Today I want to finish expositing the Lord’s Prayer. Yesterday we ended with the intercession for the will of God to be accomplished.
“9 After this manner therefore pray ye: Our Father which art in heaven, Hallowed be thy name. 10 Thy kingdom come, Thy will be done in earth, as it is in heaven. 11 Give us this day our daily bread. 12 And forgive us our debts, as we forgive our debtors. 13 And lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from evil: For thine is the kingdom, and the power, and the glory, for ever. Amen.”
Let us look at the wording of verse eleven. The verb here is a direct command to God from the supplicant. A rather bold act of a supplicant to the Creator and Master of the universe. The actual Greek meaning is “Give to us the bread of ours necessary today.” Jesus doesn’t advocate prayer for luxury foods and gourmet preparation. What He tells us to ask for is that which is necessary for our health and survival. This is important because it establishes the principle of taking only what we need to live and giving what is in excess of that. I could write a scathing indictment of conspicuous consumption from this, but I shall leave that sermon for the Holy Spirit to preach in your hearts.
Verse twelve is a plea for forgiveness of the debts we owe to God. Jesus didn’t use the word for sin here (hamartia) but the same word for financial obligations. And the forgiveness He would have us request is contingent upon our own forgiveness of the ones who owe us. From the context of the prayer and the explanation given in verses fourteen and fifteen we can tell that the debts Jesus speaks of are not material only, but spiritual as well. Therefore, hoarding grudges against others is a hindrance to our release from guilt of our own wrongful acts by grace.
Verse thirteen has three parts, two supplications and a doxology. The first supplication is for relief from the trials of our faith. The Greek word translated here as temptation bears the meaning of a testing of the object. In this case we are the object and the tests take the form of difficulties, hindrances, enticements and persecutions. Jesus wants us to pray that God does not lead us into them. Yet He tells us in other places that they will come upon us and we must bear up under these tests to grow in our faith. I believe the supplication is included here as a reminder to us that we are not to seek out these tests of our faith, but to shun them.
The second supplication in the verse is for deliverance from evil. Some translators take this to mean a person, whether a spiritual being or a physical one, who exemplifies or personifies evil. But the most common translation renders it as the condition of evil from which we request deliverance. I favor the latter rendition as it is inclusive of the former. This is included to remind us that it is God Who delivers us from the evil that besets us and we are to look to Him in our time of suffering.
Some manuscripts leave out the doxology at the end of verse thirteen. Because it is a standard Jewish doxology in closing of prayer, and it is included in the Received Text, I tend to think it belongs here because Jesus uttered those words. Lets look at them. To the Father belong the Kingdom, the Power and the Glory. The word translated kingdom denotes either the land being ruled or the position of ruler, just as the English word, in archaic usage, denotes both. In this case it represents the position of absolute ruler. The word translated power here is the one from which we get our words dynamite, dynamo, dynamic, etc. Seeing the way we have used it you can tell it is the word that corresponds to the concrete aspect of power. The Greek language has other words often translated as power that cover the abstract aspect of power, the authority, and the product of the use of power, work done. Jesus chose the concrete word to show that God is able to perform all that He has promised. The last phrase, translated forever, is literally unto the ages. The concept of eternity is exclusive of time. The ages are incorporated in time so God is both eternal and temporal simultaneously. The final word in this passage should be rendered, let it be so. And that concludes the body of the prayer.
Tomorrow I will cover Jesus’s commentary on forgiveness that He felt compelled to append to this prayer.
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