Asking Mary and the Saints to pray for us might seem (at best) inefficient or (at worst) like it undermines the sovereignty of God. But here’s an argument you may not have heard before about how the sovereignty of God is **better** revealed in the intercessory role of the saints and angels.
Transcript:
Welcome back to Shameless Popery, I’m Joe Heschmeyer. Today, I want to explore what is, at least to me, a new answer or a new argument that I’ve heard to a question that if you are a Catholic, I’m sure you’ve heard many times, “Why pray to Mary, why pray to the saints when you could go directly to God?” One form says, “It’s heretical to do that.” Another form says, “It just seems inefficient.” It’s the inefficient argument I want to look at today.
Now, the particular way this came about, a Facebook friend of mine by the name of Matthew Nugget Daniels, I don’t know if Nugget’s his middle name or part of his last name or a nickname, but he had some nuggets of wisdom he was sharing. I received them like six weeks ago. I’m very belated in replying to this.
But I received them while we were having dinner with friends of ours, the Suttons, who were converts from Protestantism. I read the question to the group. I didn’t use his name. He’s given me permission to use his name now. He didn’t give me permission to make fun of his name, but hopefully he’s okay with that.
I read them the question and then said, “Here’s how I would answer it.” Then was really intrigued by the different way they were going to answer it. Let me give his question first. He says this, “Thinking about prayers to saints, in my Protestant mind, it seems like the choice for praying to a lesser source. Jesus is sitting at the right hand of the Father interceding for us night and day. Why pray to someone who is saved through Jesus instead of just praying to Jesus Himself? Ask Him to pray for you.”
Then he says, “I understand the rationale of having a saint here on earth pray for you, which can be mystical. A saint can tap into the Holy Spirit and maybe give a word of knowledge that lets another saint know God is thinking and speaking over them. We don’t hear back from these saints in heaven. It just seems like why ask great people to pray for me when I could ask the God of the universe to pray for me?”
In the conversations and debates, I haven’t heard any Protestant bring up this point. To me, it is like having access to fullness but taking only apart. I don’t know if theologically I have an issue, I see the points Catholics make, but Jesus has connected us to the Father. Why add another layer between us when he literally tore the veil and gave us access to the Holy of Holies?
I don’t know if theologically I have an issue, I see the points Catholics make, but Jesus has connected us to the Father. Why add another layer between us when he literally tore the veil and gave us access to the Holy of Holies? Then he says, “I don’t think I have a theological problem with it. I just feel like if I’m raising prayers to heaven, just skip the administrative layer of saints and go straight to the throne.”
We could maybe broadly call this the “Let me speak to your manager” objection. Like “Why are we going to the person at the front desk when we could go above them to the manager, the owner of the company, the owner of the whole universe? Won’t that get stuff done faster?”
On the one hand, yeah, that’s probably got a lot of intuitive sense to it. On the other hand, I think it actually misunderstands something pretty profoundly about prayer. I’m going to give you how I would’ve answered the question and then the answer I really liked that the Suttons offered that I think adds a whole other dimension to this.
Now, I hope this builds on my earlier answers. I’m not disclaiming anything I would’ve said with this. I just think there’s a dimension I wasn’t getting that I’ve been reminded of recently, and I’ll explain why.
But first, here’s how I would start. Anytime someone brings up efficiency in prayer, I always go to the same place, Matthew 6, because when Jesus is contrasting the prayer of his followers to the prayer of Gentiles, he says, “Don’t be like them for your father knows what you need before you ask him.” Now, think about that.
If God didn’t know what you need before you asked Him, He wouldn’t be omniscient, He wouldn’t be omnipotent, and He wouldn’t be the God that is worth praying to. He would have to have his own God who is bigger and more powerful and more knowledgeable than Him. That would be the one we would call God.
But as it is, God is the all-knowing, all-powerful God of the universe, which means you’re never going to tell Him something in prayer that He doesn’t already know. In fact, we can go even bigger than that. He doesn’t just know what you want. He also knows what you need. He knows whether the thing you are praying for is actually in your best interest or not.
What’s more than that, He doesn’t just know what you want, know what you need. He also has the power to bring it about perfectly. Now, that is exactly why we pray to Him. But if you’ve ever thought about it from an efficiency perspective, the whole thing seems horribly inefficient. I’m not seemingly adding anything to the equation from an efficiency standpoint.
You might expect the next words out of Jesus’s mouth to be, “Don’t worry about praying because God’s got it all under control.” But He doesn’t say that. He says, “Pray then like this,” and then gives us the Lord’s prayer, the Our Father. Not only that, but we’re told not just to pray for ourselves, but to pray for other people.
1 Timothy 2, St. Paul says, “First of all, then I urge that supplications, prayers, intercessions and thanksgiving be made for all men.” Part of the Christian calling is to pray for one another and not only to pray for one another but to go to one another seeking their prayers. James 5:16, “Therefore, confess your sins to one another and pray for one another that you may be healed.”
