When Jesus Prayed, Was He Praying to Himself?

Tom: You are listening to Search the Scriptures Daily, a program in which we encourage everyone who desires to know God’s truth to look to God’s Word for all that is essential for salvation and living one’s life in a way that is pleasing to him.

For the last couple of weeks, we have been reviewing much of what the Bible has to say about prayer, or, to paraphrase the Apostle Paul, it would seem that we have been covering “prayer without ceasing.” We are using Dave’s book In Defense of the Faith as a syllabus because it contains some great questions on various subjects, including prayer, which people have asked him over his many years of ministry. If you would like to order a copy of In Defense of the Faith, Gary will tell you how you can do that later in the program.

Dave, let’s go right to the first question. “Luke tells us that Christ ‘went out into a mountain to pray, and continued all night in prayer to God’ (Luke:6:12And it came to pass in those days, that he went out into a mountain to pray, and continued all night in prayer to God.
See All...). If Jesus is God, yet it says He prayed to God, did He pray to Himself? And if He is God, why did He pray at all—especially all night? That sounds like He was desperate for help, which doesn’t reflect well upon Him as the supposed Savior of the world!”

Dave: Tom, that’s a good question and it’s typical of what an atheist would come up with. They are going to attack us, attack Christ, [and] attack God…

Tom: Well, Dave, not just an atheist. There are people—I am surprised in my discussions with lots of different people that, I hate to say this, but they are clueless. They haven’t thought about God, and there are simple things. “Oh, you mean that,” is usually a phrase that they use, and here we have Jesus who I am telling them is God, but now they have a situation in which, “Now, wait a minute, how does this work?”

Dave: Right. Well, Tom, as we’ve seen in the last few weeks, prayer is a tough subject. Why do we pray and then we say, “Not my will, but thine be done”? So if God’s going to do it anyway, then why do we pray? Well, prayer gives us the opportunity to have fellowship with God in what He is going to do to submit ourselves to His will. We talked about that in the past, so we won’t go over it, but it’s even more difficult seemingly with Christ.

Now, first of all, prayer is not just petition; it’s not just begging God for something, but it’s communion with God. So Jesus could…

Tom: By “communion” you mean…?

Dave: Well, talking with the Lord.

Tom: Communication.

Dave: Yes.

Tom: Intimate, personal communication.

Dave: Right.

Tom: Not just talking at him.

Dave: Amen. So, Jesus certainly would engage in that. But He also is our representative. He spoke of Himself often as the Son of man. He said, “The Son of man came not to be ministered unto, but to minister to others, to give his life a ransom for many.”

Now, you would read in Hebrews:4:14Seeing then that we have a great high priest, that is passed into the heavens, Jesus the Son of God, let us hold fast our profession.
See All..., for example, “Seeing then that we have a great high priest, that is passed into the heavens, Jesus the Son of God, let us hold fast our profession. For we have not an high priest which cannot be touched with the feeling of our infirmities; but was in all points tempted [now, we’ve talked about that in the past. That should be “tested”] like as we are, yet without sin. Let us therefore come boldly unto the throne of grace, that we may obtain mercy, and find grace to help in time of need.”

And in Hebrews:10:21And having an high priest over the house of God;
See All...: “And having an high priest over the house of God; Let us draw near with a true heart in full assurance of faith….”

So Christ is our representative before the Father, and on this earth he would have been representing us as well. He didn’t have to wait until He got to heaven. God willing, if the Lord spares us and the Rapture doesn’t occur, we may eventually get to John 17. What is that going to be? About another year and a half if we go at this rate?

Tom: You know we’re just going through the Scriptures as the Lord allows.

Dave: Right, but in John 17, there we have prayer. We are let into this secret. What does Jesus talk about to His Father? He is praying for His own, that we would be one as He is one. So I am sure that much of that prayer, if not most of that prayer, all night would have been on our behalf representing us.

Now that again takes us back to the whole issue. Well then, why pray? Man is going to make a choice. Why do I pray that some unsaved loved ones would come to Christ? In the final analysis, they have to make the choice. But I am asking that God would do everything—bring people across their path, work in their heart and conscience. So prayer is a mystery. Christ, I am sure, much of His prayer (and you would get that impression from John 17) was praying on behalf of his own. In other words, He’s not desperately crying out to God for help. He knows God’s will, He is in God’s will, so the person that asked this question probably is thinking of the kind of prayers they’ve heard.

