DAY 34
CHALLENGE
“On various occasions in the Gospels, Jesus prays (e.g., Matt. 26:36; Luke 3:21; John 11:41). If Jesus was God, this makes no sense. How could he pray to himself?”
DEFENSE
He wasn’t praying to himself. He was praying to his Father.
People do talk to themselves from time to time, but this is not what Jesus was doing.
The Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit are each God, but they are distinct, divine persons. The doctrine of the Trinity is that there is one God in three persons.
Consequently, it was natural for Jesus as one divine person to speak to his Father as another divine person—at least after Jesus became incarnate as a man and took on human modes of communication.
By praying, he was not giving the Father information that the Father did not already have. The same is true of us when we pray, as Jesus pointed out (Matt. 6:8). Prayer is not about giving God information, but about relating to him in a way suited to human nature (see Day 3). Having taken on human nature, it was natural for Jesus to relate to God in this manner. In doing so, he also set an example for us.
The passages in which Jesus prays are useful for showing the error of certain heresies that misunderstand the Trinity.
In the third century, a priest named Sabellius taught that there is only one person in the Godhead, and that the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit are not distinct persons but modes in which that single, divine person acts. In the ancient Church, this view was known as Sabellianism or modalism.
In the twentieth century, a similar view came to be taught in certain Pentecostal circles. “Oneness Pentecostals” hold to a “oneness doctrine,” which agrees with Sabellianism that there is only a single, divine person in the Godhead.
The passages in which Jesus prays to the Father show the error of these views, since they illustrate the fact that the two are distinct per- sons and thus that there is more than one person in the Godhead.