Angels from the realms of glory,
Wing your flight o'er all the earth;
Ye who sang creation's story
Now proclaim Messiah's birth.
With the refrain:
Come and worship, come and worship,
Worship Christ, the newborn king.
The verses that follow address humans who are now deceased (the shepherds of Luke 2, Simeon and Anna, etc.), who can be referred to as saints, in a similar manner.
Do we conclude that Protestants who sing the hymn believe in prayer to angels? And prayer to saints? And time travel, since the hymn uses the language of living at the time of Jesus' birth?
Of course not. We recognize that all three of those aspects of the hymn are rhetorical devices. On what basis?
We lack evidence that angels and saints would be able to hear our prayers, and there's evidence against it. And it seems unlikely upfront that so many people, the people composing and singing this hymn, would all be believers in both time travel and their own participation in it. Therefore, we'd need evidence to overcome the initial unlikelihood that people would be praying to angels and saints and believing in and thinking they're participating in time travel.
Additionally, we know there's a lot of precedent for people using rhetorical devices of a relevant nature in contexts like hymns. Interpreting the hymn under consideration that way wouldn't be something novel, an indication of desperation, or anything like that.
Furthermore, if Protestants believed in prayer to angels and saints and time travel, we'd expect those beliefs to show up in other contexts. And the nature of the beliefs is such that we'd expect the showing up I just referred to to be highly evidenced (how often Protestants would pray to angels and saints, how explicitly the beliefs and practices would be referred to, how much attention belief in time travel and participation in it would get, etc.). We'd expect such things to show up in theology books, apologetics videos, sermons, and so on. They don't show up in those other contexts.
To the contrary, we find evidence in other places that Protestants don't believe in the concepts in question. They oppose prayer to angels and saints, express skepticism of time travel, etc.
Because of such factors, we reach the conclusion that Protestants don't believe in praying to angels, praying to saints, or time travel, despite certain qualities of the hymn in question. It would be absurd to reach any other conclusion.
So, with such considerations in mind, what should we make of the citations of passages in the Psalms, like 103:20, to support prayer to angels? Other passages address inanimate objects and other people on earth, including enemies of the people of God, as if they can hear the psalmist and are expected to respond in some manner (97:1, 97:7, 97:10, 97:12, 103:22, 148:7-12, etc.). Should we conclude, on the basis of verses 10 and 12 in Psalm 97, that we can pray to fellow believers currently living on earth? If you live in Mexico, can you pray to another believer in Russia, without a telephone or any other such device, and expect him to hear you? Does Psalm 119:115 prove that we can pray to evildoers? Does Psalm 148:7-12 prove that we can pray to snow, unregenerate kings, etc.?
We evaluate such passages in the same way we evaluate the hymn I discussed earlier. If praying to angels (or saints) was a practice the relevant Biblical figures believed in, we'd expect it to show up explicitly and often. Prayers to God are explicit and are mentioned frequently from the book of Genesis onward. The absence of prayers to angels (and saints) in the historical narrative portions of scripture, didactic passages about prayer, and other such contexts is a major problem for advocates of such prayers. The fact that people have to resort to passages like the ones under consideration in the Psalms reflects the weakness of their position. The best explanation, by far, for the prominence of prayers to God accompanied by the absence of prayers to other entities in the relevant contexts is that the view held by the relevant Biblical figures (the Biblical authors, Jesus, etc.) was that we should pray only to God.
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