Which is also the repayment, if you will, from 2 Th 1:11 where the author writes, we always pray for you. In 2Th 3:1, the author writes, finally brothers, pray for us. Along about the 15th chapter of Romans, he asks the people to join him by their prayer to the Father on his behalf. We can start with the fellow who did the most to evangelize in the earliest of times, Paul. They are not praying to the picture, it is nothing more than a reminder of the person for whom they are making an intercessory prayer to the Father. What may well be happening is that the parent is staring at a picture while in prayer to the Father, asking Him to protect Bev or Brad as they prepare for, undergo, or recover from an operation that will be performed in a couple of hours. Are these idols? If a person takes out a photograph of a child and stares at it to the point of appearing to be transfixed on the image, is that image an idol? Many people carry 4 or 7 or 12,539 pictures of their parents, spouse, children, and siblings in their purses or wallets. Were these “graven images?” Statues as photographs engraved cherubim, and all sorts of other stuff, such as flowers and trees, lions, and even pomegranates all over the walls. Check the sixth and seventh chapters of 1 King, the temple had bronze oxen. In both of these cases, the Father told Moses to fashion what could be misdefined as a “grave image” for a specific purpose, but He told him to make them.īy the time they got to the Promised Land and had built a temple for the Ark and all it held, they got very busy covering it with all sorts of images. Later, in the book of Numbers, He told Moses to make a bronze serpent and mount it on a pole, so that anyone who looked at it would recover from a snake bite in the camp. But, is it possible that God had a brain cramp and forgot what he told us to do in chapter 20 in Exodus when a mere five chapters later he told Moses to make a pair of angels out of gold to adorn the Ark of the Covenant? We each agree that we have been told by the Supreme Authority not to make a “graven image” or idol and pray to it, or serve it. In the case of a statue, the person praying in front of the statue may be simply asking to have that saint, intercede to the Father for a particular need, or concern. In this case, the entire congregation is praying to the Father that Fred be granted a speedy and full recovery. Let us pray for a speedy recovery for brother Fred?” Well, that is intercessory prayer. He came back with “I have never prayed that way.” Have you ever gone to church and had the pastor say something like, “I have been told, that this week, as our brother Fred Jones was carrying some groceries into the house, he twisted and fractured his ankle. Intercessory prayer is used by a tremendous number of people. The main reason people will pray before a statue, not at it, is to ask for them to intercede for us with the Father for a particular solution to a personal issue, or whatever it may be. Catholics do not worship statues, if you go into a church and you see someone kneeling in front of any statue, that is not worship of whomever the statue represents, Rather it is perhaps a veneration of the person depicted and a reminder to us all of what it is they went through, their trials, sufferings, burdens, etc. The other half of that command is “you shall not bow down before them or serve them”. My response was that he was essentially right with what he said, but that it was incomplete. He reminded me about the reference in the book of Exodus where the command was given to worship no graven images. The Bible tells us not to worship graven images yet Catholics have statues all over the place. A non-Catholic once asked me if it was true that Catholics worship idols.
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