Proving that the Saints in Heaven Hear Our Prayers

You are listening to Shameless Popery with Joe Heschmeyer, a production of Catholic Answers.

Welcome back to Shameless Pope. I’m Joe Heschmeyer. So this is the third of three videos on prayers to the saints. You don’t have to have seen the other two for this one to make sense because in some ways, this is actually going to be the most basic one. The first two videos were objections by Dr. Gavin Ortlund, the idea that medieval prayers to the saints drew people away from Christ and the idea that prayers are of pagan origin and responded to those arguments. But Gavin and I actually seem to agree that the saints in heaven can hear our prayers and are interceding for us and a lot of Protestants wouldn’t even give that much. They’d say, “How do we know either of those things are true?” Those are reasonable objections and I want to answer those. One of the commentaries actually in the video from last week, I won’t mention their name, but I mean, it’s a public comment.

You can find it yourself if you want, but I didn’t get permission so I don’t want to call them out. Had a great comment. I really enjoyed it. They said it’d given them a lot to think about, begrudgingly admit to being one of the best and most enjoyable in this topic so far. But they said, “However, there are a few things I’ve yet to hear about in depth from Catholic apologists and scholars that I wish would be covered because until they are, I still remain unconvinced.” These are going to be good objections. “Number one, I’m greatly concerned that asking the saints to intercede for us opens the door to the demonic. Throwing out the name Mary or Peter, et cetera, is no guarantee that a particular saint is going to hear us, but it is a great way to invite a demonic spirit into our lives, even false apparitions.”

We’ll get into that. “Number two, it’s my second concern, 2000 years of accumulating saints that are neither omnipresent nor omniscient means it’s kind of hit or miss whether or not they can hear us.” We’ll get into that. “Number three, not nearly enough time is spent showing the particulars of how the saints hear us from a scriptural standpoint. For example, both you and Dr. Ortlund believe that the saints do hear us and are aware of what’s going on on earth. There are also protestants who do not believe that they can because that would mean that they’re suffering in heaven.” The suffering in heaven part, I think we’ll get to, I know we’ll get to the rest. So here I’m going to do them more or less in reverse order from the commentary’s desires. Sorry, they’re good objections, but I think it makes more sense logically to approach them in the opposite direction.

The first one is going to be the easiest of the three can questions. Can the saints hear us? And I want to look at not only what they’re asking but also are the saints even conscious because there are some people, Seventh-day Adventist today, Martin Luther in the past, who thought the saints were actually unconscious and unable to hear us. The second and much harder can question is, well, how does that work? How are the saints able to see or hear us? How are the saints able to see or hear anything? We’ll get into that, but It’s going to take a little more of a deep dive. And the third set of objections is, well, should we do this anyway? Even if I’m convinced the saints are in heaven and that they are praying, how do I know when I say, “Mary, pray for us,” that some demon isn’t just crawling up there saying, “All right, that gives me permission to torment you now.”

So how does that work? Because scripture does condemn things like necromancy and spiritualism and Ouija boards and conjuring up the dead. I mean, Ouija boards didn’t exist then, but you get the idea. What makes this different from that? These are good questions and I’m glad people are thinking these through and I’m going to do my best to answer them more or less in order Let’s start with the idea of soul sleep. The idea of the saints can’t hear us because they’re asleep. In answering this, I’m going to answer some of the beginning of the can. We’re going to have to go a little deeper. So the soul sleep idea is most popularly associated with the Seventh-day Adventists and on their official website and their declaration of their beliefs, they say, “The Bible says those who have died know nothing. That means we aren’t aware of the passage of time after death.

We aren’t aware of what’s happening in the world. Death is like a deep sleep. Your body and spirit rest as the breath of life which makes body and soul one and alive has returned to God until the resurrection.” You can see, I think, why it’s called soul sleep. Death is like a deep sleep. Martin Luther flirted with this idea. He tentatively embraced it in part in a letter in 1522 to a university professor. He says, “I’m inclined to agree with your opinion that the souls of the just are asleep. They do not know where they are up to the day of judgment.” Now this would, of course, have major implications for things like purgatory, for the intercession of saints and all sorts of things. It was actually a very convenient thing for a Protestant to believe in because if soul sleep is true, then yeah, the saints intercession doesn’t work and also the souls aren’t in purgatory and also they’re not in the beatific vision, they’re not enjoying or experiencing God. They’re just asleep. They’re not exactly annihilated. They’re just floating around there somewhere without any consciousness.

Nevertheless, Luther realized this couldn’t completely be right. So he said, “I do not dare to affirm that this is true for all souls in general.” And he points to some scriptural evidence that, as we’re going to see, actually seems a pretty clearly refute soul sleep. But he’s going to try to have it both ways to say, well, maybe some souls are asleep and some aren’t of the righteous. It’s kind of a strange position that he takes. It doesn’t seem to have been one that caught on among many Protestants because Luther was himself not super consistent on it and didn’t seem to be totally convinced of his own argument. But nevertheless, I want to be fair to both Luther and the Adventists that there are these passages in scripture that speak about death as sleep. So how do we make sense of those? And so for instance in John 11, when Lazarus dies, Jesus says, “Our friend, Lazarus, has fallen asleep but I go to wake him out of sleep.”

Now, unfortunately, the apostles are often biblical literalists and so they hear this and they think that he’s talking about physical sleep and Jesus has to explain no, he’s talking about death. That’s John 11. Another passage is Ecclesiastes 12. Now this one fascinatingly is quoted by the Seventh-day Adventists who say that … well, the line says, “And the dust returns to the earth as it was and the spirit returns to God who gave it.” Now as a non-Adventist reading this, that seems to be very clearly saying that when we talk about sleeping in death, we’re talking about the body going to rest in the earth until the general resurrection, not about the soul being asleep but about the body being asleep as it were. And the reason we call it sleep, this is, by the way, where we get words like cemetery, we’re referring to this as like the place of sleep.

The pagans called it a necropolis, a city of the dead, but we use cemetery because we believe this is a place of rest before they rise again. Daniel 12 talks about this, that many of those who sleep in the dust of the earth notice that. Where are they asleep, in the dust of the earth. They’re buried. Shall awake, some to everlasting life and some to shame and everlasting contempt. So this sleeping and awakening are references to bodily death and bodily resurrection. It’s not about the soul unless you believe the soul is actually in the ground. If you dig around, you’re going to find people’s souls or you could say their soul’s in their body, but the whole idea of death is a separation of soul and body. That’s literally what death is. The Latin word for soul is anima, which is the animation it’s what makes your body alive.