Now finally we get here an answer. The prayer of a righteous man has great power in its effects. Now he’s going to give an illustration of that. He says, “Elijah was a man of nature with ourselves and he prayed fervently that it might not rain,” and for three years and six months it did not rain on the earth. Then he prayed again and the heaven gave rain and the earth brought forth its fruit.
Prayer isn’t just us going through the motions. Prayer really does produce results. It really does have an effect. Now, it’s not a mathematical formula where if you pray this thing, you’re going to get that thing you want. It doesn’t work like that. But it is nevertheless efficacious, it does produce results. Now, maybe that strikes us as kind of strange.
C.S. Lewis makes a point. It’s really no stranger than anything else. In an essay he wrote for the Atlantic, or at least it appeared in Atlantic. I don’t know if it originally was written for that. He points out that our involvement in anything raises this same point. He says God, and then he quotes Pascal, God instituted prayer in order to lend to his creatures the dignity of causality.
Let’s unpack what that means. That means God could have done all of this on His own. But like a loving Father, He helps his children to participate. My son, who is two years old, loves to help anything that involves tools. Now, from an efficiency standpoint, I love him, but rarely does he make the job go more quickly.
But part of treating him as a son and not as a slave or a robot or just a recipient of action is sharing with him the dignity of causality that he gets to help build whatever we’re building. He gets to help work on the outdoor furniture we constructed, and maybe that is passing me screws.
Now I might have to be like, “Actually, I mean the other screw.” But all of that, not from an efficiency perspective, but from a dignity perspective makes sense. God has shared with us the dignity of causality through prayer. He’s allowed us to be part of the plan that He has. His plan isn’t thwarted by our prayers. His plan from all eternity included the fact that He knew our free responses that we would pray.
But then C.S. Lewis says, “But not only prayer, whenever we act at all, God lends us that dignity. It is not really stranger nor less strange that my prayers should affect the course of events then that my other action should do.” That cuts to the heart of things. People worry like, “Well, why pray at all? If I pray, aren’t I interfering with God’s plans?” It’s like, “Well, anytime you act, you could say that.”
Why make myself breakfast? What if God’s plan was that I wasn’t going to have breakfast today? Why go to work? Maybe God didn’t want me to? You could always ask the question, does my acting in the world interfere with God’s plan? It’s like, no, that misunderstands how God’s plan works.
God’s plan involves your action. When you act, you’re not thwarting God’s plan unless you’re sinning or something. When you act, you’re cooperating with God’s plan. You’re helping to bring God’s plan about. That includes the action of prayer. From an efficiency perspective, it’s true any type of prayer is inefficient because prayer isn’t just what’s the quickest way to produce a desired result?
I really want it to rain, so I’m going to pray for rain. God could have made it rain without me praying for it. If I imagine that the end goal of prayer is simply to get the thing I’m wanting, then I’m missing some of why prayer exists. Because what God is instilling in us is not just the ability to get stuff by saying the right words or something like this. That’s much more the Gentile model.
What God has given us is the dignity of causality, but even more than that, the dignity of being His sons and daughters, that we get to approach Him as a father. All of that is connected to holiness. In James 5, remember the prayer of a righteous man is efficacious, has great power in its effects, which means that it actually matters If I’m living as a son of God when I go to Him as Father.
It actually matters if I’m in a healthy relationship with him or if I’m estranged by sin. In John 9:31 we get it very clearly. We know that God does not listen to sinners. But if anyone is a worshiper of God and does His will, God listens to him. Now elsewhere, we know that a sinner who repents, that prayer of repentance, absolutely, God is listening to that.
The point here of God not listening to sinners means you can’t just treat God like a genie or a vending machine where you say the right words and He’s going to give you the result you want apart from your holiness. That holiness actually matters. There’s plenty of examples of this.
In Genesis 19, God saves Lot and his family. Now, Lot and his family are righteous. But when Sodom and Gomorrah are destroyed, we’re told that it wasn’t because of their own holiness that they were saved, but that God remembered Abraham and sent Lot out of the midst of the overthrow. That is Abraham had interceded prayerfully for Sodom and Gomorrah. Even though the cities were destroyed, that intercession still was effective in saving Lot and his family.
Or another classic example at the end of the book of Job, in Job 42, God punishes Job’s friends. He says, “My wrath is kindled against you and against your two friends.” This he says to Eliphaz, not to Job. For you have not spoken to me what is right as my servant Job has. But then notice what happens next. He tells him to take seven bulls and seven rams and go to my servant Job.
That is He tells them, if you want to come back into right relationship with me, you need the intercession of Job. Would it have been more efficient if he said, “Come directly to me?” Yes. But He doesn’t say that. We would do well to ask why He doesn’t say that, that He wants him to go to Job and have Job offer a burnt offering.
