The Other Point Of View

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