Mark Brumley answers a caller who wonders if there’s any amount of time we should wait after someone’s passing before we start asking for their intercessions, and what happens if they are perhaps not in a state to fulfill our requests.
Transcript:
Host: We go to Glenn in Battle Creek, Michigan. Glenn, you are on with Mark Brumley, what’s your question?
Caller: Hi, thanks so much for taking my call. My question is probably kind of simple for you. It is: how long do you have to wait until a loved one passes away before you would consider praying to them, in the sense that asking them for intercessions to our Lord?
Mark: I don’t think there’s any specified period of time, so as soon as you like.
Caller: Okay, the second half of my question there, just to kind of put a fly in the ointment is, what would happen if I’m praying for that person to intercede for me and they weren’t in the place that I had hoped they would be? What happens to that prayer?
Mark: Well, we have to assume that that God can handle that. God wants to utilize us to help one another, so He has established this way of acting in the world, obviously He has, we have natural causes and and human freedom in the world that we know; but over and above that, He’s decided that He’s going to allow prayer as a causal agent, as they say, as enabling certain things to come about, and that that prayer is going to include asking for the intercession of other people. So I can ask Cy to pray for me, I could ask you to pray for me, and that God can work through that.
But the fact that God can and does work through the intercession of others, whether we’re talking about Christians in this world or Christians who have passed on, doesn’t mean God is limited to acting in that way. So if we are asking the intercession for a person, and that person is not in a position in the next life, let us say, to give that intercession for which we ask, God is not bound by that. He can act in spite of that, so we need to keep that in mind.