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Friday, February 14, 2025

Praying to dead saints

 Praying to dead saints

1 Timothy 2:5

Hebrews 8:6

Heb. 9:15

Heb 12:24

When you pray, do not be like the hypocrites, for they love to pray standing in the synagogues and on the street corners to be seen by men

John 14:6 

Revelation 5:8

Revelation 5:8

Romans 8:27

Matthew 6:7

Revelation 19:10

John 16:23 

Philippians 4:6

Psalm 82:1-8

Psalm 82:1-8

Rev 22:8

Psalm 115

 

There two somewhat different things involved with this subject, 1) Praying to the saints who are no longer physically alive. 2) Asking the saints to intercede with God for us. These can often overlap in the minds and prayers of people.

 

The practice of praying through saints can be found in Christian writings from the 3rd century onward

 

The idea of praying to saints that have died was not known in the early church but started as shown above.

 

Here is an excerpt from Calvin’s work A Treatise on Relics that summarizes his thesis:

Hero-worship is innate to human nature, and it is founded on some of our noblest feelings, — gratitude, love, and admiration, — but which, like all other feelings, when uncontrolled by principle and reason, may easily degenerate into the wildest exaggerations, and lead to most dangerous consequences. It was by such an exaggeration of these noble feelings that [Roman] Paganism filled the Olympus with gods and demigods, — elevating to this rank men who have often deserved the gratitude of their fellow-creatures, by some signal services rendered to the community, or their admiration, by having performed some deeds which required a more than usual degree of mental and physical powers.

The same cause obtained for the Christian martyrs the gratitude and admiration of their fellow-Christians, and finally converted them into a kind of demigods. This was more particularly the case when the church began to be corrupted by her compromise with Paganism [during the fourth and fifth-centuries], which having been baptized without being converted, rapidly introduced into the Christian church, not only many of its rites and ceremonies, but even its polytheism, with this difference, that the divinities of Greece and Rome were replaced by Christian saints, many of whom received the offices of their Pagan predecessors.

The church in the beginning tolerated these abuses, as a temporary evil, but was afterwards unable to remove them; and they became so strong, particularly during the prevailing ignorance of the middle ages, that the church ended up legalizing, through her decrees, that at which she did nothing but wink at first.

https://blog.tms.edu/when-did-praying-to-saints-start

 

 

The Bible nowhere instructs believers in Christ to pray to anyone other than God. The Bible nowhere encourages, or even mentions, believers asking individuals in heaven for their prayers. … Why do they petition the dead to request their prayers? Catholics view Mary and the saints as “intercessors” before God. They believe that a saint, who is glorified in heaven, has more “direct access” to God than we sinners do from our earthly vantage point. In Catholic thinking, if a saint delivers a prayer to God, it is more effective than our praying to God directly. This concept is blatantly unbiblical. Hebrews 4:16 tells us that we, believers here on earth, have direct access to God and can “approach the throne of grace with confidence.”


There is absolutely no scriptural basis to pray to anyone other than God alone. There is no need to, either. Jesus, our Intercessor, has it covered. No one in heaven can mediate on our behalf except for Jesus Christ. Only God can hear and answer our prayers. The temple veil was torn in two (
Hebrews 10:19–20); the child of God on earth has just as much access to God’s throne of grace, in Jesus’ name, than anyone in heaven (Hebrews 4:16).

https://www.gotquestions.org/prayer-saints-Mary.html

 

https://www.gty.org/library/sermons-library/90-317/exposing-the-idolatry-of-mary-worship-what-the-bible-says

 

Queen of Heaven is a title given to the Virgin Mary, by Christians mainly of the Catholic Church and, to a lesser extent, in Anglicanism, Lutheranism, and Eastern Orthodoxy. The title is a consequence of the First Council of Ephesus in the fifth century, in which Mary was proclaimed Theotokos in Greek, a title rendered in Latin as Deipara or Mater Dei, in English "Mother of God".

 

https://werdsmith.com/genesology/VodjCBvxk   IMPORTANT!

 

Jeremiah 7:16-20

Jeremiah 44:17-25

1 Kings 11:5

 

https://www.jesus-is-savior.com/False%20Religions/Roman%20Catholicism/queen_of_heaven.htm

The goddesses Asherah, Anat and Astarte first appear as distinct and separate deities in the tablets discovered in the ruins of the library of Ugarit (modern Ras Shamra, Syria). Some biblical scholars tend to regard these goddesses as one, especially under the title "Queen of heaven".

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Queen_of_Heaven_(antiquity)

 

Who is the Babylonian queen of heaven?

She was known as the "Queen of Heaven" and was the patron goddess of the Eanna temple at the city of Uruk, which was her main cult center. She was associated with the planet Venus and her most prominent symbols included the lion and the eight-pointed star.

 

Is Ishtar the queen of heaven?

Ishtar, called the Queen of Heaven by the people of ancient Mesopotamia (modern Iraq), was the most important female deity in their pantheon.

 

 

June 18, 2017Craig Truglia6 Comments

The pagans believed that the souls of the dead, both good and bad, were deities of sorts. Essentially, good people became angelic demigods when they died, the wicked became demonic demigods, and those who were not quite bad or evil became a demigod of an uncertain nature. These demons can be prayed to in order to attain protection or blessing (akin to a guardian angel or patron saint) and also prayed for in the case that their afterlife is not in paradise.

https://orthodoxchristiantheology.com/2017/06/18/pagan-versus-christian-prayers-for-and-to-the-dead/

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