Praying to Mary or to any Saint in Heaven
By Tim Staples
Staples has been exposed as a specious sophist of RC propaganda, and i doubt he has anything new, and I will post what i did on a concurrent thread here (Praying to Saints? - Praying to those who are already in Heaven?) of desperate Catholics seem to think constant posting of such propaganda will make it true.
When the Holy Spirit inspires approx.
200 prayers in Scripture and instructs us to prayer after this manner, "Our Father who art in Heaven," to whom believers have direct access to in the holy of holies in Heaven by the blood of Christ, (
Hebrews 10:19) who is the only heavenly intercessor btwn God and man (
1 Timothy 2:5), who is the only one said to ever live to do so, (
Hebrews 7:25) and never shows created being having the ability to hear all prayer, and nowhere records any prayer/supplication to anyone else in Heaven but the Lord - except by pagans - despite there always being plenty of created being in Heaven to pray to, and despite prayer to created beings being a most basic common practice by Catholics;
then we can be sure praying to created beings in Heaven is not Scriptural, and to do so it is impugn the Spirit of God for only showing prayer made to God, and only teaching that prayer to God is addressed to God.
Prayer to created beings in Heaven (PTCBIH) is simply another of the Catholic distinctives that are
not manifest in the inspired record of what the NT church believed and practiced (Acts onward, which is interpretive of the gospels) and here is absent from the entire body of inspired Scripture.
Although the weight of Scriptural warrant is not the basis for the veracity of Catholic doctrine, and what "The Catholic Church" says is to be the supreme law, in condescension to those to test what is taught by the inspired writings, as the noble Bereans did, (Acts 17:11) and not vice versa, Catholics will desperately attempt to support PTCBIH by reasoning that since we ask each other to pray for us on earth then we can do so of those in Heaven.
But only God is shown able to hear all prayer and is the only one appealed to as able to do so, and "only knowest the hearts of all the children of men," (
1 Kings 8:39;
2 Chronicles 6:30; Acts 1:24) and from what I recall any two-way communication btwn created beings required both to somehow be visibly in the same place, versus believers praying "hear Thou from Heaven"
2 Chronicles 6:21,23,25,27,30,33,35,39).
Catholics also vainly imagine that Angels and elders offering up prayers in Heaven (
Revelation 5:8; 8:5) somehow supports praying to them, but which is not what is shown, nor even that they knew the express contents of these prayers before hand, and rather than this offering of prayers being some continuous postal service, they are offered in memorial before the judgments of the last days (Rev. 5:8 and 8:3,4; f. Lv. 2:2,15,16; 6:15; 24:7; Num. 5:15)
For when "He maketh inquisition for blood, he remembereth them: he forgetteth not the cry of the humble. (Psalms 9:12; cf. Genesis 4:10) and before judgment God brings forth testimony of the warrant for it, which includes the cry of those martyred souls under the altar in Rv. 6:9, and with odors representing prayer, akin to
Leviticus 6:15, "burn it upon the altar for a sweet savour, even the memorial of it, unto the Lord." (
Leviticus 6:15)
Another attempt to invoke
Genesis 48:16, taking it out of context, in which the addressee is God, before whom my fathers Abraham and Isaac did walk, the God which fed me all my life long unto this day, (
Genesis 48:15) who is addressed as an angel, as in other examples of angelophanies (cf.
Genesis 32:22-30 ,
Hosea 12:4; Acts 7:30) who "redeemed me [Joseph] from all evil," which manifestly was God. Joseph is not changing the addressee from God to an anonymous angel, but is addressing God as an angel.
Another and egregious example is that of using such as texts "Praise ye him, all his angels: praise ye him, all his hosts" (
Psalms 148:2) to support praying to angels. However, this also ignores context for to be consistent, contextually the Catholic must also affirm praying to created elements is also encouraged:
Praise ye him, sun and moon: praise him, all ye stars of light. (
Psalms 148:3) Praise the Lord from the earth, ye dragons, and all deeps: Fire, and hail; snow, and vapour; stormy wind fulfilling his word: Mountains, and all hills; fruitful trees, and all cedars: Beasts, and all cattle; creeping things, and flying fowl: (
Psalms 148:7-10)
Catholics also employ in the specious hermeneutic that if God does not specifically explicitly disallow something then it may be sanctioned, as if the Spirit of God would actually fail to provide actual examples of PTCBIH while providing approx. 200 prayers, and yet recording that of such by pagans, and only instructing and exampling prayer to God in Heaven.