We run our website the way we wished the whole internet worked: we provide high quality original content with no ads. We are funded solely by your direct support. Please consider supporting this project.
How Does God Hear All Our Prayers?
Q: At any given moment there are millions of people praying to God. How is it possible for God to pay attention to my little, silent prayer amidst all the chatter?
The reason you or I can only effectively listen to one person at a time is because we only have a limited amount of attention to spread around, due to our limited brain power. If two people are talking to us at the same time, we have to divide our limited attention between the two, which means we can’t attend to either person very effectively. But God does not have limited brain power or limited attention. In fact, he has infinite (unlimited) brain power and attention. Since you can’t fraction infinity (a third of infinity is still infinite), this means that God can listen to each and every one of a trillion people talking to him as though EACH ONE were the ONLY one. He doesn’t have to spread his attention thin to cover all the individual prayers.
So, when you talk to God you rest assured that ALL his attention is on you, as though you were the only person he created. It’s just that, being the great God that he is, the same is true for each of the other million people talking to him at that very same moment.
Category: Q&A
Tags: Christian Life, God, Prayer, Q&A
Topics: Hearing God, Prayer
Related Reading
What is the significance of Jeremiah 32:35?
As in Jeremiah 19:5, the Lord expresses his dismay over Israel’s paganism by saying they did this “though I did not command them, nor did it enter my mind that they should do this abomination.” If this abomination was eternally foreknown to God, it’s impossible to attribute any clear meaning to his confession that this…
What is the significance of 2 Chronicles 32:31?
“God left [Hezekiah] to himself, in order to test him and to know all that was in his heart.” God tests his covenant partners to discover whether they will choose to remain faithful to him, an exercise that is absurd if God exhaustively foreknows exactly how faithful every person will choose to be. If the…
What makes the claim that Jesus rose from the dead unique?
Question: What makes the story of Jesus’ resurrection different from other pagan resurrection stories, such as those surrounding the Egyptian god Osiris? Answer: In Lord or Legend? (and more academically, The Jesus Legend), Paul Eddy and I address this, and many other, objections to faith in Jesus. I encourage you to check either of these…
The Image That Transforms
With the Advent of Jesus, we see the icon of God, the One in whom the otherwise invisible God is seen. The word icon comes from the Greek word for “image” (eikon). While it is idolatrous for humans to make and worship icons of God (Lev 19:4; 26:1), it’s certainly not idolatrous for us to…
Is Open Theism Incompatible With a Chalcedonian Christology?
Question: The Chalcedonian Creed says Jesus was “fully God and fully human” and that these “two natures” remained distinct in the Incarnation, even though Jesus was one united person. I’m told that part of the reasoning behind the concern to keep Jesus’ humanity distinct from his divinity was to protect the “impassibility” of the divine…
If God anticipates each possibility perfectly, how does he differ from the “frozen God” of classical theism?
Question: If God anticipates each and every possibility as if each were only possibility, how does God ever experience novelty and adventure? It seems that a God who perfectly anticipated (from all eternity) every single possibility as if it were the only possibility would not differ from the timeless “frozen God” of classical theism Answer:…