“Prayer is not overcoming God’s reluctance,” says Martin Luther, “but laying hold of his willingness.” When we pray, we do not change the mind of God as if he might have chosen wrongly. We act out the infinite wisdom of God, in the midst of all the brokenness in front of us, and welcome the inscrutable goodness he had always planned to do through our prayers.

Few truths have proved as precious to me as the sovereignty of God over all things.

The longer I walk with him, the more comfort I find in passages like these from Isaiah:

I am God, and there is none like me, declaring the end from the beginning and from ancient times things not yet done, saying, “My counsel shall stand, and I will accomplish all my purpose.” (Isaiah 46:9–10)

The Lord of hosts has sworn: “As I have planned, so shall it be, and as I have purposed, so shall it stand.” (Isaiah 14:24)

I experience stability, refreshment, and contentment knowing I have been “predestined according to the purpose of him who works all things according to the counsel of his will” (Ephesians 1:9–11).

As many of us first discover the sovereignty of God on page after page of the Bible, however, a strain sometimes emerges (in our immature thinking) between what he has planned and how we pray. Why would I pray if God has already planned what will happen? Our prayers can begin to feel small, peripheral, even unnecessary next to the vastness of all that God will inevitably do. He will accomplish his purpose, we might think, whether I pray or not. We wonder what difference our prayers might really make.

Where Prayerlessness Leads

While we, as modern people, may feel some tension between the sovereignty of God and prayer, desperate, faithful, praying saints in Scripture do not seem to share our struggle — and God certainly is not afraid to intimately knit his sovereignty and prayer together, especially in times of serious need. In fact, in some of the tensest moments, the two lean and rely on each other, as if God were holding them up to our face, saying, “See!”

We could listen closely to Moses’s prayer that really saved the people from the fury of God’s righteous wrath (Exodus 32:11–14), or marvel again at Joshua really stopping the sun in the heat of battle (Joshua 10:12–14), or watch Jonah really pray his way out of his grave in the belly of the fish (Jonah 2:1–10), but at least one other desperate situation really accentuates the preciousness of God’s sovereignty for prayer.

When Hezekiah was king of the southern kingdom called Judah, before the nation was sent into exile, the Assyrians assaulted Jerusalem until the people were left utterly hopeless (Isaiah 36:1). Because Ahaz, the wicked king before Hezekiah, had refused to seek the Lord’s help (2 Chronicles 28:24–25), Judah was now firmly lodged between a rock and a horrifying enemy. How much of Israel’s tortured history is meant to warn us about the awful price of prayerlessness — of looking anywhere but heaven for the help we need most? Hezekiah had done what was right (2 Chronicles 31:20–21), trying with all his might to undo what had been done, but they were still forced to eat the awful fruit Ahaz had left behind.

The Assyrian ambassador, called the Rabshakeh, taunted Judah, “Beware lest Hezekiah mislead you by saying, ‘The Lord will deliver us.’ . . . Who among all the gods of these lands have delivered their lands out of my hand, that the Lord should deliver Jerusalem out of my hand?” (Isaiah 36:18, 20). While they were left begging on the precipice of starvation, the messenger humiliated them (Isaiah 36:12). Their dreadful end was sure and soon, and probably worse than any of us could imagine.

What God Promises

So, with everything to fear and nowhere else to go, Hezekiah did what good kings do: he turned to God. He sent for the prophet Isaiah, seeking mercy and help from above. And despite all the evil the previous generation had done, God listened to their prayer, and went to war for them. Isaiah answers,

Thus says the Lord: Do not be afraid because of the words that you have heard, with which the young men of the king of Assyria have reviled me. Behold, I will put a spirit in him, so that he shall hear a rumor and return to his own land, and I will make him fall by the sword in his own land. (Isaiah 37:6–7)

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