The Lord's Prayer: 1

Narrator: Chris Genthree
Matthew 6:5‑15; Luke 11:1‑4  •  25 min. read  •  grade level: 10
Listen from:
(Matt. 6, Luke 11.)
I propose to examine the Lord's prayer, as briefly as is consistent with a perspicuous exposition: first, looking at it, as given most comprehensively in the Gospel of St. Matthew; next, comparing the form which Luke presents; and, thirdly, seeking as far as the Lord enables to gather His design touching its use, whether then or afterward.
The first thing I desire to point out, is the accordance of the Lord's prayer with the place it holds in the first Gospel and with the object the Lord Jesus had then in view. It occurs in the sermon on the mount where He is addressing Jewish disciples, and leading them out of their previous thoughts and feelings and ways into the new principles of the kingdom of heaven, which He was about to introduce. This is important to remember for understanding either the meaning or the object of the prayer. It does not contemplate, as it was not addressed to, the whole human race indiscriminately; it does not express the state, wants, and feelings, of every person who has holy desires after God or a due fear of coming wrath.
Thus, when the publican, standing afar off, would not lift up so much as his eyes to heaven, but smote his breast, realizing his sin and unworthiness, he does not venture to say, “Father,” or “Our Father which art in heaven.” He has no thought of taking up the profound and lofty petitions with which the Lord's prayer opens; nor has he leisure of heart to think of the full supplies and the tender mercy counted on in God, which the latter portion breathes. “God be merciful to me a sinner” was the just and becoming cry from his contrite heart. Here was a man under the guidance of the Spirit of God, contrasted by our Lord Himself, not with the disciples of course, but with the Pharisee who trusted in himself that he was righteous and despised others, whose prayer, if prayer it is to be called, betrayed his self-gratulation, and whose thanks were not for what God, but for what he, the Pharisee, was. The publican, on the other hand, might be dark, but at least, as far as his conscience was enlightened, he really felt and owned his condition as a sinner before God. He, Who is mighty, despiseth not any; and the publican went down to his house justified rather than the other. At the same time, it is not to despise a man, if we call his attention to the actual condition of his soul, and remind him that the Lord's prayer supposes discipleship and the relationship of children with a Father. Sincerity can never change wrong into right, and ignorance, though loss guilty than the constant utterance of language which goes beyond our state and experience, is a sorry excuse before the full blaze of God's revealed light in His word.
If asked how we are to know for whom the Lord's prayer was meant, it suffices to answer that there are two ways of ascertaining, which, if rightly applied, lead to a right conclusion. First, we have to observe whom the Lord had in view in the prayer and the context in which it occurs; and next, we must consider the nature of the petitions, separately and as a whole: which, if duly appreciated, will be found in harmony with the true wants of those for whom the prayer was designed.
Now, it is obvious that, when the sermon on the mount was pronounced, there was an immense crowd listening, but it was not directly addressed to them. They heard the Lord and were astonished at His doctrine, for He taught them as One having authority, and not as the scribes. Wherever confidence in man usurps the place of the truth, uncertainty before God is the never failing result; and hence the craving after tradition, official and successional authority, and such like props of conscious weakness. This was the case with the scribes in a very large degree. Their employment even of Scripture had no power in it, neither flowing from nor producing simple happy-hearted confidence in God. They were a class who handed down a measure of Scriptural knowledge, crusted over with a coating of tradition which often obscured and perverted even what was true in itself. Such is the inevitable effect of tradition; it always brings in foreign ingredients, which so mix themselves up with truth as to put a blind between the soul and God. The Spirit of God, on the contrary, uses the word to detect and expel all hindrances, and thus places the soul without disguise in the presence of God, there to learn His thoughts. And if what God thinks of me as a poor convicted sinner crushes me, what He reveals of His own perfect love towards me calls me from the dust, sets me firmly on my feet, and bids me fear not. It is so even now where the Holy Spirit works in any power by the vessels whom He deigns to use; how much more when Jehovah-Jesus was there! “For He whom God hath sent speaketh the words of God; for God giveth not the Spirit by measure.”
In that discourse, then, the Lord had His own disciples immediately before Him. For their wants, as having been Jews and not yet taken from under the law, He was providing. “And seeing the multitudes He went up into a mountain and when He was set, His disciples came unto Him; and He opened His mouth and taught them, saying, Blessed are the poor in spirit” &c. The disciples were a class, who (excepting Judas or any other special case of the kind if such there were) had truly received
Jesus as the Messiah by the Spirit of God. They had not chosen Him, but He had chosen them that they should go and bring forth fruit, and that their fruit should remain. They were gathered around Him as His witnesses, and separated from the rest of the nation even now in a measure (i.e. in faith and affection to His person), soon to be so far more fully by His death and resurrection, and in the power of the Holy Ghost sent down from heaven. These were the persons to whom the Lord addressed Himself, in the sermon, and of whom He thought in His prayer.
