"Do you pray for the dead?" ~ Ruminations on God's Sovereignty Over Time

"Someone asked me, 'Do you pray for the dead?' I said, 'No, I preach to them! I think every pew in every church is death row. Think about that! They're dead! They sing about God; they talk about God, but they're dead! They have no living relationship (with God)."
- Leonard Ravenhill -

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When I was noticeably younger,

I suffered from an attitude of disdain toward certain religious traditions. I espoused a neatly packaged systematic theology, largely fostered by having grown up in a predominantly Baptist tradition.

I discounted my Catholic friends who dared to pray for the dead. That seemed foolish to me. Is not the fate of the dead already sealed? Being dead, they no longer have opportunity for repentance, and thus are beyond hope.

Are the dead beyond hope?
Image courtesy of Brentwood/United Kingdom and http://pixabay.com

But are the dead truly beyond hope?

From a very hard core, traditional Baptistic viewpoint, yes, they most certainly are. As the Scripture says:

"...it is appointed for man to die once, and after that comes judgment..."- Hebrews 9:27

However, we the living are not without hope.

Older and (possibly?) wiser now,

I have lately come to see things a little bit differently.

God is sovereign over time.

He is not limited by our human constraints. Did not Jesus say:

"I am the Alpha and the Omega, the first and the last, the beginning and the end.”"- Revelation 22:13

Recognizing that God is not constrained by time,

these days when I recall some dearly departed friend, I have begun to pray for them after this fashion:

"Lord, I pray that you might have had mercy upon my friend Bob C., and that you may have rescued him from eternal death and granted him your gift of eternal life."

In other words, when I pray, I express my desire and intention to the LORD for his mercy and grace to—before their earthly death occurred—have already been administered to friends whose outcome may be in doubt.

I have come to believe that such prayers are as effective as the ones that I prayed for them while they were still living. Although I am confined to this slowly progressing timeline, Jesus/God is certainly not. He is quite capable of hearing my prayers in the present and acting on them in the past.

And so I continue to have hope for Bob C., Joel S., Larry H., Eric F., Uncle Martin, and other friends and loved ones who were kind blessings to me while they were still living.

"Can these bones live?"
Image courtesy of [Mike Cook](https://pixabay.com/en/users/mikecook1-7596011/ and http://pixabay.com

Ignorance can be a blessing.

Even as the apostle Paul offers hope for unbelieving spouses in his first letter to the Corinthians, I believe that we can continue to live in hope for our departed loved ones.

We may not have seen the inception of faith in their life right up to the last moment, but ought to remember the thief on the cross. He found redemption in Jesus' grace at the very last moment of his life. How do we know whether God may have shed the light of his grace and salvation in the mind and heart of that loved one, even in their last moments on their death bed?

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~FIN~

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Don't Abandon Hope... "How do you know?"
Image courtesy of Wokandapix and http://pixabay.com

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