Help With Prayer - If God Knows Everything, Why Should I Pray?

 In some sense, it seems that God knowing everything would make prayer of any kind irrelevant. Perhaps you've had the discussion: "If God already knows what is best, won't He do that regardless of what I say to Him?" This particularly becomes an issue if we think of God in Platonic terms - the Unmoved Mover, the All-Knowing, the One Who Always Does What He Has Determined From Before All Time That He Will Do.

I'm not convinced, though, that is how God thinks of Himself.

On a Tuesday evening in late August 2001 at the Village Vanguard in Greenwich Village, Wynton Marsalis was soloing on the ballad "I Don't Stand a Ghost of a Chance with You." Just as he reached the climax of his solo, a cell phone rang in the audience - and he lost them. The audience started to chatter, and a critic wrote on his notepad in capital letters, "MAGIC RUINED!" In his book, Finding the Groove, Robert Gelinas notes, "Marsalis improvised. He played the notes of the cell phone ring tone - slow, fast, and in different keys - and when all ears were back on him, he seamlessly transitioned the silly cell phone tune back to the ballad and finished the song. In the words of the jazz critic, 'The ovation was tremendous.'"

In the United States, when we meet someone for the first time, we almost always ask, "What do you do?" The answer gives us a sense of what the other person is all about. Well, when we meet God for the first time, he is not the static, all-knowing, omnipresent god of Plato - but a God who is creating. He creates the heavens and the earth and then begins shaping them; taking what He has given Himself and modifying it. Apparently, God wants our first impression of Him to be that He is someone who loves making stuff.

So, what if God knows everything in the way that Marsalis knew the end he wanted to create for his ballad? What if God's all-knowing is a creative omniscience? An improvising omniscience? What if God is even more creative than Wynton Marsalis? Perhaps our prayers are like cell phone interruptions that God weaves into the song He is creating with the universe, the stars, the people, and the creatures? Perhaps our little cell phone interruption is just what He needs to set a counterpoint to the wind in the leaves in the spring? When we interactively ask for help, and try to modify the world around us with our questions and our prayers, what if we are participating in the call and response of a jazz-like improvised creation?

I realize this response does not address the underlying question of whether or not we have free will. Maybe that question cannot be resolved - but it sure feels like we have free will, and God treats us as if we have free will. So we might as well treat prayer as if we have free will whether it's true or not.

And on a purely philosophical and logical level, arguing that we need not pray because God already knows everything accomplishes too much. For in fact if God knows what's going to happen then He also already knows we are going to pray or are not going to pray. He has already factored your prayer or lack thereof into His choices. The argument becomes unendingly recursive, and incapable of resolution.

But if God is not the god of Plato, but the creative God presented in Scripture, then maybe, just maybe, He wants to use our prayer as part of His improv. As part of His jazz. As part of His plan to co-create reality with us. Maybe, what God wants is for us to add our little cell phone music to His ongoing ballad of love and delight - so that as jangled and as discordant as our contribution may be, the Great Master of improv can receive the ovation He really, truly is entitled to.

Article Source: Dr. Richard Griffin