Hence, while the discourse consists of an admirable exposition of the principles of the kingdom, and announces great and precious truths of God, which must ever abide, the actual circumstances of the disciples were not overlooked by their gracious Master. On the contrary, the proper application and only full meaning of many parts in detail are found in their necessities and adapted to their condition. And most blessedly He did provide for them, as One who, though a divine person, was come of a woman, come under the law, and thus by experience, and not omniscience only, knew what they lacked most, and where their real dangers lay. “For though He were a Son, yet learned He obedience by the things which He suffered.” For Him obedience was indeed a new thing, assuredly not because He had a rebellious nature as we have (for He was God, as well as with God, and even as born of the Virgin He was “that holy thing"), but because from everlasting He was the Word who had spoken into being all things, all creatures, heavenly and earthly, visible and invisible. Therefore had He to learn obedience, and learn it He did in a pathway of suffering as none but He could know. What, then, was His first, last, and constant thought as He walked and served in perfect grace here below? It was His Father's name: as He says elsewhere, “the living Father hath sent me, and I live by the Father.” Viewed as man it was the power of His communion, as it was the aim of His work. And it is as the One who was thus familiar with the Father, whose heart was ever overflowing with the sense of His glory, that He puts forward His own heart's feeling, as the first and prominent thought for His disciples in their intercourse with God. Some of the petitions He was about to put in their mouth were very suitable for them (e.g. that about the forgiveness of their debts or sins); but He would have them begin with their Father, not with themselves.
Accordingly the prayer, viewed in its structure, naturally divides into two sections. The first portion is made up of the desires proper to righteousness in the largest and highest sense—the atmosphere, I think I may say, in which our Lord Himself lived and moved here below. The second part is composed rather of supplications suited to those who were needy in every way, but withal true objects of grace. The three first petitions form one division, and the last four the other.
The very opening title or address to God appears to me in beautiful keeping with our Gospel and the then position of the disciples: “Our Father that art in heaven.” It is a phrase which constantly occurs in Matthew's Gospel, and there only. It is true that the Authorized Bible has it in the corresponding passage of St. Luke (ch. 11:2); but it is known to every person of competent acquaintance with these matters that there are weighty reasons for reducing the clause there to the single word “Father.” My own conviction is that the enlarged form which appears in the text of Luke was borrowed from Matthew; and this probably either through the mistake of some ancient copyist who trusted to his memory, and thus introduced confusion, or through the graver fault of designedly making as exact a harmony as possible in the language of the two evangelists. It is unnatural to suppose that, if an open enemy tampered with the sacred text, his corruption would gain currency in Christendom. On the other hand, no friend of revelation could possibly justify the deliberate introduction of a discrepancy with another Gospel. The tendency, therefore, and more particularly in the Gospels, has always been, on the part of misguided professing friends, to interpolate words or clauses from one into another, so as to give not only concurrent testimony, but as much as might be of verbal resemblance. I need hardly say that it is grievous and presumptuous thus to meddle with a word or letter of that which the Holy Ghost has inspired; that such a step, even if well meant, invariably spoils, so far, the beauty and perfection of Scripture, though of course the substantial truth remains; and that they are the truest friends of the Bible who seek to go back to the earliest and purest sources, relying on the abundant evidence which the goodness of God affords, in order to arrive at a just decision.
Assuming that this difference is well founded, what does it teach us? or why, we may reverently ask, is it thus written? In Matthew, one sees, the disciples are regarded according to their connection with God's ancient people Israel, accustomed therefore to look on or hope for the earth as the sphere of their exaltation as a nation. Here the Lord is gradually breaking their merely Jewish links by the revelation of a Father in heaven with Whom they would have to do. It is not now “the Lord of all the earth” causing the Jordan to be not a barrier but a highway for His conquering people to pass over and take possession of the land. Neither is it “the God of heaven” conferring imperial power, in His sovereign will, on a heathen when His people had utterly, sinned away, for a season at least, their heritage. But, again, it is no such fullness of blessing as was conveyed in our risen Lord's message to the disciples through Mary Magdalene: “Go to My brethren, and say unto them, I ascend unto My Father, and your Father; and to My God, and your God.”
The address, in Matthew, wears to my mind an intermediate or transitional character. Certain elements in the ancient oracles which Israel had are supposed, but there was an accession of light in accordance with the state of the disciples, who wore associated with a Messiah Whom the people did not receive, and who were thus in process of weaning from their former prejudices and of training for yet higher privileges. “The heaven, even the heavens, are the LORD'S: but the earth hath He given unto the children of men.” “Like as a father pitieth his children, so the Lord pitieth them that fear Him.” These sentiments from the Psalms, or sentiments akin springing from the Lord's divine wisdom, seem to me the basis of the address, though there is (naturally, when we think Who the speaker was) that degree of progress in it which exactly met and reflected the duo place of the disciples at that time. The Father is regarded as in heaven, and those who look up to Him were on earth, far from Him as it were, and in circumstances of weakness, want, and danger, though with hearts in a measure yearning for His glory.
