WOGminister said:
What I really want you to explain to me is why do you talk to the dead- when scripture commands us to have no contact with the dead (she is dead now you know) Read Lev 20:6. We are not to have contact with the dead (or familiar spirits)
So you object to asking our fellow Christians in heaven to pray for us by declaring that God has forbidden contact with the dead in passages such as Lev 20:6 or Deuteronomy 18:1011.
In fact, he has not, because he at times has given itfor example, when he had Moses and Elijah appear with Christ to the disciples on the Mount of Transfiguration (Matt. 17:3). What God has forbidden is necromantic practice of conjuring up spirits.
"There shall not be found among you any one who burns his son or his daughter as an offering, any one who practices divination, a soothsayer, or an augur, or a sorcerer, or a charmer, or a medium, or a wizard, or a necromancer. . . . For these nations, which you are about to dispossess, give heed to soothsayers and to diviners; but as for you, the Lord your God has not allowed you so to do. The Lord your God will raise up for you a prophet like me from among you, from your brethrenhim you shall heed" (Deut. 18:1015).
God thus indicates that one is not to conjure the dead for
purposes of gaining information; one is to
look to Gods prophets instead. Thus one is not to hold a seance.
But
anyone with an ounce of common sense can discern the vast qualitative difference between holding a seance to have the dead speak through you and a son humbly saying at his mothers grave, "Mom, please pray to Jesus for me; Im having a real problem right now." The difference between the two is the difference between night and day. One is an occult practice bent on getting secret information; the other is a humble request for a loved one to pray to God on ones behalf.
WOGminister said:
SO that brings me to question two- is she is dead how can she pray for you?????
Your question reminds me of another famous anti-catholic question. Let's take a look at Catholic Answers:
"How, then, can they listen to and answer thousands upon thousands of petitions made simultaneously in many different lands and in many different languages? Many such petitions are expressed, not orally, but only mentally, silently. How can Mary and the saints, without being like God, be present everywhere and know the secrets of all hearts?" (Roman Catholicism, 142-143).
If being in heaven were like being in the next room, then of course these objections would be valid. A mortal, unglorified person in the next room would indeed suffer the restrictions imposed by the way space and time work in our universe. But the saints are not in the next room, and they are not subject to the time/space limitations of this life.
Further, the Bible indicates that the glorified human intellect enjoyed by the saints in heaven has a phenomenal ability to process information, dwarfing anything we are capable of in this life. This is shown by the fact that, on Judgment Day, we will review every act of our lives. But since Judgment Day is not going to take eighty years to review the events of an eighty year life (if it takes any time at all), our intellects will be able to process enormous amounts of information and experience once freed from the confines of this mortal life. And not only will we be aware of the events of our own lives, but of the lives of those around us on Judgment Day as well, for Christ stated that all our acts will be publicly revealed (Luke 12:23).
This does not imply that the saints in heaven therefore must be omniscient, as God is, for it is only through Gods willing it that they can communicate with others in heaven or with us. And Boettners argument about petitions arriving in different languages is even further off the mark. Does anyone really think that in heaven the saints are restricted to the Kings English? After all, it is God himself who gives the gift of tongues and the interpretation of tongues. Surely those saints in Revelation understand the prayers they are shown to be offering to God.
The problem here is one of what might be called a primitive or even childish view of heaven. It is certainly not one on which enough intellectual rigor has been exercised. A good introduction to the real implications of the afterlife may be found in Frank Sheeds book Theology and Sanity, which argues that sanity depends on an accurate appreciation of reality, and that includes an accurate appreciation of what heaven is really like. And once that is known, the place of prayer to the saints follows.
