God Is Wonderful in His Saints

Fr. Solomon Longo · July 16, 2026 · teaching

If you are intrigued by all the people imaged on our walls, the ones with radiant light around their heads, this article is for you. If you’ve ever thought that Orthodox, or Catholics for that matter, have a preoccupation with the saints, or been suspicious that this is some sort of unChristian, or outrightly pagan intrusion into the apostolic faith, this article is also for you.

First, what is a saint? A saint is a “holy one” of God. The word can be used for humans or angels that have made themselves “holy” (i.e. set apart to God). A saint can be living or departed.

Moses is a saint. The Archangel Gabriel is a saint. St. Nicholas (the origin of Santa Claus) is a saint. A kind, humble, and completely unknown lady in Oregon right now is a saint. And, by nature of being a human being, you are destined to be one, if you accept it. Therefore, those in our parishes today who are following Christ are called “saints” in an unfinished, anticipatory, but true manner.

Contrary to what some people imagine, saints are not super-natural humans. It’s just that a mature or finished human is more than we tend to imagine. Humans are created by God to be by nature holy and glorious, full of God, and both ready and willing to do what God does. Sainthood is what it is to be naturally human—some of us are just living in a way that dips above and below what can be called the natural human way of being. Much of what we mean by “salvation,” refers to a way of being that leads to this natural unity with God that makes us shine with His characteristics.

As one witness to this, we can look to St. Athanasius the Great of Egypt. St. Athanasius is sometimes understood (though this is overstated) as the creator of the canon of Scripture, establishing which books were in the Bibles that were received in the centuries to come. He is also a defender of the deity of Christ against those who would have made him sound like merely a “highest created being.” So St. Athanasius, defender of the unique Godhood of Christ, greatest defender of the Trinity in the 300’s AD, is a good witness to call to this subject of whether we can think so highly of mere human beings “with a nature like ours.” Afterall, he wanted it clear that Christ, as fully God, is infinitely greater than any human or angelic holy one. Surely, you would think, he would tell us to keep an exceptionally clear line between God and human saints since he fought against blurring the line between the unique Son of God and other “holy ones” of God.

And, you’d be right, of course. St. Athanasius would never risk blurring that line. But he does not risk that when he teaches us that Christ the Son of God became man by nature so that man would become what God is by grace. By grace—by having God's presence within—man can become qualitatively, and in practice, like God (except insofar as this is a finite reception and sharing of God’s infinite and natural qualities).

That’s what sainthood is. Sainthood is the upward never-ending growth of the saved into unity with God. Beginning with repentance, humans are meant to become part of Christ and so leave behind death for eternal life. Rescue from death is a beginning and not a final chapter. Eternal life is not just safety.

We are to be “transformed into that same image [of the Lord] from one degree of glory to another.” And among those glorious qualities that characterize ones who are godly is concern for those in need. If somebody wants to be like Christ, this wouldn’t mean that they would forget about people in need and struggling. Christ is very concerned with people in need on the earth (evidence the Gospels). Therefore, the saints that are part of Him and like Him, and are His friends, also are attentive to us on earth. In Revelation, the martyrs pray always to God to set right the world that persecutes and murders.

Those who go to be with God after this life are not “dead people.” Christ says that God is not the God of the dead, but of the living, and then, as examples of the living, names three people that had already been “dead” for nearly 2,000 years. Far from being dead, Christ teaches that they are very much alive. And Christ tells parables about those who have passed on as being very much awake and conscious as well. And if they are alive, awake, righteous, and with God, and they speak and pray, then we should remember that “the prayer of a righteous man availeth much,” and ask those strong in prayer to pray to God for us. We ask other people in the church to pray for us, why not that “great cloud of witnesses” who are with Christ and done with sin. These saints serve Christ and reign with Christ, and they attend to our lives with the mind and love of Christ.

In what’s been said, we’ve already prepared ourselves to understand the icons of the church. But a missing puzzle piece is the tabernacle Moses built, and the temple Solomon built afterward.