Peter Kreeft, the philosopher, gives the example of two cows who are identical. The only difference is one of them is alive and one of them is dead and one of them has just died moments ago and he says, “Well, what’s biologically the difference, they’re the same weight, the same height, the same shape, the same … All of the material properties are the same. At the level of matter, there might be identical twin cows but there’s something else, an animating principle, that’s in one and not in the other. That one of them, all of those big material parts are working together.” They’re moving and they’re keeping the cow alive, aware and et cetera. And in the other one those things aren’t there and in fact, they so much aren’t there that the different organs and systems pretty quickly start to decay and fall apart. That we need a name for whatever we’re going to call that animating principle and the Latin word for that is anima, which in English, we say soul that’s. What we literally mean by a soul is that principle by which a thing is kept together, a material thing is kept alive.

So to say that the soul is asleep in the body is just to say that the person’s asleep not dead. When we say a person is dead, we mean the soul has actually left the body, which is why for instance in the case of Jesus, we can talk about him both in 1 Peter 3 is sending to preach to the souls who rejected him in the days of Noah and we can also speak about him being in the tomb that he is in both places because your soul and body. And so when soul and body are separated there’s a sense in which you are in one place, there’s a sense in which you are in the other place. Hopefully, that makes sense. That’s certainly how scripture speaks, is how we speak of Christ and it explains in this first sense that we can talk about the soul and the body separately and the body has gone to rest in peace in anticipation of the bodily resurrection.

We can also strikingly talk about the soul entering the rest of God as well. We’ll get into the right and wrong way to use that, but we see that pretty clearly in Psalm 95 when God says of the rebellious Israelites in the exodus that, “I swore in my anger, they should not enter into my rest.” Hebrews 4 has a great commentary on this saying, “We who have believed entered that rest.” And it explains what’s meant by the rest that it’s the Sabbath day, the Sabbath rest of God because on that day God rested from all his works. When we talk about rest in this sense, we don’t mean loss of consciousness. We mean you’re no longer striving, that when the soul is at rest in God, this is the [inaudible 00:10:54] we can talk about rest, not that you’re not aware of what’s going on, but no, no, no.

Life is hard. Work out your own salvation with fear and trembling and now that this journey has been completed and you’ve received your reward, you kind of relax, right? You’re no longer striving in the same way. Now sure, you’re still praying for other people, all of that is still true but it’s that loss of striving, the completion of all that, day six is the day of humanity and this great day of effort and day seven is the Sabbath rest of God. This is the today of God that we’re trying to enter. So hopefully, that’s clear when we talk about rest in that sense, we don’t mean unaware of what’s going on or else we’d have to say God who rested on the seventh day from all his works isn’t aware of what’s going on in the world since Genesis and that would be a huge disaster.

Obviously, God knows what’s going on and yet is at rest and that’s the kind of rest we’re talking about when we talk about the soul being at rest. So that’s the twofold sense. Biblically, we can talk about souls and bodies resting in death. So what about these supposedly sleeping souls or resting souls? Are they aware of earthly affairs or no? And the biblical evidence here is very clear that they are. Revelation, we’re going to mostly look at and the reason I’m looking mostly at Revelation is because, A, it’s pretty directly about heaven and, B, Protestants haven’t removed it from their bibles although Luther thought they should but that’s another question. In Revelation 6, I mentioned this last week, the souls that are under the altar, the martyrs, cry out in prayer, “Oh sovereign Lord, holy and true, how long before that will judge and avenge our blood on those who dwell upon the earth?” And they’re told to rest a little longer.

Keep resting. But notice that this rest that they’re experiencing in heaven is not a loss of consciousness. They’re praying, they’re aware that justice has still not been done on earth, that there’s still injustice and they’re told to continue to rest until the number of their fellow servants, their brethren should be complete. Now there are some Protestants who think if this is true, this means they’re suffering in heaven. And I would argue, well, first, you’ve got to make sense of Revelation 6 somehow because clearly, there are souls who are aware of injustice on earth and are praying about it and are praying for justice to be done. So how is that not suffering? Because they’re content and at rest in God even amidst this, they know that there are still injustices on earth. There are not injustices in heaven. And so the idea that happiness in heaven can only come from God hiding the truth from us.

We can’t know how bad things really are or we wouldn’t be able to be happy is a bad view of heaven. I don’t know another way to say that. It’s a view of heaven where God has to be a little bit of a deceiver for us to be able to be happy and he has to just kind of like maybe not lie to us but mislead us, to not let us know how bad things are. In that world in which God was hiding the truth from you, I don’t think that would be happiness anyway because you’d know, “I think God’s hiding something from me,” and what would it even mean to contemplate God and his fullness and his truth while at the same time having the idea that God isn’t telling you the full truth? It’s a weird vision of heaven.

So the happiness of the saints does not turn on them only knowing the good news and having the bad news hidden from them. These saints underneath the altar are experiencing the bad news and still trusting in God and praying to God. They’re not unhappy here. They’re still in perfect glory. They nevertheless desire good things for others. That’s at the heart of intercessory prayer is that the saints who enjoy all good things want us to enjoy good things as well. Those good things might help me find my keys. It might be avenging the injustice done to Martin Luther Christians, might be anything in between those two points. So that’s Revelation, Chapter Six. In Luke 9, you have one of the passages that persuaded Luther, he couldn’t just fully bind his soul’s sleep and he was right to point to this. In the transfiguration, Moses and Elijah come to Jesus and were told they appear in glory and they spoke of his departure which he was to accomplish at Jerusalem.

Moses and Elijah seemed like some of the only people to actually get what’s going on on earth, which is that Jesus has this ministry and that’s leading him towards Jerusalem towards the cross. I mean, if anything, they’re more aware of what’s going on than the disciples who’ve been with Jesus are, because the disciples still don’t get that Jesus is going to Jerusalem to die and Moses and Elijah certainly seem to get that. So they seem completely aware of what’s going on here on earth. Then I want to turn to maybe a surprise and example. This is one regularly used by those who think the souls of the just can’t hear you is 1 Samuel 28. Now it’s a complicated passage for a few reasons. One, it involves a medium like a witch basically, and king Saul goes to her and she does some weird magic stuff and she says, “I see a God coming up out of the earth.” And Saul says, “What is his appearance?”

