And the smoke of the incenses went up with the prayers of the saints from the hand of the angel before God."

These texts give us a way to understand how the saints offer our prayers for us. Our prayers are like nuggets of incense. They smell sweet and good. The 24 elders around the throne, who are saints, and the angels offer these nuggets of incense for us. They set them on fire before the throne of God.

This is a beautiful image of how the intercession of the saints works. Because the saints are so close to the fire of God's love and because they stand immediately before him, they can set our prayers on fire with their love and release the power of our prayers.

Also http://www.gotquestions.org/prayer-saints-Mary.html

Question: "Is prayer to saints / Mary Biblical?"


Answer: The Bible nowhere instructs believers in Christ to pray to anyone other than God. Why, then, do many Catholic pray to Mary and/or pray to "saints"? Catholics view Mary and saints as "intercessors" before God. They believe that a saint, who is in Heaven, has more "direct access" to God than we do. Therefore, if a saint delivers a prayer to God, it is more effective than us praying to God directly. This concept is blatantly unbiblical. Hebrews 4:16 tells us that we (not saints) can "...approach the throne of grace with confidence..."

It somehow seems like the Catholic reason for praying to saints is that they are praying 'through' the saints - which, to be frank, I do not understand the need.

All that writing and the only thing that caught my attention was the fact there was a Pope named Dionysius.

Yeah, Dionysius. Not Dionysus - which would have been hilarious!

Sarcasm is the lowest form of wit. (Oscar Wilde)


The thread is on the topic "Old Testament Justification for Praying to the Saints". I presented the Catholic stance on the subject.

If neither of you have constructive comments to make, why bother to post ?

michel said:

Sarcasm is the lowest form of wit. (Oscar Wilde)


The thread is on the topic "Old Testament Justification for Praying to the Saints". I presented the Catholic stance on the subject.

If neither of you have constructive comments to make, why bother to post ?

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I meant no offense, it was just a joke.

The way it has been explained to me in the past makes a certain amount of sense. We ask people here on earth to pray for us all the time. If I understand correctly, when Catholics pray to the Saints, that's pretty much all they're doing. My only problem with this is the notion that one has to be a Saint in order to have more clout, so to speak, to intercede with God on our behalf. Plus, prayer is different from just asking a favor. If I ask someone I know to pray for me, it doesn't exactly seem to be the same as praying to someone other than God. I'm just not comfortable with it, but I think I more or less understand the principle behind it and I suppose there is some logic behind it.

Katzpur said:

The way it has been explained to me in the past makes a certain amount of sense. We ask people here on earth to pray for us all the time. If I understand correctly, when Catholics pray to the Saints, that's pretty much all they're doing. My only problem with this is the notion that one has to be a Saint in order to have more clout, so to speak, to intercede with God on our behalf. Plus, prayer is different from just asking a favor. If I ask someone I know to pray for me, it doesn't exactly seem to be the same as praying to someone other than God. I'm just not comfortable with it, but I think I more or less understand the principle behind it and I suppose there is some logic behind it.

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You're right about what we do when we 'pray to' saints, and I don't believe RC practice is any different. We believe those that died in Christ are every bit as much alive and with us as are the Church militant, for God is a God of the living. We ask the saints to pray for us exactly as we might ask another member of our parish to pray for us. We don't believe that only saints have 'enough clout' (or we'd never ask those on earth to pray for us and we do - frequently) but Scripture states that the prayer of a righteous man is powerful and I don't know of many here on earth that I would consider more righteous than the saints and martyrs with God in the Church triumphant.

James

I had always thought that praying to the "saints" was wrong, until I read Hebrews.

Hebrews 12:1 Therefore, since we are surrounded by such a great cloud of witnesses, let us throw off everything that hinders and the sin that so easily entangles, and let us run with perseverance the race marked out for us. 2 Let us fix our eyes on Jesus, the author and perfecter of our faith, who for the joy set before him endured the cross, scorning its shame, and sat down at the right hand of the throne of God. 3 Consider him who endured such opposition from sinful men, so that you will not grow weary and lose heart. NIV

This was in reference to the OT prophets and leaders! It gives me goose bumps to think that Moses, David and others are up there cheering us Christians on. Pray to them? Sure, why not? As long as you don't deify them, all is good! Prayer is nothing more than a conversation, and as others have pointed out: I don't mind asking them to pray for me.

NetDoc said:

Pray to them? Sure, why not? As long as you don't deify them, all is good! Prayer is nothing more than a conversation, and as others have pointed out: I don't mind asking them to pray for me.

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NICE!

:clap