Archive for » February, 2009 «

Shifting Gears

Saturday, February 28th, 2009 | Author:

Give us this day our daily bread.  Matthew 6:11

Shifting Gears

Bread – You can’t see it in English, but in Greek the emphasis on this part of the model prayer is not on the verb.  It is on the noun – bread.  In Greek, emphasis is determined by position in the sentence since there is no punctuation.  “The bread of us the daily give to us today,” is the literal rendering.  The focus comes first, and in this case, it is about our sustenance.  That isn’t so unusual. What is unusual is that this is the only place in the gospels where such a request is addressed to God.  You would think otherwise.  With all of our contemporary emphasis on God meeting our every need, don’t you find it a little strange that this is the only place in the gospels where we request God to give us daily sufficiency?  Does that make you question, just a little, whether we have the right perspective toward our needs?

If we looked at the Old Testament, we would find this kind of request quite frequently.  So obviously, Yeshua assumes that His disciples know this.  That’s because the Old Testament perspective on all of our provisions and assets is very different than our contemporary view.  Everything is a gift from God!  Remember Job?  “The Lord gives and the Lord takes away.  Blessed be the name of the Lord.”  Maybe we need to contemplate Job’s attitude before we utter this part of the prayer.  Maybe we need some adjustment before we start asking (demanding?) that God take care of our every need.  Do we see “take away” as a gift too?

There is something else quite unusual about this phrase.  Lohmeyer suggests that the use of the personal pronoun “our” has special significance.  It doesn’t mean “Give us what we want.”  By comparing this phrase with Old Testament parallels, we discover that it probably means, “bread that we need because, without it, we will go hungry.”  In other words, we are not praying for the fat of the land.  We are praying for the necessities.  We are praying as the poor pray.  “Today I will not eat without Your provision, O Lord.”  To turn this prayer into a request for goods and services that enhance life is to ignore its simplicity.  This is prayer cut to the bone.  Most of us don’t even qualify to mention this.

This simple necessity is underscored by the use of the word “daily.”  In Jesus’ cultural setting, there were plenty of people who had no expectation of tomorrow’s provision.  They lived day-to-day because that is all they could do.  They were day-laborers and beggars and orphans and widows.  This is really their prayer.  It is a prayer to the God of compassion who has a special place in His heart for those who have nothing but Him to sustain them.  This is an extension of “blessed are the poor in spirit.”  These people know what it means to have emptiness.  They know what it means to beg.  Pride is not a word in their vocabulary.  These people have cast their cares on Him.  They have no other choice.

So, I wonder if our rote repetition of the Lord’s Prayer disqualifies us.  There are very few among us who live so close to the edge.  If Yeshua’s model prayer includes a plea for these people, what does it say about us?  Actually, the Old Testament gives us the answer.  Almost everywhere that the Hebrew Scriptures speak about bread, they speak about sharing what we have even when we do not have enough.  Maybe that’s the thought we need to take away from this.  I may not live close enough to the edge to qualify to speak this phrase, but I do qualify to give according to this phrase.  If the man next to me can legitimately pray, “Give us this day,” and I have the ability to give to him this day, the very presence to this prayer confronts me with God’s will.  If I do not respond to his need from God’s gift to me, I not only harm one of the least of these, I also insult the giving God.

Topical Index:  bread, daily, gift, Matthew 6:11

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The Other Point Of View

Friday, February 27th, 2009 | Author:

on earth, as it is in heaven  Matthew 6:10 

Earth/ Heaven – Startling!  Uncomfortable!  Of course, it isn’t for us because we are not saturated in the Hebrew Scriptures.  But the disciples were.  They would have expected “heaven and earth” not “earth and heaven.”  Glance through the Old Testament and you will find the phrase over and over, but not in the order that Yeshua suggests.  Why?

Don’t you find it a little uncomfortable that even in this so-familiar prayer there are many things that should have caused us to ask questions?  Isn’t it just a bit disturbing that we never really asked?  Maybe we have been so anesthetized by our own religious culture that we really don’t hear what Yeshua is saying.  We need to go back.  We need to pry and dig and question and wonder – all the time – in order to get out of the insulating shell of our religious training.  If we want to see the wonder of Jesus’ insight and education, we have to somehow ask deeper questions.

Heaven and earth is a pretty big question.  The reason that the Hebrew Scriptures use the words in this order (heaven, and then earth) is that the Hebrew Scriptures are about God, not about men.  All authority belongs to the Creator of the heavens and the earth.  The perspective of the divine revelation is from heaven.  Sure, God deals with those on earth, but His involvement has a cosmic point of view.  This isn’t the local fertility god we’re dealing with here.  This is El Shaddai – the Almighty.

