Lord’s Library contributor Jared Helms offers a brief commentary on the danger of Godless prayer and how to avoid it. Check out Jared’s YouTube channel and two blogs: A Light in the Darkness and Blind Faith Examples, or send him a reader response email. Lord’s Library’s Ministry Leaders Series is a collection of contributed articles written by ministry leaders on key Christian topics.
Deuteronomy 6:4-5 is one of several places where God explained Himself to His people, only He was God as such He alone was to be worshipped see verse: “Hear, O Israel: The LORD our God is one LORD: And thou shalt love the LORD thy God with all thine heart, and with all thy soul, and with all thy might.”
However, Israel was prone to neglect this reality as it suited them. They had forsaken God for the golden calf, and would soon enough forsake Him for all the idols whose’ people He had driven out of the land of promise. Time and time again god’s people abandoned Him for others who did not hear or answer prayers.
It seems odd to us, even ridiculous that these people who had seen the effect of praying to the one true God would so often turn to false gods instead. We would think after so many times praying to worthless idols and being on the brink of disaster only to be delivered when God Himself intervened they would learn. Yes, it seems after a while people would figure out that who you pray to is important.
The Danger of Godless Prayer
We have defined prayer as communication with God, and by that definition any communication not involving God is not prayer. Simple enough, until we involve the idol factory which is the human heart. There is only one God eternally existing in Three Persons: Father, Son, and Holy Spirit; but there are countless knock-offs sprung forth from our imaginations.
Some of the counterfeits are fairly easy to spot like the mother of God or the spirit without personality. Others are harder to detect like the Jesus who was made in the image of a red-blooded American male, or a middle-aged suburban housewife. “Our god” is easily substituted for God, and we go on talking to this imaginary friend, and getting increasingly disillusioned as our “prayers” seem to fail. Well, of course, such prayers fail as “our god” does not exist.
The origins of “our god” often lie in our true desires. If we come to God for wealth, health, or status then God is not our god, the object we seek is. So, to satisfy our true desires we instinctively edit reality to make a god that serves our object of worship. We want money so we come up with a god that will certainly give us money.
That is the allure of idols, they can be tamed and controlled. Idols operate on principles we set ourselves. God does as He sees fit and laughs at the opposition of the nations, according to Psalms 2. Any god we could bend to our will is not God. It is not He who needs to heed our will, but we who need to heed His.
It does not matter if an idol is radically different from the true and living God, or only subtly and minutely different from the true and living God, any prayer offered to anything but the one true God is nothing. Such godless “prayer” is a vanity of thought that can affect nothing but our own sensation. I do not mean to be harsh, only to be perfectly honest.
The chief matter in prayer is to know who we are praying to. It is the persons who receive our prayers that make them effective. It is the communicating with the God of Scripture that accomplishes something. We need to take care that we are after the real God and that our deceitful hearts have not switched Him for some easily tamed golden calf.
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