Tom: Right.

Dave: But that would not be what Christ was praying to His Father.

Tom: Right. But this issue of, if Jesus is God, yet He says He prayed to God, did He pray to Himself? Now that takes us really into…we talked about the mystery of prayer, but the mystery of the Trinity that we as finite human beings can’t fully comprehend. Dave, there are a lot of good reasons for that.

Dave: Right. A major reason would be, and we’ve again talked about it in the past, but we can review very briefly. On one end of the scale, you have polytheism. You have a multiplicity of gods. You have no “head god.” Who’s going to control this thing? Even the gods fight one another, steal one another’s wives, and so on and so forth. On the other end, you have Islam. “Allah is one!” And most Jewish people think Jehovah, Yahweh, is one single individual. When we go to the Shema, that is really the heart of biblical Judaism, if we call it that.

This is Deuteronomy:6:4Hear, O Israel: The LORD our God is one LORD:
See All...: “Hear O Israel, the Lord our God is one Lord.” In the Hebrew, actually, it says, “Hear O Israel, Yahweh our Eloheim…” Eloheim is a plural form for God. “Yahweh our Eloheim is one Yahweh,” and the word in the Hebrew there is echad. It doesn’t mean a singularity, it means a unity.

You would have it in Genesis:2:24Therefore shall a man leave his father and his mother, and shall cleave unto his wife: and they shall be one flesh.
See All... where it says the man and the woman, “Adam and Eve became one flesh,” echad.

You would have it in Psalm:36:13
See All..., 2 Samuel:2:25And the children of Benjamin gathered themselves together after Abner, and became one troop, and stood on the top of an hill.
See All..., Ezekiel:37:17And join them one to another into one stick; and they shall become one in thine hand.
See All.... There in Ezekiel:37:17And join them one to another into one stick; and they shall become one in thine hand.
See All... it is, “Judah and Israel will become echad—one nation again.”

So this is not teaching singularity. This is teaching unity.

Now the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit: three Persons, one God. As you said, that is difficult for us to understand. We have, for example some…not good illustrations, but length, breadth, and height—space is made up of three. The length is not the height and the height is not the breadth. They are separate and distinct. Yet each one is the whole. You draw enough lines lengthwise you take in all the space.

You have past, present, and future in time. Each one is separate and distinct, and yet they are one. And there it is even more interesting, because the Father and the Holy Spirit are invisible, whereas the Son is visible and the visible manifestation, and that’s as it is with the present, which is the visible manifestation of time. It flows out of the future (that is the source), the Father; it goes into the past—that is like the Holy Spirit. You can reflect upon what time is, what it has done, and so forth, and learn from it. So even in heaven before He came to this earth as a man, the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit are in communion with one another.

Tom: That’s right. It has to be, Dave. If that weren’t a fact, then God would have been incomplete.

Dave: That’s right. You would have unity, but no diversity. So we have in the concept of God given to us in the Bible. Interesting—thousands of years ago, we have a philosophically sound concept of both unity and diversity. And this is why John, writing in his first epistle 1 John:4:8He that loveth not knoweth not God; for God is love.
See All..., I think it is, could say, “God is love.” You couldn’t say of Allah, “Allah is love.” No, Allah could not love anyone until he created other beings…

Tom: Exactly.

Dave: …if he really was God. The same thing with the Jehovah as most Jewish people conceive of is. But echad, the unity of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. Now, we have a God who is love in Himself. Father, Son, and Holy Spirit love one another, commune with one another. Allah would have to create other beings before he could experience communion and fellowship and so forth. So the God of the Bible is complete in Himself.

Tom: The self-existent one.

Dave: Right.

Tom: Needing no other.

Dave: That’s right. He didn’t need to create us, but He is complete in Himself. So, then it’s not surprising that Jesus on this earth would be in communion with the Father. But now He has become a man, and He didn’t cease to be God. We’ve talked about that in the past. In fact, I think we did a Q and A in our newsletter. Anyone who is interested in that could contact us. I guess Gary will give them the number.