She says, “An old man is coming up and he is wrapped in a robe.” And at this point Saul realizes it’s Samuel, he bows his face to the ground and does a [inaudible 00:16:22]. Then there’s this line that regularly gets quoted, I think, out of context because Samuel says, “Why have you disturbed me by bringing me up?” And so reasonably enough, if this is the only Bible verse you read on this subject, you might say, “Well, yeah, look Samuel can’t hear anything going on. So he’s totally confused why he’s there.” I think this is a rebuke when he says, “Why have you conjured me? Why have you disturbed me by bringing me up?” He’s not like, “It’s early, why did you wake me up?” No, this is a rebuke and we know that from everything that follows because Saul says to Samuel that the reason he brought him up was because he’s worried about this battle with the Philistines.

Samuel does two things. First, in verse 16 to 18, he tells him that God has turned from him because he has not been faithful to God. This is what Samuel had worn during his lifetime and now it’s coming to pass. But then secondly and more remarkably, 1 Samuel 28, verse 19, Samuel makes a prediction about the future. He says, “Moreover, the Lord will give Israel also with you into the hand of the Philistines and tomorrow, you and your sons shall be with me. The Lord will give the army of Israel also into the hand of the Philistines.” In plain language, tomorrow Israel is going to lose the battle and you and your sons are going to die because of your unfaithfulness. Here’s the kicker. All of that came to pass. So Samuel who is often invoked as someone who doesn’t know what’s going on both knows the present and the future of what’s going on on earth.

So all of that points to no, they really do know. Now there’s a few other passages that I’d point to that aren’t in Protestant bibles, but they were in the Bibles of early Christians. The first one is from Baruch. Now even John Calvin thought the book of Baruch was divine scripture. And in there, it says in Chapter Three, verse four, “Oh Lord Almighty, God of Israel, hear now the prayer of the dead of Israel and of the sons of those who sending before thee who did not heed the voice of the Lord, their God, so the calamities have clung to us.” That seems to be very explicitly saying those who have died in Christ or died in the faith in God, I mean, they wouldn’t have said Christ at this point, it’s Old Testament, but that these righteous dead are still praying and God should listen to those prayers.

The second one, I’ve already mentioned this last week is 2 Maccabees, Chapter 15, short version. Judas Maccabeus, the leader of the Jewish people right before a major battle is visited by the already departed high priest Onias and the prophet Jeremiah who intercede for him, who give him spiritual counsel, who give him a sword for the battle. These books were regarded as divine scripture by the yearly Christians and seemingly correctly but that’s another question, but either way, if you remove those, that’s no argument that the evidence isn’t there. You’ve just gotten rid of some of the evidence, but there’s still plenty of other evidence that the saints hear us and intercede for us. Going back to the Book of Revelation, this is a passage I touched on last week as well, we have the four living creatures, the 24 elders who fall down before the Lord and they’re offering the golden bulls full of incense, which are the prayers of the saints. And that’s critical because here are these, especially the elders, seemingly human in heaven who are not only praying for us but are also offering up our prayers they’re interceding for us with our prayers.

Now this is going to be a really critical kind of passage because this shows not only that they’re praying for us in some generic kind of way, “I hope everybody’s okay down there,” but in a much more specific kind of way, that they know what our prayers are and are praying on our behalf along with us just as the angels do. And if you remember from last week, revelation is drawing on Tobit another of the books not in Protestant bibles because Tobit 12 talks about this is one of the things the angels do, particularly the seven angels that stand in the presence of God. Revelation 8 says this is true of the seven angels that stand in the presence of God but also true of the four living creatures and the 24 elders. So all that’s to say the biblical evidence is actually pretty clear that the saints are conscious and that they’re praying for us. That doesn’t answer everything because it still raises, I think, a pretty good question which is, well, how in the world does that work?

How do the saints hear our prayers? How do they hear us if more than one of us approaches the same saint at the same time? What if we approach them in different languages? What if I pray really quietly? What if I think my prayer and do my rosary without moving my lips? How does any of that work? And here, I want to give you three words of advice. Bear with me because notice in this, we’re asking a question about human limitations and these questions are not just biblical. They’re philosophical and metaphysical meaning this. Let me give an example from an article Matt Slick, CARM, which is like a Protestant apologetics website, argues Mary can’t hear our prayers. Now he knows that verse from Revelation I just cited, Revelation 5, Chapter Eight and he says, “Well, the saints in heaven offering the prayers doesn’t mean they can hear the prayers of people on earth.”

Now this is a weird objection because obviously, it does, meaning if they’re offering our prayers, how do they not know what our prayers are? But fine, he says even if it were possible, this verse could be interpreted to mean the saints in heaven can hear prayers which I don’t assert as legitimate. It still does not mean that Mary can hear the prayers of people all over the world simultaneously both thought and spoken and in different languages. And I have to admit, I find this objection kind of funny. I mean, look, it’s a good objection in one way, I’m glad people are asking this. I’m glad people are thinking about this because it does cause us to think more deeply about heaven, which is always a good thing. But it is funny to me because I’m bad at learning languages to imagine that even with 2000 years of time Mary can’t learn Spanish, so she’s just like, “No hablo. I don’t know what you’re praying for.”

It doesn’t work like that. What we have here is a human failure on our part to understand or envision heaven. I want to look at two assumptions that match Slick in a lot of Protestants and frankly, a lot of people are making. Number one, that sensation seeing and hearing and the rest works basically the same way in heaven that it does on earth. You hear things with your ears when somebody says them to you, the sound waves hit your ears, the light waves hit your eyes and that if the saints are going to know what we’re praying for, they have to either read our lips or listen real closely, maybe press an ear against a cloud to be able to hear us. And so if two of us are talking at the same time, it’s too loud and they can’t understand. That is, I think, if you think about it, a bad way of understanding what’s going on with the saints.

