Praying to people who have died and expecting them to hear your prayers is a form of comunication. It is not the same as asking a living breathing Christian who is alive in this world to pray for you. You have no way of knowing the person you have prayed to can hear your prayers or is even conscious of your request. Jesus is the only One you can pray to with confidence since He and He alone is our great High Priest and Intercessor before the Father. See Hebrews 4:14-16 as one of many examples.
**You have an incredibly narrow understanding of what it means to be the Body of Christ.
It is clear from Revelation 5:8 that the saints in heaven do actively intercede for us. We are explicitly told by John that the incense they offer to God are the prayers of the saints. Prayers are not physical things and cannot be physically offered to God. Thus the saints in heaven are offering our prayers to God mentally. In other words, they are interceding.And if the saints in heaven are offering our prayers to God, then they must be aware of our prayers. They are aware of our petitions and present them to God by interceding for us.
Immediately preceding 1 Timothy 2:5, Paul says that Christians should interceed: “First of all, then, I urge that supplications, prayers, intercessions, and thanksgivings be made for all men, for kings and all who are in high positions, that we may lead a quiet and peaceable life, godly and respectful in every way. This is good, and pleasing to God our Savior, who desires all men to be saved and to come to the knowledge of the truth” (1 Tim. 2:1–4). Clearly, then, intercessory prayers offered by Christians on behalf of others is something “good and pleasing to God,” not something infringing on Christ’s role as mediator.
As for your contention that it is ‘communication’ with the dead, Deut. 18:10–15 specifically indicates that one is not to conjure the dead for purposes of gaining information; one is to look to God’s prophets instead. Thus one is not to hold a seance. But anyone with an ounce of common sense can discern the difference between holding a seance to have the dead speak through you and a son humbly saying at his mother’s grave, “Mom, please pray to Jesus for me; I’m having a real problem right now.” The difference between the two is the difference between night and day. One is an occult practice bent on getting secret information; the other is a humble request for a loved one to pray to God on one’s behalf.
As far as those in Heaven ‘hearing’ our prayers, if being in heaven were like being in the next room, then your objections would be valid. A mortal, unglorified person in the next room would indeed suffer the restrictions imposed by the way space and time work in our universe. But the saints are not in the next room, and they are not subject to the time/space limitations of this life. This does not imply that the saints in heaven therefore must be omniscient, as God is, for it is only through God’s willing it that they can communicate with others in heaven or with us.
The problem here with you is one of what might be called a primitive or even childish view of heaven. A good introduction to the real implications of the afterlife may be found in Frank Sheed’s book
Theology and Sanity, which argues that sanity depends on an accurate appreciation of reality, and that includes an accurate appreciation of what heaven is really like. And once that is known, the place of prayer to the saints follows.
Maybe someday you’ll “get it.”**