He says, “My servant Job shall pray for you, for I will accept his prayer not to deal with you according to your folly. For you have not spoken of me what is right as my servant Job has?” Then sure enough, two things happen. They go to Job. They do what God told them to do and we’re told and the Lord accepted Job’s prayer.
But then we’re told the second thing. In Job 42:10, the Lord restored the fortunes of Job when he had prayed for his friends, that God blesses both Job’s friends who he prayed for. He also blesses Job for what? For praying for his friends. We take of this quite seriously that we ought to be praying for one another and that there may be some things in our lives that we don’t get from our own prayers, even though we can go directly to God.
But that we might get those things if someone else is praying for us, someone else who is maybe holier than we are, someone else who’s in right relationship with God, isn’t marred by sin. For instance, the saints who are beholding God in glory, who are completely without sin right now. The saints in heaven completely without sin. Now, it’s reasonable to ask here why would God do it this way? Why not just say, “Eliphaz, you go directly to me. Don’t worry about Job. You’re already talking to me. I’m God, and therefore, we can sort this out right now.”
But He doesn’t do that. Well, why not? I want to suggest one reason is because of how we’re made. Man is a social animal as Aristotle says, or as God says in Genesis 2:18, it is not good that the man should be alone. We are not meant to be in radical isolation one from another. It’s a mistake to have a really individualistic view of Christianity because Christianity is simply not an individualistic religion.
When Jesus is asked what the great commandment is, what does the great commandment in the law? In Matthew 22, what does he say? Well, he gives two answers. He first says, you shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your soul, with all your mind. This is the great and First Commandment.
If he stopped there, that would’ve been great, me and Jesus, me and God, just a direct vertical relationship. But he never leaves it just the direct vertical relationship. There’s also the crossbar. There’s a horizontal relationship. In the very next verse he says, and the second is like it, you shall love your neighbor as yourself.
On these two commandments, depend all the law and the prophets that every single part of the Old Testament comes down to one of two things or both of those two things, loving God, loving neighbor. The rest is just telling you how to do it.
But notice loving neighbor flows from loving God that you can’t rightly be in relationship with God if you’re not in right relation to your neighbors. You can’t say you love the God you haven’t seen if you don’t love the neighbor you have seen.
All of this is closely related to the idea of the church. St. Paul says in Colossians 1:18, he is the head, me being Jesus here, of course, he’s the head of the body, the church. The body of Christ exists to build up the other parts of the body. Jesus could have saved you as an individual cell, a little monad, but He doesn’t. He brings you into a body and you are saved through the body of Christ.
That is why the parts of the body of Christ look out one for another and that includes the parts of the body here on earth, but also the parts of the body in heaven. It’s a mistake to imagine that the saints in heaven are less a part of the body. It’s also a mistake to imagine it’s either or. I pray directly to God. When Jesus gives us the Our Father, Catholics pray that all the time. We prayed at every mass. You pray it in the Rosary. You pray it, for most of us, in personal devotional prayers. The dedicate talks about praying it at least three times a day back in the first century.
Going directly to God, absolutely. But you might have even considered this question. Even in the way the question was originally asked, he said, “Well, we can go directly to the Father. We can go to Jesus who can pray for us to the Father.” It’s like, “Well, hold on a second. Have you ever considered the fact that those two things are both true? You can go directly to the Father. You can also go to Jesus who is at the right hand of the Father, who is both God and who intercedes for you to God. You can go to the Holy Spirit who helps to form the [inaudible 00:17:26] expressions of your heart, the things you can’t put into words before the Father.”
Even within the Trinity you have this work of intercession, which means that trying to simplify and say, “What’s the fewest steps I can go to get to God or what’s the fewest steps I can go to get to the Father?” Something is fundamentally unchristian about that. I don’t mean that as an insult. I mean that the Trinitarian workings that you see there are not themselves efficient from a modern industrial way of thinking.
We’re constantly getting rid of inefficiencies and simplifying and shaving off anything that takes longer. You’ve got a GPS right now that can save you a minute by redirecting you on a different route. Great. That’s not how prayer works. Prayer doesn’t work by what’s the fewest possible steps. Because as I said before, the fewest possible steps would be zero. God can do it himself. Or one, I’m not even going to pray to Jesus. I’m going to go only to the Father. I’m not going to go to the Holy Spirit. I’m going to go only to the Father. Any number of those things.
But that’s not at all how it works. We have a paraclete that’s not more efficient. We have an advocate with the Father that’s not more efficient, but it is more efficacious. It is better than me trying to do it all by myself. Move away from thinking of efficiency and think instead of efficaciousness and God gives some results in this seemingly less efficient way that He doesn’t give in the seemingly more direct way.
That’s how I would’ve responded to the question if I had not forgotten for six weeks to reply to his question. But here’s what I missed because when I posed that, shortened form of that, to the Suttons, Anna, the wife said, “I go to a different passage.” I was really intrigued. She said, “Matthew 8.” I’m heavily paraphrasing. I don’t know if she quoted the chapter and verse.