The second is this whole notion that time which is mediated through the bodies, which is a physical property that time works the same way in heaven that it does on earth. Now, hopefully, me just mentioning that, hey, these are extremely physical understandings of both sensation and time are enough to make you say, “Wait a second, this objection seems to suppose that the saint’s experience is basically just like being in a slightly higher place that’s still on earth and that that’s not a very good understanding.” Look, I understand the difficulty. The difficulty is as Saint Paul says in 1 Corinthians 9 that when we’re talking about heaven, we’re talking about what no eye has seen and no ear has heard nor the heart of man conceived, that God has prepared something beyond our wildest imagination. And so our imagination inevitably, invariably falls short. This is why you’ve got to bear with me because I can say this way is wrong and Matt Slick is describing is obviously just a human conception of a basically human place and it is not like a divine place at all.

But nevertheless, if you ask me to explain it, my own explanations are going to fall short because no eye is seen including my eyes, no ears is heard including my ears, no heart conceived including my heart that we know from Revelation that this is beyond our imagination. So all I can do is point past our concepts towards these heavenly realities. On that way, I would point us to 1 John, Chapter Three which says, “Of the Father, see what love the father has given us that we should be called children of God and so we are. The reason why the world does not know us is that it did not know him. Beloved, we are God’s children now. It does not yet appear what we shall be. We know that when he appears, we shall be like him for we shall see him as he is.”

Now when I read that passage, for a long time I thought that when he appears we shall be like him was referring to Jesus appearing. But if you read the context is referring to the father appearing, but the father’s not going to come back in glory. So what is this talking about? It’s about beholding God in heaven transforming us seemingly. Now I think you could probably, I mean, maybe you’ll find someone who says, “No, maybe he should be Jesus.” But in the context of those two verses, I think the love of the Father doesn’t mention Jesus. Talks about us being made children of God and then being transformed into being like God when he appears, looks like the Father. Why do I mention all that? Two reasons. Number one, we know that what the saints are right now enjoying as they behold God makes them God-like. Remember from the book of Revelation twice that John goes down to worship the angel because the angel seems like a God in comparison.

Remember the witch of indoor when she sees Samuel thinks she’s seeing a God rising from the earth, that there’s something glorious about the saints and that we need to take that into account and so if we’re like, “Well, they can’t understand Spanish, they can’t hear two people at the same time,” we have really underestimated the glory of the saints that we will be like him when we see him as he is. Okay. That still leaves a question. This is the second reason I raised that passage. When we see him, well, how do the saints see? How do the saints hear? Leave aside for a second the question how do they see or hear us. Let’s ask a more rudimentary question. How do they see or hear God? Because we’re told they do. You just heard 1 John 3 says they are going to see him but also in the Beatitudes, Jesus says, “Blessed are the pure of heart for they shall see God.”

Why is that a problem? Two reasons. Number one, because John 4 says that God is spirit and 1 Timothy 1 says that the king of ages, the only God, is invisible. So how is the invisible God visible? You can say, “Well, he reveals himself,” but that misunderstands it. It’s not like he’s a bodily creature that’s just wearing an invisibility cloak. God is pure spirit. He is invisible by his nature. His divinity as such is not visible because it’s not made of matter. Hopefully that’s clear. Saint Thomas Aquinas makes this argument in the Summa. He says, “God can’t be seen with the eyes of the body or perceived with any of the senses. And he can’t be seen or perceived with the senses here or in heaven.” That is, I think for many people, kind of a surprise because we have this idea that heaven is basically just like earth but a little better.

But he says no, it’s not going to be like that. The glorified body is no more able to see God than the unglorified body because it’s not a matter of your lack of glory, that’s not why you can’t see God. The reason you can’t see God is not because you’re too sinful. The reason you can’t see God is because God is pure spirit and the eye picks up light and matter. It doesn’t pick up pure spirit. You don’t have spirit eyes. Right here, right? So we don’t behold the divine essence as an object of direct vision. Nevertheless, Aquinas says, “Well, we will seek the glory of God in one way indirectly because we will behold the glory of God in bodies, especially in the glorified bodies, most especially in the body of Christ.” But then if we want to talk about how we see God, not indirectly but directly that’s true at the eyes of the heart or the intellect. That’s what’s perceiving God. The way you come to see an idea, you say, “I see now. You don’t mean that idea just floated by. I saw the idea.”

Even if you saw the idea written down, you’re seeing the letters. You’re not really seeing the idea itself, right? Well, likewise with God, you can see the manifestations of God like all the glorious things, but it’s in that immaterial way of seeing, the way you say, “I see.” That’s how you see God but something bigger and better than that. So still break past the human limitations category, but it is the intellect. It is that kind of spiritual perception by which you see God directly. So in Aquinas, the bodily eyes see glory of God indirectly in his creation and his saints, most especially in the body of Jesus Christ, the spiritual eyes, the intellect, we might call the eyes of the heart, see God clearly and directly. Now that second thing in terms of what that looks like is actually hotly debated by theologians between the [inaudible 00:30:39] and the [inaudible 00:30:40] and the Palamites.

We’re not going to go that deep on this question. What matters is what I think everybody can agree on, which is you are not just going to have glasses or binoculars and with your physical eyes, behold the infinite divine essence. That’s not what this is going to be like. And that agrees with scripture. Ephesians 1, Saint Paul prays that we’ll have the eyes of our hearts enlightened to know the hopes which we’ve been called. So the eyes of our heart are what we’re dealing with here. Why do I mention that? Because this points towards a different kind of eyes, a different kind of scene and also a different kind of light. In the Psalms, in Psalm 36 it says, “For with thee is the fountain of life, in thy light do we see light.” This is what’s called the light of glory, lumen gloriae. That’s what we see in glory with the light of glory.

The reason the saints in heaven know what’s going on on earth, the reason they know about your prayers is because they’re beholding God and beholding God in this way that is kind of hard for us to fathom. But in beholding God who is truth, this is how they know the worldly affairs. This is how they know what to pray for. This is how they know when we ask for their prayers, and this is why it doesn’t matter. If your prayers are in English or Spanish or Hebrew or Greek, it does not make the slightest bit of difference and it doesn’t matter if you’re saying them out loud or really loudly or quietly or silently. Because it’s still through God that they’re experiencing everything that they experience.