In Exodus 25 God tells Moses to build the tabernacle, and the ark of the covenant, and all the things used in worship, “According to all that I show thee, after the pattern of the tabernacle, and the pattern of all the instruments thereof, even so shall ye make it...look that thou make them after their pattern, which was showed thee in the mount."

Moses was shown a vision of heavenly worship and told to give a certain replica of this in the tabernacle, before being given very specific instructions to how this place of worship should symbolize that heavenly worship.

St. Stephen, before his martyrdom in Acts, says "Our fathers had the tabernacle of witness in the wilderness, as [God] had appointed, speaking unto Moses, that he should make it according to the fashion that he had seen." And Hebrews records the teaching of St. Paul that “[The priests of the temple] serve a copy and shadow of the heavenly things. For when Moses was about to erect the tent, he was instructed by God, saying, ‘See that you make everything according to the pattern that was shown you on the mountain.’”

And the result is that the tabernacle and temple show the Paradise of God’s presence. They have imagery of the garden of Eden, and angels are sewn and carved and sculpted in various parts of the tent/temple. These are the holy ones Moses sees in God’s presence—the angels alone. Until Christ, humans were not there. They were waiting in Sheol/Hades for Christ to deliver them. But Christ said to the thief on the cross, “today you will be with me in paradise.” Because of Christ’s becoming human, human holy ones are now also in the presence of God. This is shown in our churches. Holy ones, both angel and human, are shown, because our temple is revealing the heavenly worship as it is now, after Christ’s incarnation and ascension into heaven. The book of Revelation has reconfirmed this, showing the angels offering incense and the prostrations of co-enthroned saints. To not show this reality would be less true. God has given us revelation of what heavenly worship is, and neither Moses nor Christians today should obscure it or deny it.

It is increasingly understood by scholars of many backgrounds that Christian iconography is some of the earliest information we have about the Christian Church, and that it has continuity with Jewish use. Many scholars used to think that the later Jewish practice of avoiding imagery was consistent all the way back to Christ’s day. They assumed their interpretation of the 2nd commandment and looked at the Judaism they knew and assumed there must have been consistent avoidance of image use (the tabernacle and temple being unique exceptions). This assumption colored how people imagined the churches that the Jewish apostles began. Indeed, John Calvin, founder of Calvinism, assumed that icons were made up in the 600’s or 700’s. To be fair to him, what could archaeology of his day do to prove otherwise?

But those denying icons or prayer to saints have had to move the goal posts since archaeology has supported the widespread and early use of iconography and prayer to the saints. First the goal posts moved back from the 600’s to the 300’s (maybe the legalization of Christianity opened the floodgates to paganism and the Christians weren’t willing to suffer for Christ to resist it). But that goal post had to move as well, since prayers to saints were then evidenced from the Middle East to Germany in the 200’s, and both Christian and even Jewish places of prayer (the earliest ones still preserved) have icons from the 200’s.

The concept held by various denominations which trace their beginnings to the Reformation of the 1500’s, was that there was a faithful golden age in the early centuries of the Church when there were no icons, relics, or saints, and things were simple and unadorned in belief and practice. When it becomes clear that a massive change in the church needs to be found in a smaller and smaller time frame, it becomes less credible that this unseen non-Orthodox “golden age” existed.

Before this hypothetical lost Protestant era, we have priestly prostrations and incense toward the seraphim covered ark; we have bowing to David as an icon of God, and incense to Daniel for the same reason; we have oft-forgotten facts, such as that many Jews of Christ’s day thought that there were carved icons in heaven, on God’s throne, which angels venerated; we have the way that the Old Testament faithful bowed to and kissed the venerable among them, such as elders (a practice continuing in the Middle East to this day). On the other side of the missing era we have all the use and honoring of icons in Christian churches, as well as the ways we venerate each other in Liturgy, which all continue to this day. And as we look at history and the Bible, the supposed gap between them narrows so as to permit a smaller and smaller claim that somewhere, surely, this Old Testament intuition must have ended in iconless churches and then got reintroduced in churches and synagogues a few generations later as something pagan and not at all Jewish or Christian. The weight of history makes it an increasingly strained claim seeking validation.