But this is a mystery. Paul said, “Great is the mystery of godliness.” God is manifest in the flesh. How could God become a man? Well, He couldn’t become a stone; he couldn’t become a tree, obviously, like the pagans think. They worship stones, trees, and waterfalls. He couldn’t become a monkey or a lion, because there is a chasm between man and beast that no evolutionary process could possibly bridge. Man was made in the image of God, we are specifically told. Therefore, God could become a man. He didn’t cease to be God; He will never cease to be man. He is the one and only God-man. So, now as man—and you can’t separate these. He is God and man in one person, but still He is a man. The Scripture tells us—we read it in John 4, it says, when he came to Sychar’s well there in Samaria, he sat weary on the well.

He fell asleep in the boat in the storm. The disciples were upset. “Lord, don’t you care for us? We are going to perish.” And he says, “O ye of little faith….” But He had to sleep.

When He was a child in the home of Mary and Joseph, and Mary said, “Jesus, go to the well and get some water for us,” He didn’t say, “Wait a minute, who do you think you are ordering me around? I’m the creator of this universe. I mean, I just came here to kind of pretend I’m a boy.” I can’t fathom it, Tom. He was a boy, and yet at the same time, He’s running the universe.

So that is the picture of Christ in the garden. Now, we know there in the garden He is crying out in agony, “Father, if it be possible, let this cup pass from me.”

Now we gain another insight into the relationship between Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, and this is how we can understand what Jesus says a number of times. We’ve already come to some of them in John’s Gospel: “I can of my own self do nothing. Whatever the Father says, that’s what I do.”

Well, but when we get to John 16, we have the same expression about the Holy Spirit: “When he, the Holy Spirit is come, he will lead you into all truth, and he will not speak of himself….”

Now, I can remember when I was younger in the faith, many years ago, I used that as a verse to criticize the—well, we had some really wild Pentecostals. And when I was a boy, some of us boys, we would go around the corner to one of these Pentecostal churches. Tom, they are rolling on the floor. It’s wild, and…

Tom: Dave, we had the same across this creek that was behind. They had a church, and we were Roman Catholics. We never went over to the church, but we would go down to the bank and listen to the goings on there. It was just wild.

Dave: Yes, well, we peeked in. But they had a bouncer, and we’d run when he showed up. But anyway, they did talk a lot about the Holy Spirit, and I would use that. This verse, oh, when the Spirit is come—He’s not going to talk about Himself. No, that’s not what it says in the Greek. It says, “He will not speak on His own initiative.” Father, Son, and Holy Spirit do not act independently of one another. There is a unity. That’s what Christ is praying about in John 17: “That they [that is, we here on this earth] his people may be one as we are one.” Echad, there’s that echad again.

So when Jesus is talking to the Father, He’s communing with Him. You could almost say that this is a counsel and, “Now, Father, as a man, I’d like to escape what lies before me on the cross.” It wasn’t mainly the nails being driven in His hands and feet, but He was going to be the sacrifice for our sins. He would be made sin for us. “All the waves and the billows have rolled over me,” the psalmist said. That’s the waves and billows of God’s wrath against sin, and He would pay the penalty that His own infinite justice required for our sin. And His holy soul shrank from that.

Tom: Plus, Dave, it’s the separation.

Dave: Yes, there was a separation that we don’t understand. “My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?” He had to experience that. He had to experience the horror of eternal hell separated from God forever, and because He is infinite, He could experience that in those three hours on the cross.

So, Tom, I don’t see that the atheist has any basis for criticizing the Scriptures, or that He prayed all night would indicate that He was not God.

Tom: Dave, this issue, though, of praying all night, it’s interesting that somebody presents a question and our first reaction is, “Oh, I’m going to deal with this!” But if we really take our time and look at questions that people ask, they can be conviction in our own heart.

Dave: That’s right.

Tom: I’m not saying that’s the main thrust of the question, but the Lord can use that. And I—just us talking about praying all night, I’ve been involved with prayer sessions with other people, and I know when it says Jesus is chiding some of His disciples, “Can’t you pray with me? Can’t you…”

Dave: “Just for one hour.”