Then Yeshua shifts the perspective.  Now we are praying, and that means we must recognize our footing, not God’s.  What we see is that Yeshua’s model prayer assumes that there is a disparity between earth and heaven.  This is not the viewpoint of the sovereign God.  His will is always done.  This is the viewpoint of the man who has just declared that the Father will be manifest in him.  From our point of view, God’s sovereignty must still become our reality.  It is earth and heaven until the Father rules and reigns over all.  Then we will return to the beginning, when God created the heavens and the earth.

But that does not mean that this petition is consumed in human effort or human vision.  No, it is still about the inscrutable will of God.  The creation is still His.  What we voice in this petition is our desire to see Him govern without opposition, in us and in all His creation.  In addition, this petition calls for the revelation of God’s active will in earth as it is in heaven.  No being in the heavenly realm has a single doubt about the power and majesty of God, nor do they lack visible demonstrations of His might and glory.  But we do!  “The will of God in both past and present goes almost in secrecy through the world” (Lohmeyer).  And that’s the problem.  We must pray that His will becomes paramount here on earth; that the hidden hand of the Almighty be uncovered in us and revealed to the world.  That is what it means to be salt and light. 

Say these words with me.  “Your will be done, on earth, in me, in my house, in my neighborhood, in my city, in my culture – that You be manifest and that I be Your light – as it is in heaven.”

Topical Index:  heaven, earth, will, hidden, Matthew 6:10

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A Picture A Day

Thursday, February 26th, 2009 | Author:

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Desiring God

Thursday, February 26th, 2009 | Author:

Thy will be done  Matthew 6:10

Will – “But how do I know what God’s will is?”  Have you struggled with that question?  I have – more often than not.  I long to do His will, but knowing what He wants in any of the various gray areas of my life is not so easy to determine.  Sure, I have to book of instructions (the Torah), but I am hard pressed to find anything there about retirement plans, career moves, home schooling or automobile choices.  Nevertheless, I pray, “Your will be done,” as if I knew what it really was.  And, since I am often quite confused about the correct choice, I add the cover phrase “if it’s Your will, Lord,” to most of my prayers.

That doesn’t seem to be what Yeshua had in mind.  He doesn’t appear to vacillate over direction.  In fact, there isn’t even a hint of doubt in this part of the model prayer.  Yeshua prays boldly for the exercise of the Father’s will.  Or so it seems.  Let’s take a look.

The Greek word thelema is very common in classical Greek, but it is surprisingly rare in the New Testament.  When we look at its Hebrew equivalent (rason), we find something even more interesting.  Rason is not about rational decisions like the Greek word.  It is about passionately birthed desire.  In other words, Yeshua is not talking about all the choices that make up God’s purpose and direction.  He is talking about the joy, delight and passion that belong to the character of what God does.  Did you get that?  It’s hard to re-think in a world that is saturated with the notion that will is about cognition.  We split emotion and will, but Hebrew is a lot fuzzier.  To proclaim God’s will is to announce my delight, joy and passion for His display.  It is to endorse His glorification in action.  Furthermore, this phrase commits me to His holiness because the only thing God must do is exhibit His holy character.  What God does is holy.  Therefore, when I pray “Your will be done,” I am asking that He manifest Himself as holy regardless of my agenda or interpretation.  And, of course, this is exactly what God already does.  So, my petition is really a declaration of His inscrutable righteousness.  Speaking blessings upon His will is, at the same time, my commitment to contentment.  I declare that I am content with His purposes.  I long for His holiness to be manifest.  I delight in seeing it.

Sounds good, doesn’t it?  And it is good, except that it immediately confronts us with our own resistance to His will.  How can we pray for God’s holiness to be manifest and for contentment with this manifestation and then immediately ask Him to explain what He requires of us.  You see, the will of God is not found in peaceful co-existence.  It is found in obedience!  God has already revealed His moral will.  It’s called the Torah.  To pray for His will to be the passionate delight of my life and, at the same time, refuse to be obedient to the manifestation of His instructions is not only self-contradiction, it is sin.  This has nothing to do with His freely given grace.  This has everything to do with delighting in Him.  The disciples knew exactly what Yeshua meant.  Do we?