But she mentioned the scene from Matthew 8 where Jesus goes into Capernaum and his centurion comes and he says, “Lord, my servant is lying paralyzed at home in terrible distress.” Jesus says, “I will come and heal him.” But this centurion says, “Lord, I’m not worthy to have you come under my roof, but only say the word and my servant will be healed.”
Now if you’re a Catholic, chances are that sounds extremely familiar because we quote that only we say, “My soul will be healed” at every mass right before receiving communion. We acknowledge we’re unworthy, but that God can make us worthy. What you may not know unless you’re familiar with the passage this comes from is what the centurion says to Jesus next.
He says, “For I’m a man under authority with soldiers under me. I say to one, go and he goes, and to another come and he comes, and to my slave” or the word doula can also be servant, “do this, and he does it.” Notice the centurion is saying to Jesus, “I’m not even worthy to have you in my house.” That’s one reason. But then he gives a second reason. I’m a man under authority, meaning he knows how authority works and he knows that someone in authority gives a command.
He can say, “Go, come, do this,” and he can trust that the servants are going to go, come, do that. The soldiers are going to go, come, do that. He realizes Jesus has authority. He has royal authority. He can act through intermediaries. Jesus doesn’t say, “Hey, that’s too inefficient. That’s too indirect.” Jesus praises this as a faithful response. Matthew 8:10, when Jesus heard him, he marveled and said to those who followed him, truly, I say to you, not even in Israel, have I found such faith.
Given the fact that the man is not himself Jewish. He’s a Roman centurion. Given that this is coming from a certain time and place to make sense of what’s going on here in Matthew 8, you have to step back and think about ancient royal authority. Ancient royal authority is really big. I’m going to say it just a couple words at the outset that kings surrounded themselves with people who were extensions of royal authority.
You see this all over the place. As we’re going to see, you see this even in the Kingdom of God. When you see that, a lot of that is foreign to our way of thinking about things. But this is not foreign to the way of thinking of people in the day of Jesus. We have to step back from our own, again, this post-industrial efficiency-obsessed mentality and enter into more of an ancient royal view of authority.
Here’s what I mean by that. I’ll give just a handful of examples. In Judges 4, the Israelites are under the hand of Jabin, the king of the Canaanites, but while he’s ruling in Hazor, their direct opponent, their direct foe, the one who’s actually doing the oppressing isn’t the king, it’s the commander of his army, Sisera.
Judges 4 and 5 tells about the defeat, not of Jabin directly, but of Sisera, because he’s the representative, if you were, of Jabin’s royal authority. He’s the one whose boot is actually on the neck of Israelites. Likewise, in Judith 2 is not Nebuchadnezzar, the king, that they have to worry about. It’s Holofernes, the chief general of the army. The story is about the defeat of Holofernes, not of King Nebuchadnezzar.
In Jeremiah 39, when Jerusalem is taken, we’re told about the Babylonians and the officers of the King of Babylon are all mentioned who are the embodiments of royal authority, who are these representatives. Now, I mentioned all of this happened like six weeks ago, and I was reminded of this recently, because in a couple of weeks I’m going to have a video looking at 2 Kings 18 with what happens with the Assyrian attempt to take over Jerusalem.
There’s an important fact there that the king of the Assyrians sent three people, one called the Tartan, one called the Rabsaris, and one called the Rabshakeh with a great army from Lachish to King Hezekiah, Jerusalem. Notice the king pretty explicitly does not come himself. This is an intentional move the Assyrians to show their authority, don’t send the king, they send representatives of the king. That’s going to matter.
There’s a lot of reasons why that matters. Because the Assyrian one is the one I’ve been really obsessed about, I’m going to explain this one a little more then I explain the other ones. Believe me, I’m explaining this less than I want to because I imagine you’re not obsessed with the Assyrians right now, and I respect that.
First, Betina Faist says in the Neo-Assyrian empire, there were five other dignitaries of paramount status beside the grand vizier and the steward of the royal palace. You have two right there. You also have the Tartanu or the Tartan. The commander in chief, he was the supreme commander of the Assyrian army after the king. That first of the three that you heard about, that’s him.
He possessed major forces of his own. On campaigns, he led the provincial governors, especially in the absence of the King. But then you also have the Rabshakeh, the chief cupbearer. The Rabasaka, the Rabshakeh that’s the same thing. The Nagir-Ekalli, the palace herald are also attested as high military commanders.
You have these established offices that were not a threat to the king. It was not the king having less authority. This is not checks and balances like Congress and the Supreme Court and the presidency. No. These are all extensions of the executive power. These are all extensions of the power of the king. If you were to take the American example, this is like having a Secretary of State. The Secretary of State can’t overrule the President. Serves as the President’s command and can be just waived away. Only has the authority of the President.