It’s in the beholding of God, that they’re encountering this glory. In his light, they see light. So that’s the first thing and then maybe just to hammer that point home, we can take an earthly example of Pentecost in Acts 2. Remember in Pentecost, people from all over the known world at the time were together in Jerusalem and they were able to hear them talking even though they were all Galileans, each in their own language. So the idea that these linguistic barriers are going to be too much seems to be false. So that’s what I say, the reason the saints can hear us is because of this light of glory, because of this contemplation of God and none of this is in a bodily way with eyes and ears.

The next thing, and this is going to be a related thing, is about time. What if two of us pray at the same time and we have different intentions. There’s a football game and we’re both asking the saint to intercede for us, maybe not the best example, but you get the idea. There’s a battle say and we’re both praying for the intercession of Saint Michael or Saint Mary or whoever at the same time. Well, are they able to hear both prayers? Yes, but here we have to go deeper into the experience of eternity, the experience of time and then what’s sometimes called sempiternity or aeviternity. Let’s start with eternity. In Exodus 3 when Moses is at the burning bush and he asks God, “Who should I say sent me?” God reveals himself as, “I am who I am,” is one translation. I actually prefer I am who am, it’s the YHWH. That’s sometimes translated as Yahweh or even as Jehovah that this is the divine name and it’s a mysterious and magnificent name and it’s sometimes shortened to just I am. That I am should remind us of the timelessness of God.

It’s not I was. I am and I will be. The way we think about God that he was in the past, he is now, he will be in the future, that to God he just is. He’s able to say I am, I am in the past, I am in the present, I am in the future simultaneously, that this is the timelessness of God, this is the eternity of God and this is because God is a maker of all time and the maker of all matter. Again, scientifically we can talk about time as a physical property, it’s a relationship between matter so that if you’re traveling at nearly the speed of light, your experience of time will be radically different than the experience of time of somebody on earth. For that matter, if you’re in a dream where you’re not influenced by external bodily realities, you’ve probably experienced time being radically different before where maybe it feels like you were there for a week or maybe just for a few moments, but it was for the course of a night, that our experience of time is mediated through our bodies.

God who is the maker of time and of bodies is not bound by either materiality or time. So this is really interesting. We talk about Jesus because he is also fully man. In taking on humanity, he brings himself into the world of temporality and so we talk about the child Jesus growing and becoming strong, filled with wisdom. There’s even a sense in which we can talk about him learning things, which is really kind of fascinating. But at the same time in talking about his humanity, we don’t want to forget his divinity. And so even though as a human child he’s growing, there’s another symptom which we can say with Hebrews 13, verse eight, that Jesus Christ is the same yesterday, today, tomorrow and forever. Well, that’s because he’s also divine and as divine as eternal. He’s timeless. So I love the way Jesus drives his home in John 8.

When he’s asked, “You’re not yet 50 years old. Have you seen Abraham?” Jesus says, “I tell you before Abraham was, I am.” Notice that it’s that timelessness of the I am. It’s not before Abraham was, I was. Nope. I am. He is even now as he says these words in John 8, as we talk about these words 2000 years later, he’s even now also preexisting Abraham. All of these moments are simultaneously present to him. That is a very hard thing for us to wrap our minds around. But that’s what he’s saying here in John 8. Boethius, a philosopher talks about this in 5:23 in his famous work On the Consolation of Philosophy that eternity is the possession of endless life, whole and perfect at a single moment.

When we talk about eternity, we don’t just mean that God is really, really old and won’t ever die. It certainly means he has no beginning and has no end, but it actually means much more than that. Because you can imagine something with no beginning and no end still traveling through time in some way. That’s not what we mean with God. We mean that he is outside of time because he’s the author of time, so that all of these parts are simultaneously present to God. He can’t grow and change or have a mood swing or any of these things because that’s contrary to what it is for him to be eternal.

So contrast this with the experience of time. You’ve got eternity over here with God. You’ve got temporality, the experience of time with us, with us, tomorrow we don’t yet grasp, we’ve already forgotten yesterday but not just the far off future, the far past of our own lives. But even if you take today probably part of the morning, you’ve forgotten about. You probably don’t know exactly what’s going to happen tonight. We can get even closer and say this very moment, you don’t know what I’m going to say. I could say something really crazy after this. I might’ve already forgotten the last point I made. The past and the future, we don’t possess. We only possess a fleeting moment called now, the present and this moment is infinitesimally small. By the time you notice it, it’s already behind you and you don’t possess it anymore. It’s already fading away. That’s the experience of temporality.

This is something worth pondering on that with us, we have this infinitely small point of time that we don’t even possess a full second unbroken. You’re not in all of the second at the same time, I hope this is clear. This sounds like I’m on drugs, but I’m not. I’m trying to explain very hard experience. When you say the present moment, you don’t get an entire minute that you’re just simultaneously present for. You could have said something really dumb 15 seconds ago you wish you could take back. So how much time is actually in the present moment? Well, it’s inseparably, indistinguishably small, it could not be any smaller. It’s infinitely small. That’s how long we have in the now. In contrast, what God has is the exact opposite of that. He has infinite time and space in front of him. There’s no limit to what is his now. Our now couldn’t be smaller, his now couldn’t be bigger. I hope that’s clear.

Augustine talks about this, that if you take this idea seriously of God having everything simultaneously present before him, it explains why it means the same thing to say that God is incorruptible, unchangeable, eternal, immortal, all of those are pointing to the same timeless reality. Everything is present to him. So he’s not on a hero’s journey. God isn’t saying, “Well, now I feel like I’ve really learned a lot from creating humans.” I get there are times where scripture speaks about God in that very human kind of language. But we should also be able to understand in that that these are metaphors trying to explain something that is kind of beyond our frame of reference and concept, which is that God is infinite, he’s eternal and therefore he’s unchanging and unchangeable because there’s no new information he’s going to get tomorrow that’s going to cause a personality change in him.

Hopefully that makes sense. And if it did, he wouldn’t be God, right? If he was getting better or worse, then he wouldn’t be God. So as Augustine says, “He didn’t receive wisdom. He is wisdom.” In a city of God like Boethius, Augustine is going to contrast this with our experience of time, that for us the future isn’t yet, present’s now and the past was. But to God, all of these moments and all moments are simultaneously present in what Augustine calls his stable and eternal presence. That there is only the now of God. I am who am means just this. I know I’m talking a lot about eternity, but we have to have this concept of contrasting our experience of time, God’s experience of eternity to then ask what then about the saints and angels because we know from Ecclesiastes that God has put eternity in man’s mind, but we’re never going to be eternal like God.

