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June 16, 2026 |
| Can Prayer Change God's Mind? | ||
Can Prayer Change God's Mind? I saw this question as the title of a YouTube video that I never watched. The answer seems obvious - yes - but that requires deeper understanding.
In this short study, we will answer that question more deeply.
Sometimes when our prayers are answered, if we look back to the chain of events that brought the answer to us, we can see the chain started before we prayed. Does that mean we didn't need to pray because the answer was coming already?
I am God, and there is no one like Me, 10 Declaring the end from the beginning, and from ancient times things which have not been done, saying, ‘My counsel will be established, and I will accomplish all My good pleasure’ (Isaiah 46:9-10)
Through Isaiah, God says that, from the beginning, he knows what the end will be, and he proves that by telling whomever he chooses whatever he chooses. We must never forget that whenever we discuss anything about God.
This means that at the moment creation began, God knew the outcome of everything. He knew every person who would exist and everything that they would do.
When God was planning creation, he was planning the end as well. When God created all that exists, he created the end as well.
This is too much for some people, even some Christians, to believe. They think that no being could know all of that, but they are thinking like humans. Satan also thinks this way, but he's not part of this study.
“For My thoughts are not your thoughts, nor are your ways My ways,” declares Yahweh. 9 “For as the heavens are higher than the earth, so are My ways higher than your ways and My thoughts than your thoughts. (Isaiah 55:8-9)
Getting back to our question, when we understand God in this way, we can see our prayers in a different way. Being human, we understand them in a time-ordered causal way, that is, we pray, then God hears us, then God acts because of our prayer, then our prayers are answered.
That isn't correct though. God knew you would pray that prayer when he was planning creation, and he created everything that exists so that your prayer would be answered.
God wants you to pray for the things you need. They motivated him to respond to them at the time of creation. If you hadn't prayed for them, he would not have built the answers into creation.
God wants you to pray for the things you need, because he wants to be the one you call on when you have a need. He wants to "have will heard" those prayers. I created a new verb tense there because English doesn't have a verb tense for that. That isn't such a crazy thing to do. The Bible uses a similar one that we call the Past Prophetic Verb Tense, where God speaks in the past tense about things that will be in the future.
Our question was: "Can Prayer Change God's Mind?" We now see that God didn't really change his mind. Changing your mind is like saying you didn't know the future when you set your mind, which is fine for us, but not for God. Instead God changed creation. From our perspective, those look like the same thing, but they aren't
Sometimes in the Bible, it seems like God changed his mind. One of those times is when God calls off the Angel of Death because David prayed for that. It seems like the Angel would have continued, except for that. But God knew that, if he sent the Angel to slaughter Israel, David would take responsibility and pray for mercy for his people. In the end, the Angel slaughtered all of the people that God wanted slaughtered, and God got what he wanted from David.
We now understand why it sometimes seems like the answer to our prayer was coming before we prayed. Of course it did. It always does. It's been coming since creation.