Well, likewise, these intermediary officials and these officials of the king only have authority because of the king. I hope you see the connection to the saints. The Saints authority is not a threat to the authority of the king. It’s an extension of it, and it shows the imperial royal majesty of the king, because only a great king has all of these officials, only a great king has these viziers and everything else.
In fact, the Neo-Assyrian Empire, those offices evolved over time. We don’t see all of those offices in the Middle Assyrian Empire. Okay. Volkmar Fritz commentary on 1 and 2 Kings talks about the Rabshakeh or the cupbearer. He is sent to Jerusalem as a representative of the Assyrian King in expectation of the final submission of King Hezekiah in order to start negotiations for a peaceful handover without siege or assault.
Sennacherib, his king, remained at his camp at Lachish, as is shown on the reliefs from his palace at Nineveh. He intentionally does not come to Jerusalem. He intentionally sends representatives. The Rabshakeh was a high official from the circle of the Assyrian king whose exact function we cannot establish.
Even though I said cupbearer, there is some controversy over exactly how to make sense of his role. It really doesn’t matter for our purposes. For our purposes, it’s enough to say this is someone who is going to set over the house of the royal palace in some way or set over the house of the army in some way.
Go back now to 2 Kings, 2 Kings 18, the King of Assyria remaining where he is does not go to Jerusalem, sends these three to go and demand the complete submission of King Hezekiah and of Israel and then is going to send them all into exile. Now there is a very interesting article in this called Assyrian Royal Eunuchs from a database for a group called Foundation of Ours, and I have no idea who wrote it.
It is a good article that seemed to be pretty well-documented and matched everything I was finding in more scholarly sources. It is an encyclopedia-style entry. But I don’t know the name of the author, neither here nor there. They do a good job explaining the history of the Royal Eunuchs who were some of the important officials for King Sennacherib and more broadly for the Assyrian King as you go down the line.
They explained not just in Assyria, but in royal courts across the Middle East. It was common practice for eunuchs to live in the palace. Eunuchs were called sa resi in Assyrian, which translates as those of the head. This referred to the fact they did not have a beard.
Now, the fact they’re being called beardless is either a euphemism for them being eunuchs or incredibly insulting to people without beards, neither here nor there. It was an ancient title, sa resi, for a personal attendant. They were the archetypical servants of the king. Now, he also had some palace staff who were not eunuchs and did have beards.
But this article makes the point that these eunuchs were clearly not just personal attendants. In other words, they weren’t just bringing food and drink to the king that instead they were sent out to the reaches of the empire to exert and represent royal power. That’s exactly what we see them doing in 2 Kings.
They’re going out as representatives of the king so that when you see them in a certain way, you are seeing the king as it were, but you’re seeing the king is so glorious, he doesn’t have to answer you directly. He can send somebody to do it. This is what the centurion is realizing about Jesus. He’s so glorious. He doesn’t just have to come and personally heal. He can send an angel to do it. That is royal authority.
I hope that makes sense that he is saying, “I realize you don’t have to come yourself and you can still do this through a third-party, through an intermediary.” That’s true power. I think this is an important difference in how we’re viewing it, because so often I think people hear about the angels and saints and think, “Doesn’t that draw away from the authority of God? Doesn’t it draw away from his sovereignty?”
From an ancient perspective, it couldn’t be further from the truth. One of the ways that sovereign showed his sovereignty is that he didn’t have to do it all himself, that he could send somebody and they would do it for him. This Assyrian Royal Eunuchs article goes on to say we know of eunuchs has served as military leaders, governors and crucial empire builders on behalf of the crown.
Their primary role was to serve the king with no attachments nor obligations outside the royal court. That is the fact that they’re eunuchs means they are single-mindedly devoted to the king, at least on paper. That’s the idea. They’re not trying to build up their own dynasty. They’re without the ability to cultivate their own dynasties nor interfere in the royal dynasty.
You don’t have to question if they’re going to put their son on the throne because they can’t have sons. You don’t have to worry that your son might actually be the eunuch’s son. None of that stuff. These are completely devoted followers of the king who thus serve as an extension of the king’s royal authority.
Now, let’s go back one more time to 2 Kings 18, because the Assyrians, you’ve got these three delegates who’ve been sent with actually a larger retinue, but those three are the named offices for those who are sent representing the King. 2 Kings 18:19, they call for the king. They call for King Hezekiah. What does he do? Does he come out? He’s there in Jerusalem. He does not come out. He instead sends out Eliakim, the son of Hilkiah who is over the household, and Shebna the secretary, and Joah the son of Asaph, the recorder.
We’re going to talk a little bit more about Eliakim or Eliakim as the original name is pronounced. These are important figures. But for now, maybe it’ll suffice to show King Hezekiah doesn’t feel the need to personally come out. Sennacherib is sending representatives. He’s going to send representatives even though it’s in Jerusalem, even though he’s in Jerusalem.
