James 5:16
James 5:16
Therefore, confess your sins to one another, and pray for one another so that you may be healed. The effective prayer of a righteous man can accomplish much.
John Calvin: “In case anyone should think that there is no benefit gained by others praying for us, he sets out the usefulness and the effect of prayer.” (Calvin’s New Testament Commentaries: Matthew, Mark and Luke Vol. III, and James and Jude, p.316, emphasis mine)
What “effect”? If you are a Calvinist, what effect is there, that hasn’t already been fatalistically predetermined? And Determinism is exactly what John Calvin taught:
John Calvin: “First, the eternal predestination of God, by which before the fall of Adam He decreed what should take place concerning the whole human race and every individual, was fixed and determined.” (Concerning the Eternal Predestination of God, p.121, emphasis mine)
John Calvin: “God had no doubt decreed before the foundation of the world what He would do with every one of us and had assigned to everyone by His secret counsel his part in life.” (Calvin’s New Testament Commentaries: Galatians, Ephesians, Philippians and Colossians, p.20, emphasis mine)
John Calvin: “…the reason why God elects some and rejects others is to be found in His purpose alone. … before men are born their lot is assigned to each of them by the secret will of God. … the salvation or the destruction of men depends on His free election.” (Calvin’s New Testament Commentaries: Romans and Thessalonians, p.203, emphasis mine)
That’s the thing about deterministic Calvinism. It’s a static universe in which there is no net change in anything. Prayers, in this case, are all included in an elaborate chain of predetermined events.
The New Living Translation states: The earnest prayer of a
righteous person has great power and wonderful results.
Question: However, according to the Deterministic decrees
of Calvinism, can prayers “accomplish” anything at all?
Answer: Calvinists reason that God predestined the prayers
that “accomplish” God’s predestined plans: “Prayer does not
change God; prayer changes man.” Calvinists view prayer as
man aligning himself with God. However, if everything is
scripted, fixed and decreed, as per Calvinistic Determinism,
then prayer would change neither God nor man nor anything
at all.
Calvinist, Spiros Zodhiates: “Hasn’t God already determined everything, however? Yes, He has. If so, then how can prayer produce results? After all, His decrees are immutable. It is true that God has foreknown and predestinated everything that happens in Heaven above and in earth beneath. Why pray then? But that’s like asking, if God has predestined the air, why should we breathe? The answer is, because He has ordained it so. Yes, it could have been possible that we didn’t need to breathe to live, but God who has put oxygen here in the exact amount needed to sustain life has also ordained that we should breathe; and He who has set His plans ahead of time has also told us that we should ask and pray. It’s all there waiting for us to appropriate it, but He says, ask for it. Prayer simply releases what God wants to give us. He also predestined His people’s prayers. When we pray we produce links in the chain of ordained facts. It gives us a sense of bringing to pass that which God in eternity predetermined. That’s a tremendous thing to contemplate -- that when we pray God does something. It proves that we are in tune with God, and what we have asked has been in such agreement with God’s purposes that it has been accomplished and we are co-workers with God. The privilege of prayer is tremendous. What joy to know that we have adjusted our will with the plan of God. Destiny decrees that we should pray; therefore we pray. Destiny decrees that we shall be answered, and the answer comes. The Lord Jesus says the decrees of God need not trouble us. They are His business. He has also determined that our business is to pray.” (Why Pray?, pp.91-92, emphasis mine)
Calvinists teach that the answers to prayer are just as foreordained as the prayers themselves, so that anything we ask is already predetermined to be asked. But the problem is that prayer was designed to be a way for man to communicate with God in faith, and if everything is predetermined, then God is merely communicating with Himself, through us.