We’re never going to be unbeginning. We are sometimes described as eternal by which we just mean everlasting, lasting forever, but that’s only in one direction, right? We go forward, we have a limited path. We didn’t always exist but we will exist forever. So we are everlasting, but we’re not eternal in the way God is where everything is simultaneously present for us. So what is the experience with saints and angels? Aquinas answers this about the angels and is actually clearer from the biblical evidence about the angels and it’s clear in this way that with the angels there’s one sense in which they’re like God and being unchanging as regards to their nature. They don’t get older. You don’t have older and younger angels. You don’t have angels having a bar mitzvah in heaven. You don’t have angels learning to drive. There’s none of this process of growth and aging.

They’re not metabolizing. They’re not eating and drinking and going through a bodily changes. There’s none of that. They’re purely spiritual. So in that sense, they’re unchanging. But on the other hand, they are changing as regards choice or changeable as regards choice. And how do we know that? Because the demons rebelled against God. They had a before and after. Before, they were in heaven. After, they were in hell. So they’re like God in one sense unlike us. Like us in another sense, unlike God in terms of changeability, so there’s somewhere in between. Aquinas refers to this as aeviternity or sempiternity, but it’s this middle place between time and eternity. So it might took me a while to get here because that is a weird … If you just say, “Oh yeah, you know the middle place between time and eternity,” it sounds really strange, really baffling.

But if you understand eternity is changelessness, temporality is this world of constant, perpetual, momentary change. What the angels, and it seems clear enough, the saints experience is something in between those two. The saints in heaven, they’re not getting older. They’ve encountered a kind of timelessness, but at the same time, there’s still some sense in which they’re like us and not like God in terms of choice, action, agency, all of this stuff. Whereas with God, the present, he’s not changing his mind, there’s none of that. So I hope that’s clear, but it means that the question of these two things happen simultaneously on earth, so doesn’t that mean Mary can’t hear them at the same time? It doesn’t really work as an objection. If that’s too philosophical, if that’s too highfalutin, I would say two things. Number one, well, you’re asking a highfalutin question. If you’re not content to take the biblical evidence that the saints are in heaven praying and you want to know, well, how is that possible?

Now you’re starting to ask philosophical questions, so you should expect philosophical answers. Second, if you want just like a clear image, you can just ask yourself this. Who’s more powerful? The saints are Satan? Why do I ask this? Because 1 Corinthians 6 tells us that we’re to judge angels, which suggests that there’s a hierarchy, that the glorified saints seem to be in a position superior to that of the angels and we know the angels are superior to the demons, but we also know the angels are ministering spirits sent forth to serve on earth and that the demons are prowling about like roaring lions seeking somebody to devour. That’s what Saint Peter tells us about the devil himself. And in fact, the Book of Revelation describes Satan as the deceiver of the whole world, Revelation 12, verse nine. So I find that many Protestants have on some level a very strange and kind of confused vision of spiritual realities.

And I’d say this, this isn’t everybody. But if you can imagine Sam and Bob, and Sam says, “I’m going to give my soul to the devil.” Okay, they’re ready to say the devil hears that. He’s going to show up and he’s going to try to make a deal. But then Bob says, “I’m going to give my soul to Jesus and I ask Mary to pray for me.” Then these same protestants will say, “Well, yeah, the devil can hear you but Mary can’t. And in fact in asking Mary to pray for you, the devil’s going to also show up over there.” Why? I mean, if the idea is that the glorified saints are more powerful than the angels who are more powerful than the demons, why can the devil do a bunch of stuff all over the world and the saints and angels can’t? What logic is there in any of that? That vision of the spiritual realm is so topsy-turvy that it looks like the devil is more powerful than anybody else.

That is a profoundly unbiblical kind of idea. Go back to the Book of Revelation where Saint Michael, one of the angels, kicks them out of heaven. The angels are more powerful than the demons and the saints are given this position where they can even judge the angels. So if we’ve lost sight of that, if we’ve lost sight of how glorious and powerful the saints and angels in heaven are, then we’re left with a disturbing and evil vision of the spiritual realm that we should seek to amend. A parting thought on this, I know we’ve been going through some deep water. Maybe you find yourself in a place of agnosticism of saying, “Okay, maybe my conception of heaven has been too human and too bodily and hasn’t experienced the reality of the light of glory or the way that in seeing God they’re able to see and hear everything they need to it’s going on here below, but I still I’m not really sure about it.”

And okay, let’s take best case here. We can’t prove to a scientific certainty that they can hear you. There’s not just some Bible verse that says, “Here’s how heaven works and here’s how the angels are able to hear you or here’s how the saints can hear you.” Well, imagine you fall into a pit. You’re out with your friends and you get separated from them and you fall down a well and you’re thinking, “Well, well, well, I am at the bottom of this well. I am stuck. I need help.” Would you take seriously the idea, “Maybe I shouldn’t call my friends for help because I don’t know a hundred percent sure they can hear me.” Probably not. You’d probably call for their help because what have you got to lose? So likewise spiritually. Of course, you should be praying to God directly. You should go to Jesus with your prayers as your mediator.

But you’re also told to go to other people. If I go to you and say, “Hey, can you pray for me for this?” I don’t know to a scientific certainty, you’re not going to immediately forget to pray for me. That’s not an argument against me going to you though, right? So in other words, even if this was a much stronger argument than it really is, and it seems to me it’s not a very strong argument. Even if it was a much stronger argument about we don’t know how many of these prayers are actually getting through on the fax machine in heaven, that still wouldn’t really be an argument against praying to Mary and the saints because we do all sorts of things where we don’t know a hundred percent they’re going to be successful, including spiritually. Every time you go and ask another person, maybe they’re deeply mired in sin and God’s not going to hear their prayer, you don’t know that. Who cares?