A Reformed theologian by the name of Edward D. Young sees the parallel that you should be seeing here in 2 Kings. When the Rabshakeh comes from Lachish with a great army to taunt the people of God, it is the government officials headed by Eliakim the son of Hilkiah who are described as being over the house who come forth to meet him.
They hear the words of Rabshakeh or the Rabshakeh. It’s not a name. It’s a title. But in obedience to the king, they do not answer him. The one over the house, therefore, was still subject to the king. Eliakim is not some separate power apart from King Hezekiah. He is the extension of King Hezekiah’s royal authority in this context. He’s the representative, if you want, the vicar of the king. He’s standing on the king’s behalf in the king’s intentional absence.
This is not because Hezekiah was too weak to show up himself. It’s because Hezekiah was showing a show of strength by not showing up himself. Now later this gets construed as fear or weakness. Even if you read the Jewish historian Josephus in Antiquities of the Jews, he views this as fear on Hezekiah’s part.
But from an ancient perspective, it doesn’t seem to be fear. It seems to be a show of authority that you are sending someone on your behalf. No one looks at the fact that a country has diplomats and says, “Oh, well, I guess their head of state is too weak to meet everyone himself.” No. The fact you have diplomats shows you have authority.
If somebody claimed to be head of state and didn’t have a diplomatic core, that would point away from their legitimacy, that would show them as weak and as having a poorly run country. It wouldn’t show a sign of their grandeur and glory. Heaven, I’m going to argue, works the same way. Yes. God can answer every request. But He shows us some clear cues that he wants to work through intermediaries partly to show us that he is King of Kings and Lord of Lords, partly to show us His true royal authority.
But we’re not there yet. I’m going to give a couple more biblical examples. I said a long time, my 2 Kings 18. I told you I would. But you also see this in a few other passages really worth mentioning. In Genesis 40 and 41; in 40, you see some of the disgraced officials of Pharaoh.
But in Genesis 41, you see the elevation of Joseph, Old Testament Joseph. He’s gone down into Egypt. He’s sold into slavery. He interprets Pharaoh’s dreams and he rises through the ranks. Pharaoh says to his servants, “Can we find such a man as this and whom is the spirit of God?” Beginning in Genesis 41:39, look at the elevation of Joseph. Pharaoh says to Joseph, “Since God has shown you all this, there is none so discreet and wise as you are. You shall be over my house.”
Now notice that language again, very much like the language of Eliakim. “You shall be over my house and all my people shall order themselves as you command. Only as regards to throne will I be greater than you.” If you want to know what it looks like to be over the house of the house of David, for instance, as Isaiah 22 presents Eliakim. Well, you’re seeing it laid out here in Genesis 41.
Pharaoh said to Joseph, “Behold, I’ve set you over all the land of Egypt.” Then Pharaoh took his signet ring from his hand and put it on Joseph’s hand and arrayed him in garments of fine linen and put a gold chain around his neck and made him to ride in his second chariot. They cried before him, “Bow the knee.” Thus, he sat to him over all the land of Egypt. That’s what it looks like to be set over the land of Egypt.
He is being treated as if he is Pharaoh riding in the second chariot after Pharaoh. That is not Pharaoh being too weak. This is Pharaoh intentionally raising him up. It isn’t like Joseph led some massive coup and entered a power-sharing agreement with Pharaoh because Pharaoh wasn’t powerful enough to stop him. Not at all.
Pharaoh is showing his grandeur and glory by showing here’s someone who’s clearly not Pharaoh, who’s clearly second in everything but the throne, who cannot claim to be Pharaoh himself, but is nevertheless the representative and in some ways the embodiment of the authority of Pharaoh. He’s able to manage the affairs of Pharaoh. That is royal authority.
We’ve seen it from the Assyrian and now from the Egyptian perspective. We’ve gotten hints of it already from the perspective of Israel in the figure of Eliakim. But I want to return to him now. In Isaiah 22, Shebna who had been in that role was cast aside. You saw Shebna was reduced. He was after Eliakim by the time we see him in 2 Kings.
God had said this, He said, “I will thrust you from your office and you’ll be cast down from your station. In that day, I’ll call my servant Eliakim, the son of Hilkiah, and I’ll clothe them with your robe and we’ll bind your girdle upon him and will commit your authority to his hand, and he shall be a father to the inhabitants of Jerusalem and to the house of Judah.”
Now, pause for a second. Is God giving away Hezekiah’s authority? He’s not. He is extending the authority of Hezekiah through the person of Eliakim. The image that he gives is the conveying of the keys. He says, “I’ll place on his shoulder the key of the house of David. He shall open and none shall shut. He shall shut and none shall open. I’ll fasten him like a peg in a sure place and he’ll become a throne of honor to his father’s house.”