One member of The Society of Evangelical Arminians: “While God knowing everything is consistent with prayer, God planning everything in the Calvinistic sense of unconditionally decreeing it is not. Calvinism cannot account for the Bible’s portrayal of prayer as a cause of God’s answers to prayer because it holds that God unconditionally decides all that he wants to happen and then irresistibly causes it to come to pass, including the prayer that supposedly causes him to respond to it with action that grants the request. It would be like saying that with putting a sock puppet on your hand and having the puppet ask you to do something, that the request made by the sock puppet is a cause of you doing what you had the sock puppet ask you to do.”
Question: Does prayer change anything?
Philip Yancey answers: “Calvinism, with its emphasis on God’s absolute sovereignty, shifted the focus of prayer from its effect on God to its effect on the person praying. ... In a sort of negative proof of the power of prayer, three times God commanded Jeremiah to stop praying; God wanted no alteration in his plans to punish a rebellious nation. Prayer had, after all, softened God’s resolve before.” (Does Prayer Change God?)
Jeremiah 7:16-18: “As for you, do not pray for this people, and do not lift up cry or prayer for them, and do not intercede with Me; for I do not hear you. Do you not see what they are doing in the cities of Judah and in the streets of Jerusalem? The children gather wood, and the fathers kindle the fire, and the women knead dough to make cakes for the queen of heaven; and they pour out drink offerings to other gods in order to spite Me.”
Jeremiah 11:14: “Therefore do not pray for this people, nor lift up a cry or prayer for them; for I will not listen when they call to Me because of their disaster.”
James 4:2: “You do not have because you do not ask.”
However, if they do not ask because God did not decree it so, then the whole thing becomes a charade. In other words, you have not, because He predetermined not. Logically, Calvinism requires that everything is thrown back upon God and His alleged, exhaustive decree of predetermination.
When we say that prayer changes things, we don’t mean that prayer changes God’s character. That doesn’t change, but at God’s sovereign pleasure and will, He may change His mind about His plans, which is something that He said Himself.
2nd Kings 20:6: “‘I will add fifteen years to your life, and I will deliver you and this city from the hand of the king of Assyria; and I will defend this city for My own sake and for My servant David’s sake.’”
Question: By “add,” does God mean that things are staying the same, or that He has changed something?
Answer: If everything is deterministically scripted, then to “add” anything is merely an illusion of the alleged secret script of deterministic Calvinism.
To a Calvinist, the universe is static and unchanging, predetermined and fixed, unfolding according to an eternally predestined script. In contrast, Arminianism teaches a dynamic universe, where prayer can be answered and where the Holy Spirit intercedes upon our prayers: “In the same way the Spirit also helps our weakness; for we do not know how to pray as we should, but the Spirit Himself intercedes for us with groanings too deep for words.” (Romans 8:26) What would be the point of the Holy Spirit’s intercession if our prayers were already predetermined? Furthermore, Arminianism teaches that God can change His mind, show mercy and “relent,” or to “think better” of His plans of doing good and instead, executing judgment. A biblical example of the sovereignty of God is found at Jeremiah 18:1-11:
Jeremiah 18:1-11
The word which came to Jeremiah from the LORD saying, “Arise and go down to the potter’s house, and there I will announce My words to you.” Then I went down to the potter’s house, and there he was, making something on the wheel. But the vessel that he was making of clay was spoiled in the hand of the potter; so he remade it into another vessel, as it pleased the potter to make. Then the word of the LORD came to me saying, “Can I not, O house of Israel, deal with you as this potter does?” declares the LORD. “Behold, like the clay in the potter’s hand, so are you in My hand, O house of Israel. At one moment I might speak concerning a nation or concerning a kingdom to uproot, to pull down, or to destroy it; if that nation against which I have spoken turns from its evil, I will relent concerning the calamity I planned to bring on it. Or at another moment I might speak concerning a nation or concerning a kingdom to build up or to plant it; if it does evil in My sight by not obeying My voice, then I will think better of the good with which I had promised to bless it. So now then, speak to the men of Judah and against the inhabitants of Jerusalem saying, ‘Thus says the LORD, “Behold, I am fashioning calamity against you and devising a plan against you. Oh turn back, each of you from his evil way, and reform your ways and your deeds.”’”