Of course, there could be a misuse of a misunderstood icon, as there could be with almost anything (miracles aren’t bad because Simon Magus wanted to buy the ability to do them). Moses, at God’s direction, made a bronze serpent on a pole that foreshadowed the cross. The people were meant to look to it in prayer and they would be healed from the poison their sins had brought on them. When later misunderstood as a god in its own right, instead of an icon, the serpent had to be destroyed. But saints and their icons are not misunderstood this way by the Orthodox Church. As we’ve said, it is built into the core of Christianity that saints are glorious because of the Most High God who is manifested through them as his servants and friends. Their power is His, not sourced from themselves.

The seventh ecumenical council, in 787AD answered the destruction of icons at that time, not only with some of this history above, but with an understanding that, in their experience, denying icons was always based in heresies about Christ.

Having spoken of icons, let’s circle back to the continued activity of the saints. We’ll save time and put prayers of the saints and relics together.

The fact that modern Jews ask old testament saints to pray for them (especially when visiting the relics of the saints) is not an accidental intrusion of later Christianity into Judaism. It’s original to Hebrew belief.

When Job’s friends were trying to comfort him, a couple thousand years before Christ, his friend Eliphaz can speak of calling out to the angels for help as though it were a normal concept. Of course in the book of Revelation, the angels likewise bring prayers to God. Holy ones have a role in hearing prayers.

It’s worth mentioning here that prayers can be “addressed” to angelic and human saints. They can be “prayed to” because the word “prayer” is not a word for talking to God, but is used to simply mean “ask.” Consider, as evidence, how often you’ve noticed someone in movies or books say “I pray thee,” when asking to be told the time, or handed a letter.

In 2 Kings, the bones of Elisha bring a dead man back to life. Also in 2 Kings, Elisha uses the cloak of Elijah to split the river, calling on “the God of Elijah” to do so. Taking up his mantle is a joint physical-spiritual reality, it is the use of a relic (what we might call a secondary relic, something owned by the saint, like Paul’s apron). And Elisha understands Elijah as an intercessor to bring God’s power to bear in his own ministry.

The use of the created world (clothes, staves, bones, and dirt) for divine acts is both interwoven with the concept of sacraments and of relics, and it is constant through scripture from the staff of Moses to the apron of St. Paul. We could go on and on. It’s everywhere. (Even the eating of the fruit in the garden is imaged as a bodily act of enormous spiritual effect. Thus also, is eating of Christ, the tree of life.)

For a few more examples of saints being active in the world, we can look again to the Old Testament book of Maccabees. In the 200’s BC, the faithful leader of the Jewish people has a vision of a recently reposed saint and the more distantly reposed prophet Jeremiah, praying for them, talking to him, and then receives from Jeremiah, the powerful intercessor in prayer, a blessing for victory in battle in the form of a sword handed to him. The saints are seen as effective intercessors who engage in missions as heralds and bringers of divine help. This, and other biblical books, were moved to an appendix in the 1500’s in Protestant Bibles, since some parts were disagreeable to Luther and other Reformers, and they were later removed entirely from Protestant bibles, partially for the sake of printing more bibles cheaply. Tobit is another from which a reader would sense the way that angels can have a role of bringing the prayers of humans on earth to God and then also being the answer to that prayer through their activity on the earth.

This is also seen in Jewish texts and stories outside the Bible. In Christ’s time, people had stories about how Caleb and Joshua went to the tombs of the patriarchs to ask them to pray for them so that they might convince the people to be brave and enter the promised land. There were also, in the first centuries AD, Jewish descriptions of carrying Joseph’s bones to the promised land with enough honor that onlookers believed there were two arks in procession, one after the other. The Hebrews say, when asked, that they rightly carried him with such honor because he kept what was said in the law held in the ark. A holy life made his bones something to venerate.