It’s not the relevant question. You could even say maybe instead of praying for me, they’re going to ask a demon to curse me. I shouldn’t go and talk to … Just say no, these are irrational fears. This is not a rational reason not to do the thing you’re told, which is to make intercession for all men, 1 Timothy 2:1. And we see Saint Paul asking other people for his prayers. He doesn’t know whether they’re going to honor that request or not. But the model we have from scriptures do it anyway. So all that’s to say, even if you’re unconvinced of how the saints and angels hear you, because understandably it’s a confusing area, don’t let that be a hindrance to you. All right, that leads to the last objection because the one thing I could imagine someone saying in response is, “Well, maybe it’s not just useless. Maybe it’s actually dangerous.” Because then you would. If you’ve fallen into a well and you call for help and demons show up to torment you, then yeah, I mean, you probably wouldn’t want to call for help.

So is that a reasonable fear? Is that a reasonable worry? Here’s the argument from Jeff Laird. Now Jeff Laird works for a protestant ministry called Got Questions. This is actually written for the, I think a teen apologetics website, but it’s a guy who works for ministry I have heard of, even though I’m not familiar with this outreach. And I like the way he puts it because I mean, I disagree with everything he’s about to say, but it’s very clear how he says it. He says, “God makes it clear that praying to the dead is a serious sin.” And then he gives three passages. Deuteronomy 18, 1 Samuel 28, 1 Chronicles 10. We’ll look at all three of those. And then he makes three claims. He says, “Any attempt to communicate with the spiritual entity other than God himself does three things. Number one, it ignores a direct command from God.

Number two, it bypasses the best possible person to pray to in the first place, God himself. Number three, it opens a channel of communication with demons who hate and defy God and would love nothing more than to hurt you.” Now if you’ve read your Bible, I hope you know none of what you just heard is true. If any attempt to communicate with the spiritual entity does those three things, then Mary should have been rebuked for talking to the angel Gabriel. Because when he says, “Hail full of grace, the Lord is with you.” She doesn’t say, “Get back.” She talks to the angel Gabriel, she communicates with a spiritual entity, an angel. So does Zechariah, so does Abraham. Abraham doesn’t even see … Sacrifice of Abraham and Isaac, Abraham is talking to an angel he can’t even see in heaven. And so the idea that you can’t communicate with spiritual entities, he is completely profoundly unbiblical and this often leads Protestants to invent a new rule that you can speak to them, but only if they talk first and that’s completely a made up rule.

There’s literally no basis for that rule. Why is it demonic, if I start talking and angelic, if they start talking? What’s going on? It’s a bad argument. Nevertheless, I want to look at each of the passages because to get there, you have to misread and misapply a lot of scripture. There were those three passages we talked about earlier. Deuteronomy 18 is the first one. This forbids the following, “There shall not be found among you.” Number one, anyone who burns his son or his daughter as an offering, so don’t offer your children as demonic sacrifices. Number two, anyone who practices divination. So don’t do weird new agey, dark arts. Number three, a soothsayer. This is again, occult practices. Number four, an auger. I know of the Roman augers who used animal in trails to foretell the future. I don’t know if these are the same in the Hebrew context or not.

Number five, a sorcerer using magic. Number six, a charmer. Number seven, a medium. Number eight, a wizard. Number nine, a necromancer. So don’t raise the dead, don’t perform magic, wear a small or a large, don’t be a medium and don’t do sorcery. Now obviously what’s going on here is references to occult practices. Very obviously, right? You wouldn’t say, most of you wouldn’t say, “You’re not allowed to be a doctor because sorcery is prohibited.” Both sorcerers and doctors try to resolve medical issues with concoctions. Call them potions that they make. One of those is morally good. Saint Luke is a doctor. One of those is morally bad, the one prohibited, Deuteronomy 18. What’s the difference? One of them is using demonic powers and one of them isn’t. That’s the common thing underlying all of the things prohibited in Deuteronomy 18, 10 to 11 is they’re always relying on demonic forces to try to achieve some good.

So hopefully, it’s clear why that doesn’t have anything to do with asking the saints and angels to pray for you. But we’ll turn to the next one, 1 Samuel 28. I said we’d get back to this instance, this is the witch of Endor, and it becomes really clear what’s going on here. Because if you read the passage, Saul says, “Seek out for me a woman who is a medium.” He’s going explicitly to someone who he knows is a medium, and then he tells her what to do. He says, “Divine for me by a spirit and bring up for me whomever I shall name to you.”

So specifically, he’s asking her to use spiritual powers, not go to God and find out what Samuel has to say to me. But because he says God won’t answer his prayers, he’s going to the devil, he’s going to demons. The reason this is wrong is not that he’s talking to Samuel, God wants Samuel to talk to Saul. The reason this is wrong is that the way he’s getting to Samuel is using demons by using a medium. That’s abundantly clear and that’s even clearer in 1 Chronicles 10, the third of the three passages that Laird points to which says the problem that Saul died for his unfaithfulness, he was unfaithful to the Lord that he did not keep the command of the Lord and also consulted a medium seeking guidance and did not seek guidance from the Lord. So to think this applies to Mary and the saints would have to imagine that when you pray a rosary it’s like you’ve gotten a Ouija board out and you’re asking Mary to answer some questions for you so you can get around God.

In technical terms, this is really close to another dissimilarity. Now I mentioned Jeff Laird works for Got Questions and Got Questions actually occasionally has good articles, and one of those is on the difference between miracles and magic. Now, scholars will disagree about the definitional differences between them, but in the Jewish and Christian context, a pretty good difference is this one, that those words might mean the same thing to some people. There’s actually a vast difference between the two terms. It is proper to say that Jesus worked miracles, it would be wrong to attribute his works to magic. Basically, magic and miracles differ in their source. Magic has either a human or demonic source, but miracles are a supernatural work of God. That’d be even more specific and say magic has a demonic source specifically, like if you’re doing magic tricks or you’re just doing card tricks, that’s not a moral issue.

We call that magic. That’s not magic in the biblical sense. Magic in the biblical sense is trying to achieve something by going around God, by relying on spiritual powers that are not of God. That’s where you’re opening the doorways to the demons because you’re trying to. You’re trying to get around God. So notice magic and miracles can look very similar. This is clear from scripture. Exodus 7, God tells Moses to tell Aaron to turn his rod into a serpent, to convince Pharaoh to let his people go. And sure enough, Aaron does just that at God’s command. This is not magic. This is a miracle. But then Pharaoh summons the wise men and the sorcerers and they also, the magicians of Egypt, did the same by their secret arts. So you have demonstrated there in Exodus 7 that there can be one thing that’s of God, commanded by God, clearly working through God, that’s Aaron’s miraculous ministry, producing an identical looking effect to a thing brought about through the occult, through dark arts, through dark spiritual powers. Hopefully, that’s clear.

