Question Corner by Editor

Pacific Press Publishing Company · Mountain View, California · Nov 28, 1906

FromSigns of the Times, Vol. 32, No. 46.

Question Corner

By Editor

1938.—What Roman Catholics Worship.

How many gods do the Roman Catholics pray to? How many have they, and how many have been created or made of late years?

Professedly they worship one God, yet they pray to or ask the intercession of a great many “saints,” how many we do not know. We are not keeping an account of the number. There would be no particular profit to us to engage in such occupation. It does not help one in the truth to learn about the theories of error.

1939.—Intercession of Saints.

Can the saints hear the prayers and intercessions by Roman Catholics? And if it is so that the Virgin Mary can hear all the prayers, would she not have godly qualities and be like God?

According to God’s Word those who have died know not anything. Ps. 146:3, 4 declares: “Put not your trust in princes, neither in the son of man in whom there is no help; for his breath goeth forth, he returneth to his earth; in that very day his thoughts perish.” The prophet Isaiah (63:16) tells us that Abraham is ignorant of us. Surely if any of the saints were living it would be reasonable to suppose that the “friend of God” was among them. The apostle Paul tells us in the fifteenth chapter of 1st Corinthians that if there be no resurrection of the dead then they that have fallen asleep in Christ are perished. Job declares that when a man dies his sons come to honor and he knoweth it not; they are brought low, and he perceives it not. Job 14:21. Therefore, according to the Scriptures the saints, unless it would be those who were raised from the dead at the time Christ arose, do not hear the petitions offered them. The Scriptures tell us that those who sacrificed their sons and daughters and offered sacrifices to the dead, really sacrificed to devils. Ps. 106:28, 37; 1 Cor. 10:20.

Secondly, on the supposition that they are all living, they could not hear all the petitions offered them unless they possessed omnipresence. For instance, there are shrines of St. Peter in a thousand different places in this world, on opposite sides of the earth, where at the same moment petitions are ascending from some devotee of the saint. Would St. Peter, if he were alive, hear all these petitions? Then he would be omnipresent; and if omnipresent, then he is God. The Virgin Mary has devotees all over the earth, who are seeking her intercession at the same moment constantly. Does she hear them all? If so, she also must have the very essentials of deity, but to thus clothe human beings is to put them in the place of God and thus profane His name and throne and deity.

There is still further a thought in making intercession to saints, one which in the very nature of the case brings resultant weakness to those who do it. It places God farther away, and in the mind of the one who prays makes the human being more merciful and kind than the Lord Himself. Why should men and women ask those once mortal like themselves to intercede with an all-merciful God, one whose mercy endures forever, one who is pleased with all those who hope for His mercy. Jesus said, “Come unto Me.” That means coming directly to Him with nothing between. The loathsome leper, whom everybody shunned, could come to Him and plead, “Lord, if Thou wilt, Thou canst make me clean;” and the Master, who is the same yesterday, to-day, and forever, put forth His hand and touched Him, and said, “I will; be thou clean.” If we are to pray to any being in the universe, why not pray to Him who is everlasting love and through whom all the love that dwells in every other heart must come.

1940.—The First Commandment; Prayers to Saints.

Does the first commandment or any other one allow us to pray to saints?

It needs but the reading of the Word of God to show the reverent believer that there is but one God, and Him only should we serve,—“Thou shalt have no other gods before Me,” or, as rendered by some, “besides Me.” And the second commandment forbids the setting up of any kind of image or likeness or form of anything in heaven above or in earth beneath to bow down to or worship. Even God’s mighty angel which had been with His people through all the ages forbade John to worship him, simply telling him that he was a fellow-servant with John and a fellow-servant with all his brethren the prophets, and that the prophet’s duty was to worship God. Rev. 19:10.

1941.—Observance of the Sabbath.

My thought is that the Sabbath is a day of rest; is it right therefore to ride on the street-cars and pay one’s fare? Is it not the same as making regular purchases on other days?

The Sabbath is not designed as a day of mere physical rest. It is resting from our own works and using the day as a day of pleasant activity in God’s service. The idea of physical rest came in because of men’s sins and the physical weaknesses consequent thereon. Yet in the service of the sanctuary the priests did double work on that day, offering two lambs in the morning and two in the evening, instead of one at each time as on the other days. When Christ, the Lord of the Sabbath, was on earth, He spent the day in busy activity for the salvation of souls. The Jews said He transgressed the Sabbath commandment. He declared, “It is lawful to do well on the Sabbath day.” What the commandment forbids is our own secular work. The divine commentary on that commandment is found in Isa. 58:13, 14, “If thou turn away thy foot from the Sabbath, from doing thy pleasure on My holy day; and call the Sabbath a delight, the holy of the Lord, honorable; and shalt honor Him, not doing thine own ways, nor finding thine own pleasure, nor speaking thine own words; then shalt thou delight thyself in the Lord.”

As to riding on the street-cars depends on the object we have in view. If we live so far away from worship that it is necessary to ride, we see no harm in using the street-car. It is not work of our own that we have initiated on the Sabbath, and we are simply using a public conveyance in serving the Lord. Yet in many cases a street-car is used where a walk would be just as well, and sometimes much better for those who took the exercise. Two or three miles’ walk is not far for a well person. There is danger on both sides of using the Sabbath as a day of pleasure or mere physical enjoyment, or in getting Pharisaical ideas of it so as to make it a yoke which we are unable to bear. God designed that it should be made alike a day of rest and pleasure, a day of true, sincere worship and fellowship.