One additional clarification must be made.  Contentment is not passive.  It is self-surrender in the active pursuit of the eschatological horizon of the coming government of God.  OK, maybe that’s a bit too theological.  What I’m saying is the when I am content with God’s purposes, I do not sit idly by and wait for Him to do everything.  My declaration is a statement of my active obedience and passionate decision to do whatever is required of me to fulfill His purposes within His Kingdom.  My will is subsumed in His will.  I do the Kingdom because I live the Kingdom.  And I never rest until I am fully content in Him.

Topical Index:  will, thelema, rason, contentment, Torah, Matthew 6:10

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Who’s Is

Wednesday, February 25th, 2009 | Author:

Thy Kingdom come  Matthew 6:10

Come – We’re not quite finished with this part of Yeshua’s example prayer.  We discovered that this is not clock time.  It’s God time.  It’s kairos – the time when He fulfills His purposes . . the absolutely right time.  Our awareness of His breaking into the world is essential to this part of the model prayer.  We must see God at work, and it takes God opening our eyes to do this.  We need to be interrupted.

But that isn’t all.  The kingdom is not ours to bring!  The Kingdom is the rule of God’s holiness and righteousness.  It is the consummation of His glorification in creation.  It is the declaration of all that is to His service and worship.  And only He can bring that about.  We do not pray that we might usher in the Kingdom.  We pray that He will make it manifest and that we might be invited as His guests to participate in what He is doing.  The Kingdom exists only because God brings it into being.  It does not depend on any worldly operation.  It does not lie within any spiritual organization.  It is His alone.

Now you see why Jesus’ word is translated in the aorist tense.  God brings the Kingdom.  He guarantees it.  It is a done deal.  This phrase denies that men could ever build the Kingdom.  No one comes into the Kingdom unless God calls him.  No one participates in the Kingdom unless he is chosen.  No man, no organization, no church and no culture brings about the Kingdom.  Insofar as we participate in the Kingdom, we act only as humble servants of the Master who causes it to be.  This phrase is not about a promise that the Kingdom will come someday as we penetrate the culture with the gospel.  There is no promise here.  This is a statement of accomplished fact!  It is a call for us to surrender ourselves to what God has done.  From the divine perspective; there is nothing left but the unveiling of His accomplishment.

We need to hear this – loud and clear.  On the one hand, we need to know that there is absolutely no room for pride in “bringing” the gospel to the world.  We are merely stepping into the river of God.  He is the flow.  We are merely floating.  We don’t make this happen.  Only spiritual egos claim to have a vital hand in saving souls or bringing about His plans.  God didn’t consult any of us about creation and He doesn’t require any of us to complete the job.

But!  God desires our service and obedience.  At the end of the day (remember what that word is about?), we must say, “I have done only what you asked.”  Yet, God rewards such service and is glorified in it.  At the end of the day, we can rest in the assurance that He is manifesting Himself and no power in the universe can thwart Him.  At the end of the day, He has invited us to share in His victory.

“Thy Kingdom come,” is a cry of jubilation, not a feeble request.  Let God be manifest even as He is hallowed and glorified.  Jesus focuses our attention on the magnificence of God and on the sovereign exercise of His will.  He is God and there is no other.  Rejoice!  Rejoice!  His Kingdom comes!

Topical Index:  Kingdom, participate, kairos, eletheo, basileia, Matthew 6:10

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A Picture A Day

Tuesday, February 24th, 2009 | Author:

Abaco

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Age To Age

Tuesday, February 24th, 2009 | Author:

Thy kingdom come  Matthew 6:10

Come - We know that God’s Kingdom is not a physical place.  The Greek word basileia is about reign and rule, not palaces and courtyards.  God’s Kingdom is revealed wherever His servants and citizens live according to His government.  But what does it mean to pray, “Your Kingdom come?”  Hasn’t it already arrived when we observe Torah or act in accordance with His character?  Why pray for it to show up later?

The verb here is eltheto.  It is an imperative (a command) in the aorist tense (that means it is a fait accompli, something that happened once for all time in the past).  Now, this is quite unusual.  When we pray these words, we don’t think of commanding something that has already occurred.  We think we are asking (not telling) for God to complete His plans in the future.  This isn’t the only odd thing about this phrase, as we will see.

While the idea of a coming Kingdom is quite common in the New Testament, it is almost entirely absent in the Old Testament.  There is no corresponding phrase “thy kingdom come” anywhere in the Hebrew Scriptures.  And while the idea of the Kingdom (basileia) is found throughout the New Testament, the “coming” of the Kingdom is found only here, in this model prayer.  And the “coming of the Kingdom” isn’t found anywhere at all outside the three synoptic gospels.  This should tell us that Jesus is saying something very unusual.  His instruction about prayer incorporates a concept that is unique to Him.  What can He mean?

