Publisher's Synopsis
Our glorious, sovereign God created and controls the universe in a way that uses the prayers of His saints to accomplish His eternal purposes. Thus, He sovereignly uses their prayers to release His preordained blessings, and by this means to manifest His glory in, through, and over all things. The Bible clearly teaches both that God is fully sovereign over every aspect of reality, visible and invisible, and that He carries out His predestined plan in a significant measure through the intercessions of the church.While limited human minds have never been able fully to comprehend exactly how these two Biblical truths fit together (i.e. divine sovereignty and effectual believing prayer), it is precisely when both truths are held together in faith that the most powerful praying springs forth and the greatest glory descends. This leads us to a crucial principle: True piety never makes the limits of its own understanding the measure of what it will believe and practice, but rather firmly holds to all that Scripture teaches, even when the combination of some truths is rather mysterious. For instance, the oneness and "threeness" of God; the two natures of Christ in one person; and the relationship of predestination and effectual prayer are all plainly taught in Scripture as joint realities, but Scripture never explains exactly how they are two sides of the same truth. Perhaps it would take mental capacities as big as God's to take it all in, and that is not our position.But it is our position gladly to accept and hold together in our faith and action that which Scripture has joined together. From that kind of intelligent submission to God's truth flows fruitful lives and the advancement of the kingdom of God.Let us examine two illustrations of this true piety which maintains together both sides of a truth taught in the Bible (such as God's total sovereignty and the believer's need to pray for blessing) and makes that the foundation of its action. We will look at an example of this sort of powerful and fruitful piety in the Old Testament, and then at one in the New.In Daniel 9:2, the prophet had been studying Jeremiah 25, and understood by it that God had promised to allow His chastened people to return home to Jerusalem after 70 years of captivity in Babylon. Daniel (who had been deported as a young man from Jerusalem to Babylon) counted up his years in that pagan culture and realized that as God's predetermined clock was ticking away, it soon would be time to go home. That, we might say, was the side of God's sovereignty, including His predestined purposes and changeless promises.Because Daniel believed this side of the truth so strongly (that what Jeremiah, by divine inspiration, declared God would do in the future could be nothing but thoroughly true), the elderly saint began praying in profoundest fervency for God to fulfill His promises. He did not think that since God had a predetermined plan for the blessing of His people, a plan no power could ever thwart, that he therefore could relax and do nothing, believing that God would handle it anyway. On the contrary, the prophet understood that the promises of God are given to His people so that they can pray them into execution. As C.H. Spurgeon once wrote, effectual prayer is essentially crying out to God: "Lord, do as thou hast said!" And that is exactly what Daniel did (see Dan. 9:3-19).There is no indication that Daniel asked the Lord why He did not directly carry out His promises without working through the prayers of the saints. Neither did he argue that since God is certainly all-powerful, He can have no need of or use for believers' prayers as a channel through which He releases divine power to win His victories. Chapter 10 of Daniel indicates that Daniel was so certain that his prayers were part of God's plan to fulfill His promises to bless Israel that he fasted and prayed for three solid weeks until the answer came.
