With a long, overdue message to a university professor…

Texas State University in San Marcos, between Austin and San Antonio, was known as Southwest Texas University during the summer of 1976. Barely beginning my junior year, a significant paradigm challenge and among the first major attempts at indoctrination took place in a Flowers Hall Sociology class.

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“Is God so powerful, that He can create a rock so heavy even he can not lift it up over His head?” our professor asked the class.

Several classmates attempted to answer but were torn into by the professor’s stern logic.

I took a moment to bow my head.

A girl in the desk to my left, did the same. Several others also followed.

“Oh, come on now, please spare me,” he theatrically clinched his two fists together and began shaking them below his waste. “What do you believe? Did your Jesus, your God, shake himself like this and spew out a universe?”

The girl next to me picked up her belongings and walked out into the hallway. He slammed the door behind her.

“Any of you children, still sucking your momma’s teats, after this had better get out now and prepare to drop out for good.”

A few students walked out and politely closed the door behind themselves.

He turned to us and sarcastically asked, “So how does this Jesus purport to be the almighty God anyway? When he prays to God is He praying to himself?”

Of course, gullible as some of us were, none of us had the knowledge and ability to debate him. The professor’s word was the final discussion and ruling on the subject. I’m guessing he voted for William Jefferson Clinton later that year, and if still around, voted for Joe Biden and the likes of Beto O’Rourke in 2020.

Decades later, I know the answer to the mad professor’s question.

How could the prayer of Jesus to the Father be the same as us praying to the Father when he demonstrated to us that he himself answers our prayers in John 14:13?

WHATEVER YOU ASK IN MY NAME, THIS I WILL DO, THAT THE FATHER MAY BE GLORIFIED IN THE SON.

John 14:13

Now if we took the professor’s meaning of prayer, we were limited in our ability to debate him. His term for “pray” really just means a human speaking to God. Of course, this wouldn’t make sense because Jesus himself says He answers our prayers.  So if Jesus can answer our prayers, He couldn’t be just human.  

The fact that He can answer the prayers of humans, yet prayed Himself, shows both that HE IS GOD and that His prayer to the Father is of a different nature than ours.

A human being can’t both answer human prayers and pray to the Father as a human being.  Either he can’t answer prayers (but He can), or His prayer is not just a human-to-God interaction.  So the fact that Jesus can answer prayers proves that He is God while also being able to talk with other persons in the Godhead.

Along the years, I read this statement when studying the Bible:

“that will I do; he does not say, that he would be a Mediator between God, and them, an advocate with the Father for them, and would intercede, and use his interest with him that it might be done, which would have been saying much, and all which he does; but he declares he will do it himself, which is a proof of his deity, and an instance of his omnipotence.”

Jesus’ prayer does not negate his Deity

🔹The word pray does not always have to mean a communication between God and Man.

🔹Jesus used the term “pray” as being a dialogue between two individuals of the same essence.

🔹One of the methods of instruction employed by Christ was leading by example. Hence if Jesus prayed, then all the more should we.

🔹If Christ prayed to the Father in like manner to our appeals and requests to God , then it wouldn’t make any sense because Jesus said that He, himself, could answer our prayers.  

🔹If He can answer our prayers, He must not be separate from God.  

🔹If He can answer our prayers, His prayer to the Father is of a different nature than our prayer to the Father.

Dear Professor, There is no contradiction between Jesus praying and the idea of Him being a member of the Trinity, (the Father, Son and Holy Spirit), the Word made flesh.

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