First, we notice that the biblical idea of “days” is not like our Greek idea.  Days in the Bible do not come in regular sequence.  We think in terms of a constant repetition of the pattern of days, but the Bible treats days as “events,” not unnoticed succession.  In the Bible, days are the interruption of God’s kairos (pregnant moments) into our chronos (regular sequence).  So, the day of the Lord is not a scheduled time on the calendar.  Neither are the times when God acts in history.  And His return will be just as unscheduled as any other divine appointment.  God doesn’t seem to work according to clock time (chronos).  That means when we pray “Thy kingdom come,” we are not asking for God to arrive on a particular day of the week.  Instead, we are recognizing that God’s kingdom is the interruptive force in creation.  He breaks into our lives.  God brings into being His Kingdom in ways that we can neither schedule nor control.

In this sense, God’s time is not from eternity to eternity.  It is from age to age.  That is to say, it is from one event of God’s breaking into the world to the next event of God’s interruption.  Lohmeyer says, “the predominant idea everywhere is not that of an empty, merely fleeting, time, but of an experienced time, or, more exactly, a historically filled time which is in fact expressed in the ‘coming’.”  This is what the rabbis call renewal.  In other words, Jesus is telling us that one of the opening thoughts of prayer is the conscious awareness of God filling our time with His arrival.  It is the experience of His breaking into our routine and discovering renewal.  We find that the Kingdom has already arrived when we turn our thoughts to the God who is already at work among us.  In other words, even though we were not aware of God’s Kingdom, it was already here.  It was simply hidden in our preoccupation with time marching on.  We didn’t see Him because we were blind to His interruptions.  Now, all that must change.

Why is this phrase a command and not a wish?  Because it is about asking God to reveal to us what is already here.  “Let it be revealed in its arrival.”  Open our eyes, Father, so that we might see that You are coming in every pregnant moment.  Establish for us a permanent awareness of Your handiwork and presence.  Let us be interrupted!

Your Kingdom come.

Topical Index:  Kingdom, eletheo, basileia, kairos, chronos, time, age, Matthew 6:10

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To God Be The Glory

Monday, February 23rd, 2009 | Author:

Hallowed be Thy Name.  Matthew 6:9

Hallowed – Have you ever asked what it means to “hallow” His name?  Our first intuition is that it must have something to do with honoring, like the second Commandment.  But “hallow” is not a familiar word anymore.  Perhaps is never was.  Today we are left with this nebulous, uncomfortable feeling that there must be something very important here.  We just don’t quite know what it is.

The deepest meanings of this blessing for God (did you realize that you are blessing God?) would take us into the mysteries of the creation and the Creator.  Perhaps it is enough for now to just open a tiny crack in the universe, to peak at only one small part of this profound bit of theology.

The word is hagiastheto in Matthew.  Of course, this isn’t the word Jesus used.  Jesus didn’t teach in Greek.  He spoke Hebrew.  So Jesus probably used the word qadash.  Whatever Jesus intended is to be found in the Hebrew meaning of qadash.  Time to go word hunting.

After a lot of grammatical research, we come to the following conclusion.  Hallowing is the petition that God’s name reveals itself to be holy.  This is the process of letting God’s glory be revealed in and through His creation.  Normally we would expect this process of sanctification to mean removing what must be hallowed from the ordinary use in life.  Many religious rituals surround this very idea – making some ordinary element sacred through a spiritual “setting apart”.  For example, bread and wine are sanctified when our religious ritual elevates them in the celebration of the Eucharist, in communion.  But hallowing God’s name is a bit deeper than this.

It is certainly true that God’s name must be honored and kept sacred.  That is the intent of the second commandment.  The Jews live in respectful concern over the misappropriation of God’s name even today.  God’s name is special, sacred and unlike any other name.

But there is more.  In ancient near-eastern cultures, a name was far more than an arbitrary label designating something or someone.  A name was the symbolic representation of the essential character of a person.  When I pray “Hallowed be thy name” I am invoking a blessing on the name of God that requires His essential character be made sacred.  I am magnifying and glorifying who He is.

What does the name of God reveal as His essential character?  For that, we need to turn to Exodus 4.  God reveals the essential character of His name to Moses.  It is the name of Being.  God says that His name means, “I am that I am” or “I am He who exists.”  Actually, the translation of haya is still debated.  But it revolves around the fundamental idea of Being.  God’s name is the summary of what is. 

