Praying to Saints is Unbiblical
The bizarre Catholic practice of honouring saints,
they are always canonised or recognised by the Church, has aided that religion
to have such tremendous clout over the world because it offers divine beings to
its audience which they can identify with. The lack of saints to be adored in
Protestantism has led to that faith not being as successful as Catholicism.
Saint worship appeals to the polytheist in people. They want more than one God
but don’t want to admit it.
Everything about saint-worship smacks of ignorance
and superstition. Saint worship is blasphemous if you believe in God.
The Bible says we will judge angels so this rules out the reliability of canonised saints for if angels need judging saints need it even more.
1 Corinthians 6
1 If any of you has a dispute with another, do you dare to take it before the ungodly for judgment instead of before the Lord’s people?
2 Or do you not know that the Lord’s people will judge the world? And if you are to judge the world, are you not competent to judge trivial cases?
3 Do you not know that we will judge angels? How much more the things of this life!
4 Therefore, if you have disputes about such matters, do you ask for a ruling from those whose way of life is scorned in the church?
5 I say this to shame you. Is it possible that there is nobody among you wise enough to judge a dispute between believers?
6 But instead, one brother takes another to
court—and this in front of unbelievers!
The New Testament left the religious world in a state
of shock with its doctrine that the Holy Spirit prays in us and if we can't pray
he does it for us and through him we pray to God as Abba - Daddy. That intimacy
makes no sense if you can pray to the saints. It makes less sense if you should
pray to the saints.
The Catholic Church engages in sophistry to get
around the Bible command that we must worship one God and worship him 100%. The
Church calls this worship Latria. It says Latria does not exclude dulia - the
worship of the angels and saints as friends of God. Dulia however comes from the
New Testament word douleia which refers to slavish bondage. The rationalisations
used to get around the biblical injunction to love and worship God alone are
bizarre. It is like God commands you to adore him only and the Church invents a
lesser form of adoration for the saints and says that is permitted and does not
contradict God's command. The give away is how dulia is not given to your
saintly grandmother or grandfather or priest or whatever until they die!
It is about seeking magical favours. People are turned into gods when they
are safely out of the way in death. It is repellent.
SAINT WORSHIP FORBIDDEN
Praying to saints is heresy according to the Bible
though the Catholic Church encourages this worship though regarding it as giving
lesser worship for full adoration belongs to God alone.
When the Devil told Jesus he could have all the
kingdoms of the world if he would just worship him his meaning was that Jesus
must worship him as owner of the kingdoms of the world and not as God. Satan
would have offered Jesus the universe had he wanted the worship due to God. So
Satan was looking for the inferior worship that Catholicism offers to the
saints. Jesus quoted the Bible saying it said God alone is to be worshipped.
Jesus said that this worship was forbidden because the Bible said so. He did not
say it would be wrong for the Devil was evil – you can give legitimate inferior
worship to an evil being. His point was that God alone is to be adored and there
is to be nothing that gets any worship but him Jesus said that only God was to
be adored indicating that Satan wanted him to continue praying to God and
adoring God but to give him some worship too. That was the reason for the only.
Ecclesiasticus 35 denies that you need a saint to
speak for you to God. If you are in trouble God will act. It specifies how the
orphan's supplication and the widows plea will be death with fast and sure by
God. It is your need that gets a response from God not your saintlinless.
Praying to a saint is supposed to be another way of
praying to God. But it is indirect.
It implies a rejection of God.
Jesus told a Samaritan woman who believed in God that
God is spirit and those who worship him must worship him in spirit and in truth.
What does worship God in truth mean? He explained that the Jews have the true
worship of God. Her religion did not. Why? Was it because it was approaching God
as understood by the Samaritan religion? If so, then God wants to be approached
as he is and not to be worshipped through the lens of any religion. He wants to
be worshipped directly. He does not want to be honoured through the saints.
Praying to him through saints is not focusing on
spiritual union with him. To worship God in truth and spirit means that you do
it without saints and images – you act like a spirit yourself in your worship of
the divine spirit.
Hebrews 4 says that as God did nothing but rest on
the seventh day so those who enter the salvation of God will do nothing but
rest. This forbids saint-worship for the saints just lie and bask in the glory
of God. They will not plead for us in Heaven.
The Bible and Jesus say that we are to love God with
all our strength and therefore others only for his sake (Matthew 22:37) so
strictly speaking there is no such thing as inferior worship in the biblical
Christian religion. Honouring the kind is just honouring God when it is only
done for God. To really mean to give inferior worship is to be an idolater. The
command bans it. The command was first given in the Law of Moses. The first
commandment forbids others Gods and the second forbids bowing down before
anything in Heaven or on earth and bans idols. This forbids giving any honour or
worship to images of God or the saints. It forbids honouring the saints for
bowing before them is as bad as doing it before statues. Worship is always
sincere or it is not worship. God will push such worship away like an
abomination. Sincerity is not enough for him. The Church says that praying to
saints is not against the first commandment for the worship they get is entirely
different and inferior to that given to God. But the Jews who turned to pagan
gods often would have thought the same thing that the gods were inferior to
Yahweh and were praying to Yahweh for them. Yet the law is clear that no such
gods are to be entertained.
It is silly to pray to saints for then it would be
the same thing to pray directly. God forbade silliness when he asked to be loved
with our entire mind.
If God has arbitrarily decided that he will not
answer certain prayers unless they are made to a saint then the Bible which
praises his unlimited generosity is wrong. He is just like a man who won’t let
people who wear purple into his house.
God has no right to do this when he promised to
answer all prayers maybe not in the way we expected but he will always do what
is best (Luke 11; Unanswered Prayer, page 2).
Haven’t we all prayed at least once in our lives for
us to have our lives filled with grace and temporal blessings? When we have
prayed that way he has to answer that prayer all our lives so there is nothing
that is conditional upon the invocation of any angel or saint. It is prayer’s
quality not quantity that counts (Matthew 6:7, 8). This theory accuses the Lord
of putting arbitrary notions before human needs and of breaking his promises.
If we want the saints to influence God for us when we
must pray only to the being whose prayers are the most powerful. The Bible says
this is Jesus (1 John 2:1). It would be a sin to turn anyone lesser such as
Mary, who is considered to be the only non-divine being who has the most
influence with God, and even worse to pray to anybody else. Imperfection is a
sin and God only tolerates perfection (Matthew 5:48).
Praying to saints is against the Bible which speaks
of a perfectly good and all-powerful God. In the Law of Moses, God ordered that
anybody who worshipped another God was to be dragged out and stoned to death.
The New Testament says that those who commit the sin
of idolatry, adoring other gods, close the gate of Heaven against themselves. If
you believe that this should not be done to Catholics or to anybody else who
prays to saints then you still have to believe that the saint-worship is one of
the things that should be detested above every other sin or evil for it strikes
at the main thing, God. It would be sinful to ignore this sin or evil to fight
others for to pass over it is to encourage it.
Irenaeus said we do not pray to angels and since he
never stated any conditions in which saint worship was right it follows that he
forbade dulia. Origen commanded prayer to God alone. These considerations prove
that the orthodox in the early Church never prayed to saints (page 43,
Traditional Doctrines of the Roman Catholic Church Examined).