We might also look to the cross and see how the Jews of Christ’s time thought he was calling out for Elijah to help him, and waited to see if Elijah would (perhaps with significant expectation since the sun had just gone dark). They readily assume he’s asking a saint for help.

There are more examples, in both Old Testament and New, as well as from extra-biblical sources. The point is that this is much like the situation with icons above. Intercession by reposed saints and veneration of their relics was not interrupted by an unseen brief moment of “true apostolic faith” before a change into Orthodoxy. Before and after Christ these beliefs are a seamless whole.

Trying to be brief, we’ve outlined some of the many examples of how sainthood appears in scripture. One more image stretching through the Bible will have to suffice for the sake of space.

At the beginning, Adam and Eve were told “Increase and multiply, and fill the earth and subdue it, and have dominion…” It’s sometimes overlooked that this is a command to keep doing what God had been doing. The earth was “without form and empty,” and God set out to give it structure in the first three days of creation and to fill it in the second set of three days. Effectively, God tells Adam and Eve to “keep doing what I’ve been doing.” He told His children to join the family business, to spread beauty, structure, and life into the world. This command to “do what God does” like “chips off the old block” is the prime directive of humanity. And that doesn’t go away in this life or when going to be with God after this life. Why would saints suddenly abandon the people they left and that God still loves? And if they are becoming more like God, why would they be more sealed off from loving others than they were on earth? If the prime directive is to beautify and give life and rule the earth, why would we think the saints are not active in keeping that command for all the days, years, centuries, or millennia since they passed away?

In fact, Biblically, we don’t see an inactivity in heaven, but a heavenly activity that spreads into earthly life. The prophets in the Old Testament, for example, are sometimes imaged as members of the heavenly court in which God, as king, is giving missions to His heralds and courtiers. In Isaiah, the prophet, after having his lips purified by the angel with the glowing coal, is able to answer the call of God to the holy ones around Him. Isaiah sees God enthroned among the angels, and Isaiah reports: “Then I heard the voice of the Lord saying, “Whom shall I send? And who will go for us?” And I said, “Here am I. Send me!” The human Isaiah, when purified, is able to do what the servants of God in heaven do. Likewise, Elijah, “a man with the same [human] nature as us,” is able to decide when it will rain and not rain in Israel. Whereas the angels have roles as the shepherds of people, places, and nations, so also do the human saints of God, like the prophets. (Though too much to cover here, see texts such as 1 Kings 19, Job 1&2, Psalm 82, Daniel 10&12, Deut. 32, and many New Testament passages such as Revelation 20 speaking about the faithful being co-heirs with Christ in heaven until the end of the world.)

Humans are meant to be the members of the body of Christ, to be His hands and feet, and the saints in heaven are still part of Christ. Humanity is created in Christ Jesus for the good deeds God has planned for us to do, and for co-ruling with Christ, and for moving from glory to glory. That is the summation of sainthood. And, looking at the agreement of all ancient churches on these things, we would never want to depart from this understanding of sainthood or this posture toward the friends of God, our ancestors in faith. To borrow a phrase of St. Paul, if someone wants to found an iconless, relicless, and saintless church, “we have no such practice, nor do the churches of God.”

In Conclusion:

Today, there are so many kinds of Christianity an American might choose from. But in the past, unity with an unchanging faith was a watchword of Christians. And they were willing to be tortured and die rather than let the faith be warped. Much less would they let something change in the faith with no comment or contest. The Church of Christ asks the saints for their prayers, and venerates their relics and icons. This is uncontroversial apostolic faith.

“God is wonderful in his saints,” and they are on your side even now. They are for you. They are the great cloud of witnesses. They are inspirations and helpers. With the faithful of the church on earth, they are the hundredfold family that God promises to those who follow Him. To some coming toward the church they may be a stumbling block. But they also kept the faith for you to find it, and, on this very day, they helped you get to the door of this church. May God bless you by their inspiring lives and through their present intercession and assistance.