However, Calvinistic sovereignty would make God unable to “relent” or to “think better” of anything, being enslaved to execute the predetermined plan of absolute predestination without deviation. The result of Calvinism would effectively lock God in a box, and strip Him of His sovereign freedom to do what He pleases, or to change His mind, if He should so please. Consider Nineveh for instance. According to Calvinism, which teaches that God has predestinated everything that will ever occur, God would be prohibited from changing His mind either to show mercy or wrath, but must strictly execute the predetermined function of allegedly first getting them to temporarily repent, only to harden them later for a predetermined plan of destruction (their destruction is recorded in the book of Nahum). Ultimately, according to Calvinism, poor Jonah went through all of that trouble for nothing (given the Calvinistic assumption that they had been secretly reprobated all along). So Calvinism teaches that neither man nor God are truly free, but both are enslaved to the decree of absolute predestination.
If God decreed absolutely everything that ever, or will ever, come to pass, then what do you make of the following verses:
Jeremiah 19:5: “And have built the high places of Baal to burn their sons in the fire as burnt offerings to Baal, a thing which I never commanded or spoke of, nor did it ever enter My mind.”
Zechariah 1:15: “But I am very angry with the other nations that enjoy peace and security. I was only a little angry with my people, but the nations punished them far beyond my intentions.”
Does this mean that God is not in control? Realize that God is omniscient. If you can grasp what that entails, then you would also realize that He is in complete control, even in a dynamic universe. If knowledge is power, then God is all-powerful. God is also omni-present and eternal. God can still be God, even if He and man are both free. And God maintains the sovereign freedom to make changes in His plan for men, though His nature, character and principles are unchanging and immutable, because that is His nature.
If the Calvinistic theory of absolute predestination is true, then the universe as we know it is a mirror of His divine work. In that mirror are many good things, but also, all sorts of wickedness. Now if absolute predestination is true, then who wrote the script of sin? From whose mind did it originate, if absolute predestination is true? Is there a place of darkness within God that He was able to invent the concept of sin and predetermine every imaginable abomination ever committed?
James 1:16-17: “Do not be deceived, my beloved brethren. Every good thing bestowed and every perfect gift is from above, coming down from the Father of lights, with whom there is no variation, or shifting shadow.”
1st John 1:5: “And this is the message we have heard from Him and announce to you, that God is light and in Him there is no darkness at all.”
Thus, God, the “Father of Lights,” is incapable of predestinating absolutely everything if absolutely everything includes sin, wickedness and every form of abomination. Therefore, sin is not the product of God. He might say, “Nor did it ever enter My mind.”
The Calvinist criticism is such a dynamic universe would overthrow the Foreknowledge of God, who knows the beginning from the end. However, the Arminian response is that God’s Foreknowledge does not cause anything, but rather is knowledge that is “after-the-fact,” where God dwells in all time and space as one eternal now. That is how God is independent of time. He can know the beginning from the end, because He is already there and interacting with it.
Adrian Rogers: “One fundamental question you may have is ‘Why should we pray when God already knows our needs? Why should we tell God what He already knows or ask Him to do what He already wants to do?’” And here is his article: Our Greatest Privilege.
One member of The Society of Evangelical Arminians: “How should we view prayer? The way God wants us to view it, as a delight and a privilege and a daily occurrence which He expects us to engage in.”
Calvinist, Richard Mouw: “Prayer is doing something. It is petitioning the Ruler of the universe. It is making our case in the Final Court of Appeals.” (Calvinism in the Las Vegas Airport, p.61, emphasis mine)
Why pray? Because God can be moved. God is not a robot; He is an emotional Being with feelings and emotion. God is real. We may not know how this relates to eternity or omniscience, but we do know that examples have been laid down in Scripture to show us who God is, what He is like, and that prayer is meaningful and can move God into action, and frankly, it seems that God wants to be moved, and that He wants interaction and involvement in our lives.