Just like if you have a headache, you might go to a witch doctor, you might go to a real doctor, and maybe they both cure your headaches, but one of them is doing it through human agency and one of them is doing it through demonic agency. That’s the problem, not what’s done, but how is it done. And if the how involves demons, don’t do that thing. So that’s what’s objected here. So go back then to the passage, the Laird’s objection rather. We’re told that any contact of the spiritual entity other than God himself does three things. Now first notice there’s no reference to that. You can’t contact demons. None of the things prohibited in any of the three passages he mentioned have anything to say about talking to angels. We see people talking to angels throughout the Bible. None of them have anything to say about talking to saints in heaven.

Those prohibitions literally do not exist. So number one, we’re told it ignores a direct command from God, but that direct command literally does not exist. Second, we’re told it bypasses the best possible person to pray to in the first place, God himself. But it doesn’t. The difference between magic and miracles is one works with and through God, one works around God. This is why that light of glory stuff matters. Because the reason the saints can hear your prayers and offer prayers for you is that they are in union with God. If the saints weren’t in heaven, right? If they were in hell, they would not be able to intercede for you. And so every Catholic knows this, whether they can articulate it in that way or not, the only people they’re trying to pray to are the ones who are in heaven, meaning they’re only going the right direction.

They’re not going the wrong direction. Now you might say, “How do we know They’re really in heaven?” Separate question. Basically, God’s not going to accidentally let you summon a demon any more than if you’re in a well and you call out for Jeff, “Jeff help me.” But Jeff’s now dead in hell and he didn’t know that he just died, went to hell. That doesn’t mean now a demon gets to come into your life because you didn’t know Jeff had died and gone to hell and you asked him for help. It doesn’t work like that. God’s not trying to trick you in some weird legalistic trap. So this is also a good reason to [inaudible 00:59:39] canonize saints if you’re really scrupulous about this. But we know that there are saints in heaven because we’re told that we have this cloud of witnesses in Hebrews 11 and 12 that are surrounding us and cheering us on as we run the race.

It’s okay to play to the crowd and say, “Hey, cheer me on. I need some help here.” You’re not summoning demons when you do that. In doing that, the only reason that works is because of their union with God himself. Now I’ve mentioned in the last video, but I’ll stress this again, it’s true that this is less efficient than just going to God, but prayer is not about efficiency. I know of a case of … it was actually a Pentecostal, where she woke up in the middle of the night and felt the strong need to pray for a stranger or not a stranger, like someone she didn’t know super well, started praying for them and then found out the next day they’d had some sort of medical emergency, medical scare. These kind of stories happen. I think a lot of people have these experiences or maybe know someone who’s had these experiences. You feel moved to pray for so-and-so and then you find out later there was a reason why you were praying for them.

That means that it was like, “Well, here’s this issue and then God brought it to you to pray to him about the issue.” Is that direct? No, but that’s how these things work. In Genesis, remember when God goes to Abraham to have him intercede for Lot and for Sodom and Gomorrah, that’s less efficient than if he were just to cut Abraham out of the loop and do what he was going to do. Efficiency’s not the right method to look at here. So the fact that it doesn’t bypass the best person possible to pray to, it relies on the existence of God. And the final thing about it, opening a channel of communication with demons. It’s just wrong. When Mary is talking to the angel Gabriel, it doesn’t give the devil permission to come and inhabit her body. That’s not how that works. This is just a strange anti spiritualism in certain parts of Protestantism. And it’s born in part out of a healthy desire not to consult demonic stuff, but most spirits are good, right?

Like a third of these stars fall from the skies in Revelation, which is understood and frequently to mean that a third of the angels rebel against God. So most spirits are good, and so just like you wouldn’t say don’t trust your neighbor because there are murderers out there and so we should shut ourselves off from our neighbor, you would also want to say we don’t want to have just an anti spiritual attitude because most spirits are good. Now that doesn’t mean accept all spirits, right? Test the spirits. That’s also true of the literal spirits. There are good and bad angels. They’re fallen and unfallen angels, but there’s no rule against talking to them. There’s no rule against talking to the saints in heaven. This is a made up kind of Protestant legalism. Okay, the last thing about … Oh yeah, I didn’t even mention this part, about consulting the dead. I’m going to just end with Jesus’s words on the subject.

In Mark 12, 24 to 27, in responding to the Sadducees, he says, “Is not this why you were wrong neither the scriptures nor the power of God? As for the dead being raised, have you not read in the book of Moses in the passage about the bush, how God said to him, ‘I’m the God of Abraham and the God of Isaac and the God of Jacob’? He’s not God of the dead, but of the living. You are quite wrong.” So if you tell me Catholics pray to the dead, Jesus tells you, you are quite wrong if you think that because the saints in heaven are alive, because God is the God of the living. It’s right there in Mark 12. So this isn’t consultation with the dead. This isn’t necromancy. We’re not raising the dead. There’s none of that. The saints, in one sense, you can talk about them being dead because they’ve bodily died, but in the real sense of the term, they’re more alive than you and I are because they’re in the presence of God.

So then the question isn’t, “Should we talk to the dead?” It’s, “Should those who are closest to God be people that we trust to pray for us or not?” And when you reframe it that way by realizing they’re not dead, but alive, when you reframe it, that is in light of what Jesus says instead of Protestant superstitions about spirits, then you realize that praying to saints and angels is profoundly biblical in its orientation, is taking seriously the notion of the body of Christ, taking seriously the notion of the saints in heaven are alive and interceding for us.

And that they’re able to hear us even though we don’t maybe necessarily understand how that looks because I have not seen and it is not heard. We know they’re experiencing something glorious. We know they’re godlike in their orientation to Christ. So given all of this, I’d strongly encourage you, if you’ve never done it, to really cultivate a habit of going to the saints and asking for their prayers because it’s spiritually healthy and good for you and the arguments against it are largely superstitious. For Shameless Popery, I’m Joe Heschmeyer. Hope you enjoy. Look forward to your comments. God bless you.

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