In all of creation, nothing, not one single thing, exists on its own.  Everything that is depends on the existence of something else.  You would not be unless your parents existed.  Life on this planet wouldn’t exist unless the sun existed.  Animals would not exist unless there was vegetation.  Vegetation wouldn’t exist without chlorophyll.  All matter depends on previous matter, back and back through time.  We call this a contingent universe.  Its very existence depends on something prior.  That is the fundamental assumption of the Law of Cause and Effect.

But God’s name contains the implication that God is absolutely.  He has no dependency.  Everything that is depends on God, both for its creation and its continuing existence.  This is why Paul says, “in Him we live and move and have our being”.  But God is not like anything else.  God exists unconditionally.

So, what we discover is that hallowing not only expresses a blessing to let God be glorified, it also contains the idea that God is to be glorified in all His actions.  Part of the glorification of God is to see Him glorified in everything that exists.

Now for that little peek into the universe.  What this means is that when I pray, “Hallowed be thy name”, I am asking that God’s essential being of holiness be revealed in all that expresses who He is – and that means that everything should shout out God’s holiness.  My prayer is the prayer that all of creation will be returned to the place where God is glorified in its display.  My prayer says that the moment I utter these words, I am dedicating everything I am, every relationship I have, every connection between me and all of His creation, to His glorification and magnification.  To hallow His name is to make everything sacred!

The wall between the sacred and the profane just came tumbling down.  God alone is the reason behind every existing thing.  And every existing thing is intended to fulfill the purpose of glorifying Him and revealing His holiness.  My compartmentalized life must end.  God stands behind all my actions, decisions, thoughts and words.  To hallow Him is to consecrate all to Him.  From the blades of grass in my lawn to the most distant star, from the friendship with my neighbor to the need of my enemy, all must become a vehicle for His glory.

Hallowed be thy name.

 Topical Index:  hallowed, sanctify, name, Matthew 6:9, hagiastheto, qadash, contingent

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Without History

Sunday, February 22nd, 2009 | Author:

Our Father in heaven  Matthew 6:9

Our Father – The usual interpretation of this opening phrase focuses on fatherhood.  Questions are raised about how we can understand God as Father if we lack examples of human fathers.  This is, of course, a monumental problem in our culture today.  With more and more children raised in the absence of fathers, and with the sinful passion to simply eliminate the need for a father, our children are pushed one step further away from embracing the true Father.  We need to be reminded of the importance of godly fathers. 

But this is not what I want to look at today.

You may have been taught that the concept “our Father” was new to Jewish ears.  Not so.  It was not at the forefront of Jewish thinking, but there are plenty of examples of the collective understanding of God as our Father in Jewish thought.  Nevertheless, there is something here that shines a new light on this divine connection.  When God is our Father, none of us have any history.

Here’s what this means.  We are all connected through some link in the history of our past.  Somewhere back there, we all came from the same beginning.  The Bible certainly emphasizes our common legacy.  No man is radically separated from any other man.  Enemy or friend, we are all still brothers.  But Yeshua suggests something deeper.  When we pray, “Our Father,” we stand in direct relationship to God.  We no longer depend on our human ancestry to establish our relationship with Him or each other.  He is our immediate Father.  We stand before Him without any legacy or ancestry.  He conceived us (that’s what Jesus says in John 3) and we are His direct children.  This is commonly expressed as “God has no grandchildren.”  That’s true.  But what it implies is pretty deep.

If God is my immediate Father, and He is your immediate Father, then we are bonded together by spiritual blood ties.  We belong to each other.  Yeshua makes that abundantly clear in the pronoun, our.  He is the Father of each of us, all together.  And when we approach Him, we do so as part of His immediate family.  Our presence before Him is not individualistic.  We represent each other.  We are His children, plural.  We need to think of ourselves as His children, plural.  This concept runs deep in Scripture.  When one sins, all are affected.  When one hurts, all cry out.  When one rejoices, all dance.  When one is lost, all are grieved.  After all, He is our Father.

This is the opening thought of the model prayer.  Did you get that?  The very first thing in prayer is to realize our common bond.  Prayer begins with “us,” not “me.”  I have no history to rely on.  I have only you, my brothers and sisters.  We come to Him together.

Maybe we should start praying all over.

Topical Index: Our Father, history, community, children, Matthew 6:9

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A Picture A Day

Sunday, February 22nd, 2009 | Author:

Holland

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