Tom: “Just for one hour.” And it can be a very difficult thing for us.

Dave: Yes, Tom. I’ve probably said it before on the program—when I was in the business world, the Lord had put us in a very large home, and we had more meetings in our home than most churches have. We had training sessions for evangelism. I would take them door to door and [do] beach evangelism. We had special discussions with foreign students. I would urge some of you out there, maybe there’s a university nearby—foreign students are very eager to get into American homes. Those of you that maybe don’t want to have a meeting, but you could at least invite them for a Thanksgiving dinner or Sunday dinner or whatever. Take them to church; they would be happy to go.

Anyway, we had discussions groups of foreign students, we had special meetings for Jewish people, we had a gospel meeting, and so forth. And, Tom, we also had all night prayer meetings. I can tell you, they were tough, but we did spend all night in prayer.

Now I’m afraid that maybe—well, there were urgent things to pray about, but I haven’t prayed all night in a long time. I’ll confess that. I have fasted for days in prayer. I have not done that for some time.

But it’s not that praying all night is more efficacious than praying for a short time. David, in our Berean Call, we talked about a prayer of David when he was running from Absalom and it was a very brief prayer, right to the point. “O, God, I pray that you will defeat the counsel of Ahithophel,” who was Absalom’s counselor, who was brilliant. David went to the heart of it; he knew what had to be done. It was very brief and to the point, and God answered that prayer. So we can make up almost a rule out of it—“Well, if you don’t pray all night once in a while, you know, you’re not really praying.” But Jesus, I know, was praying without ceasing. He was in continual communion with his Father. And the prayer, when we get to it in John 17, that didn’t take all night. That’s a shorter prayer.

Tom: You know Dave, this is really bad—well, I think it happens to some of us. It happens to me. I love God’s Word, but a lot of times when I begin to read it, I sort of lose track of it, or doze off or something…

Dave: You wouldn’t say you fall asleep, Tom. Oh my gracious! Listen, I can fall asleep on the phone, so I couldn’t blame it on God’s Word. I could fall asleep right now, you know that. You have to keep waking me up. And my poor wife, she can’t sleep at night in bed.

Tom: Well, I’m going to give you both of those, Dave. Because now, as I said, when I get into extended prayer sessions which you mentioned you have and I have, it’s hard for me to stay awake. Now, when I’m asleep and I wake up and I can’t get back to sleep, that’s when I pray. I mean, that’s not the only time that I pray…

Dave: Oh, this is your technique for falling asleep again.

Tom: I try not to bring that to my heart and mind. But still, there I am. I can’t get back to sleep. How am I going to use this time? Well, I’ll cry out to God for petitions for loved ones, for friends, and so on and so forth. Now you mentioned in…

Dave: I can guarantee you that Jesus did not fall asleep from praying.

Tom: No. But see, Dave, you said earlier, He’s our model. And the things that He did, this is what we want to do, and we need His help to do it. And it’s a struggle sometimes.

Dave: Peter says, “He left an example that we should follow in his steps.”

Tom: Okay. Now, you just mentioned an item that I would like you to talk about. We only have about two minutes left. Fasting. Now, this fasting—how does that work? Is that a methodology, a technique for now we are really going to get God to do something, because I’m fasting?

Dave: Well, James says the effectual, fervent prayer of a righteous man availeth much. I think fasting shows that this is urgent, Lord, and I’m going to put everything aside and I’m going to—well, what it does when you fast, it puts your fleshly side under control by denying the desires of the flesh.

Tom: Yes, you are talking about the physical needs that we have.

Dave: That’s right. And you get hungry, and you are tempted to go for some food. And it’s easy to succumb to that, because after all, what does it matter? I mean, the fact that I’m fasting, that’s not going to make my prayers be answered.

So I can’t explain it, Tom, but on some occasions I have fasted for a number of days because of the heavy burden of concern on my heart, and I just didn’t want to stop to eat. I just wanted to continue in prayer before the Lord. But that’s not a rule either. The Bible doesn’t require that. Our Father is very gracious, and we enter into his presence through the blood of Jesus, not by any merit of our own. And this is how we come to Him as our heavenly Father. No demands, resting in His love and in His grace, and desiring nothing but His will.