Now, if you’ve heard that in Catholic apologetics before, it’s usually in context of St. Peter who’s given a very similar sounding set of promises from our Lord. He’s given the keys to the kingdom of heaven. He’s given the ability to bind and loosen. It’s hard to hear those promises and not hear echoes of the promises made to Eliakim.
There’s a whole debate over whether it’s strictly speaking typology that misses the point that if you want to understand what’s happening with Eliakim, you clearly should be reading Isaiah 22 as an interpretive key, if you will. You should also be looking at things like Genesis 41 with the way Pharaoh treats Joseph that the role of having someone over the house is very well established. It’s not anything new. That’s Joseph’s role to Pharaoh. Eliakim’s role to King Hezekiah. That’s Rabshakeh’s seeming role to King Sennacherib in the Assyrian Empire.
You have this idea what later becomes known as a major domus or a majordomo that someone is controlling the internal affairs of the king, not against the king, but for the king. But there’s an even deeper dimension to this because in this particular context, the way Eliakim is described looks like both royal authority and priestly authority.
He’s got the priestly robes as well as the royal governance. Bruce Chilton in Jesus in Context points this out that in Isaiah 22:22 where in the Masoretic Text he’s promised the key of the house of David, the targum on Isaiah, which is like the Syriac paraphrase/translation reads the key of the sanctuary house and the rule of the house of David.
The key of the house of David was understood as this double promise of priestly and royal authority. Now, I think that’s very significant when it comes to papacy, when it comes to the role of the Pope. But here my point is simply that there’s a way that we see royal authority exercised in Israel, and as we’re about to see a way we see royal authority exercised in the kingdom of God, that God in his own affairs in the Old Testament and in the New Testament chooses to do things this way.
He doesn’t have to. He’s clearly omnipotent. He could clearly do all of this Himself, but precisely because He’s a king, He behaves like a king. To give one example from the Old Testament, in Psalm 91, there’s a passage that the devil badly mishandles in the temptation of Jesus. Psalm 91:11 to 12, for he will give his angels charge of you to guard you in all your ways. On their hands, they’ll bear you up, lift you dash your foot against a stone.
Now, obviously, God could protect you Himself. He does not need to send angels to do it. But the fact that He can send angels to do it shows His royal authority. We are reminded of this in Matthew 26 in the Garden of Gethsemane. When Jesus is arrested, he points out with, Peter draws this sword and Peter tells him to put the sword away and then says, “Do you think that I cannot appeal to my Father and He’ll at once send me more than 12 legions of angels?”
Now go back to that efficiency point. Is that efficient? It is not. Jesus is saying the way He could handle this, He could pray to the Father and the Father would send 12 legions of angels. Now, Jesus being divine could solve this whole thing directly without going to the Father, without having any angels sent.
But instead, the second person of the Trinity, the inefficient but effective way that He talks about how He could handle this is going to the Father to have angels sent, not to have the Father do it directly, but to do it through angels even in the care of His son, Jesus Christ. The idea that, “Hey, we’re sons and daughters of God, we don’t need any intermediaries anymore.” He’s badly mistaken if for no other reason than the fact that His own son begotten not made when talking about how the Father could protect Him from this hour if He wanted to talks about the Father sending angels to do it.
Now, this is not the standalone issue either. Go all the way back to the fall of the rebel angels. Revelation 12 describes it by saying that a war arose in heaven. Michael and his angels fighting against the dragon and the dragon and his angels fought, but they were defeated and there was no longer any place for them in heaven that God is showing His royal authority by having Michael and the angels do the fighting.
I think that points to something particularly important. We see this also not just with angels, but with human intermediaries. Now remember the word angel means messenger. Even in the word angel, you have the fact that God chooses to use intermediaries. He doesn’t need to. But an angel is one who carries a message and you have a parallel. You’d have messengers of ancient kings or emperors who would go out announcing the good news of Caesar’s victory.
Likewise, you have angels all throughout the New Testament, including at the empty tomb where they’re absolutely not needed. Jesus has risen. He could announce the resurrection Himself, but He still uses angels. The idea that we’re going to be rid of angelic intermediaries in the New Testament is obviously wrong. Likewise, saintly intermediaries.
How do we know this? Because Jesus doesn’t just make use of angelic intermediaries, but human ones as well. You see this from the beginning of His public ministry. Take the wedding feast of Cana. There were six stone jars. Jesus says to the servants, “Fill the jars with water.” They fill them up to the brim. Then He says, “Now draw some out and take it to the steward of the feast.” They took it.
Now notice if you look closely at the wedding feast of Cana, Jesus never touches the jars. Yet John says, the first of his signs, Jesus did at Cana and Galilee. The servants being the ones to actually handle the water didn’t draw away from Jesus’s miracle. It didn’t make it not Jesus’s miracle. They didn’t say, “Well, it doesn’t count because Jesus didn’t touch it Himself.”
