Praying for the dead?

[Harvey_Mozolak]

One of the thoughts I have mulled is...  What if u were praying for a sick person and they died during unbeknown to you.  Say they live elsewhere.  Are those prayers silly or in error or heresy or just prayers that God hears and wants to hear from his children.   Yes.  Harvey Mozolak

[Dave Likeness]

Harvey, when we pray for a person who is seriously
ill to recover, we always ask that God's will be done.
So if that person dies, then it was God's will that his
or her earthly life come to an end.  If that person was
a Christian, we can rejoice that their soul now knows
the certainty of eternity in heaven.

[Russ Saltzman]

"Harvey, when we pray for a person who is seriously ill to recover, we always ask that God's will be done. So if that person dies, then it was God's will that his or her earthly life come to an end."

Um, no. Recall that death is God's final enemy, as St. Paul asserts, along with sin and the devil. Death (cf. Oscar Cullman, "Immortality of the Soul or Resurrection?" - 1956) is the enemy of God and serves no purpose in furthering God's will for anyone. We were not made for death, nor death for us.

God's will is to restore to Himself all that "sin, death, and the devil" has stolen, and He will do it through Christ.

To pray at the death bed that God's will be done, we mean nothing less than to pray that God's ultimate, final will through Christ is done - in life and in death.

[Russ Saltzman]

As for the dead themselves, yes, we may pray for them exactly what we prayed for them in life: That they know the embrace of God's love through Christ. We may pray this, nothing less and certainly nothing more. If this is a Communion of Saints into which we have been baptized, it is a communion that must invoke the hosts of heaven.

"All I ask is that you remember me at the altar of the Lord," was Monica's plea to her son Augustine at the time of her death. ("Confessions of St. Augustine) There was no doctrine of purgatory, not as Luther rightly raged against it, and no sense of prayer somehow "improving" the lot of the dead. But there surely there was a sense that death did not sever our relationship with Christ and, by extension, our communion in Christ.

Hold your seat for a crass self-promoting moment: Read my Speaking of the Dead: When We All Fall Down, published by ALPB Books and soon available at the web site (though there is nothing to prevent you for ordering it without waiting, $16.00, 205 pp.