No. Jesus performed the miracle without Himself touching the stone jars. There are plenty of miracles where Jesus is directly interacting with the material thing with the person, et cetera, but he can also achieve His ends through ministers and these ministers of His grace. If you understand what that is, you have the creation of the sacramental system here.
When we talk about the authority priests have, we’re not saying they’re taking authority away from Jesus any more than the servants of the wedding feast of Cana are taking authority away from Jesus. They’re relying upon the royal authority. This continues all throughout Jesus’s public minister.
I’m going to give just a couple more examples. In John 4, we’re told that Jesus was making in baptizing more disciples than John the Baptist. Then immediately after saying this, John says, “Although Jesus Himself did not baptize but only His disciples.” The baptismal ministry of Jesus we’re told two things. Number one, Jesus was making and baptizing more disciples than John the Baptist. Number two, Jesus never directly did the baptisms, His disciples did.
When you see a baptism being performed, it is the minister doing the baptizing. It is also Jesus doing the baptizing. Those two things have to simultaneously be affirmed as they are in John 4. Who baptized your child? Jesus did. Who baptized your child? The priest or deacon? Those both are true. It’s not an either or. Jesus works through mediators and intermediaries all the time.
Now, that may annoy us because it’s not efficient. But that is how he chooses to work, and that is not only how he chooses to work, that is how royal authority looks. That is what the centurion is expecting that we are often not expecting. In Luke 22, we see this doesn’t go away. He says to the 12, you are those who have continued with me in my trials as my father appointed a kingdom for me. We’re very much in the language of royal authority here. So do I appoint for you that you may and drink at my table in my kingdom and sit on thrones judging the 12 tribes of Israel.
That royal authority in the kingdom looks like the Apostles sharing in the throne of Christ, sitting on thrones, sharing in the judgment of Christ, judging the 12 tribes. This is not Jesus being threatened by the saints. This is Jesus choosing to work with the saints.
There’s one more example I want to give here because I read that lengthy thing about the role of eunuchs. Eunuchs were incredibly important in the ancient world because by the fact that they didn’t have their own families, they were considered to be radically devoted to the king.
Well, think about that royal imagery of the eunuch, and this is how Jesus explains priestly celibacy. In Matthew 19:12, He says, “There are eunuchs who’ve been so from birth. There are eunuchs who’ve been made by men, and there are eunuchs who’ve made themselves eunuchs for the sake of the kingdom of heaven.”
That authority is like when you hear eunuch, usually when you look at that and you’re like, “Look, this points to celibacy being good, and so even though not every disciple of Jesus is a eunuch and a celibate, not everyone” … But it is nevertheless clearly something Jesus is holding up as a positive good that the church rightly embraced for many of her ministers.
There’s a whole other kind of debate about all of that. But what we miss in that is that this is a royal image, because who has eunuchs? A king. Calling them eunuchs for the kingdom of heaven is pointing to them as embodiments of the royal authority of the king. That is if you want to know, does the kingdom of heaven or the kingdom of God, does it have eunuchs and ministers the way an ancient kingdom like the Romans or the Egyptians or the Assyrians or whoever else would? Jesus is answering your question right here.
He’s, in Luke 22, talked about sharing thrones in this table of feasting and the power of judgment, and here He’s using the of royal eunuchs. All of that is pointing to the fact that, yeah, if you want to know why prayer to angels and saints and all of those middle level management, so to speak, exists, it’s because they’re reflections of the royal power and grandeur of God.
Now, there was one part of this answer that I still haven’t gotten to and I’m going to save it for next week. The idea of the tearing of the temple veil. Because repeatedly when people argue against going to the angels or going to the saints, they talk about praying, and therefore, we can go directly to God because Jesus has torn the temple veil. That badly misunderstands the Jewish context of the temple veil. It goes against the way scripture talks about the temple veil. It contradicts what we know in the biblical data about people praying directly to God in the Old Testament and the New Testament.
Next week, I’m going to look at the temple veil. What does it mean that the temple veil has been torn. The week after that, we’re going to return to Sennacherib and figure out, in 2 Kings 19, we hear about the angel, the Lord fighting to defeat the Assyrians. This is a really cool passage because this is a passage we have not just biblical data about in both Isaiah and 2 Kings, we also have Babylonian, Greek, Egyptian, and Assyrian sources that point to the reality of what happened here and that point to the truth of the Old Testament account.
But I’m going to leave those as teasers. Those are the next two weeks. God willing, all goes well. For now, I’m interested in what you think of this argument. Not only is prayer inefficient intentionally, but the mere act of the inefficiency is pointing to the royal authority of God.
That’s the dimension I didn’t talk about before and don’t usually think about in terms of … This is showing something of the goodness and sovereignty of God that He is making us cooperators in His royal authority and that He’s letting us experience His royal authority when we go to the saints and the angels and ask Him to intercede for us.
For Shameless Popery, I’m Joe Heschmeyer. God bless you.