The Lord, in the address, would fix their first thought on the Father above, would familiarize their spirits with looking up to Him, as infinitely blessed and benignant as well as the most high. There was not, nor could be at that time, the sense of nearness which was afterward their privilege: nevertheless the Lord assumes them to be real believers from among the Jews; and, while maintaining the authority of the law and enlarging its scope, leads on their souls to higher things. But there not an allusion to redemption in, the prayer not indeed throughout the whole of the sermon on the mount. Those who are taught to pray are in no way regarded as worshippers once purged, having no more conscience of sins: indeed, far from having and enjoying such a place, they would scarcely, I think, have understood then what such language meant. There is no thanksgiving to the Father “who hath made us partakers of the inheritance of the saints in light, who hath delivered from the power of darkness, and hath translated us into the kingdom of the Son of His love.” All this and more could not be so said; because the work of redemption was still a promise merely and not accomplished. This gives its tinge to the whole prayer; for there is no haste in the ways of God, nor would He so far slight the suffering of His Son, nor the mission of His Spirit, as to anticipate in the experience of the saints the Precious results which were to follow from these two glorious facts, when once they had come to pass. God forbid that I should insinuate anything imperfect as to the Lord's prayer or His sermon. For any one to speak disparagingly of either would be blasphemy.
The Lord takes up the disciples where they were. If He had uttered the as yet undeveloped truth which was revealed when redemption was wrought and the Holy Ghost thereon given, His language would have been unintelligible to the disciples. If anything had exceeded what was suitable to their then state, if the then standing, experience, or worship proper to accomplished redemption had been supposed, it would not have been the perfect prayer it was for them.
Take the instance of a person in prison. A petition is framed on his behalf to the sovereign. If the document were rightly drawn up, two things at least would characterize it: a full owning of the majesty offended against; and a humble thorough acknowledgment of the prisoner's guilt. This would be the only language becoming one under such painful circumstances. He might have sure grounds to believe that the petition might find favor in his sovereign's eyes and that its prayer would be granted. This would not be by ignoring the actual circumstances of the case, but rather by a frank confession: to adopt the tone of a freeman would be false ground. Now, the condition of those under the law was, in the main, analogous to this, till redemption, when accomplished, changed all. Confidence in God that He would save, they had, and it was right; for it rested upon a believing estimate of God's character, and upon His positive promises, spite of what they knew themselves to, be. He had announced over and over again, by word and oath, type and prophecy, that He would, through Messiah, accomplish the deliverance of all who trusted in Him. Still they were not yet set free, however certainly they would be, because this depended on His faithful goodness and truth; and “God is not a man that He should lie.” But as yet it was a thing desired, not possessed—a privilege longed and prayed for, but not bestowed and enjoyed as a constant settled portion, till the death and resurrection of Christ made it to be God's righteousness so to deal with the believer.
This consideration, by the way, explains much in the Psalms, and in particular the alternations of conflict found there. Sometimes the speakers are hoping, sometimes fearing; one moment confessing themselves the sheep of God's pasture, and the next moment afraid of being consumed in His hot displeasure. All this was the experience of the saints, before the cross of Christ made it possible for the Holy Ghost to bear witness to the soul of a complete and eternal putting away of sins. It was well and of God that they should feel their state, without presuming to run before the condition of God; and thus it was with the dealing of the disciples also. Many prophets and kings had desired to see what they saw and to hear what they heard; but redemption, with all its fruitful issues, was still a blessing in prospect only. And the Lord's prayer was the perfect expression of their desires and wants, before that mighty change came in as a fact. It is essential to an adequate understanding of the prayer, that we should realize the position of those to whom primarily it was given; and it always must be misapplied, if we do not appreciate the new ground on which accomplished redemption sets the faithful.
It is well to observe also that the prayer is the proper expression of individual wants. I do not mean that the disciples may not have used it together as well as singly, but it nowhere supposes the Christians formed into one body. A prayer for the Church, therefore, as such, it is not; for it never passes beyond an aggregate of individuals, irrespective of the uniting bond of the Spirit Who baptizes into one body. But this may appear more distinctly as we look briefly at its several parts.
“Hallowed be Thy name” is the great foundation of all, the first and strongest feeling of a renewed mind. Flowing from the sense of the holiness due to the Father's name and obligatory on every soul that has to do with Him, as well as on His house forever, there is also the desire of the glory in which all shall answer to the Father's heart and character— “Thy kingdom come.” It is not exactly Christ's kingdom, but the Father's. The Gospel of Matthew, if examined with care, shows that the Father's kingdom is distinguished in Scripture from that of the Son of man. Thus, in ch. 13:41-43, we are told that the Son of man Shall send forth His angels, and they shall gather out of His kingdom all scandals, and them which do iniquity...then shall the righteous shine forth as the sun in the kingdom of their Father. At the end of this age the Lord will take the world as His kingdom, and must have evil purged from it, sooner or later, by His judicial power. But the Father's kingdom is another and heavenly sphere where only the righteous shine.
But it does not satisfy the heart that the Father's will should be done in heaven only. Accordingly the third petition runs: “Thy will be done on earth as in heaven.” When the Father's kingdom comes, this will be the moral answer to it, if I may so say, though in a lower sphere. The Father's will, instead of being despised or resisted, is yet to be the guide and ensurer of all blessing in that which was still a rebellious province. The disciples were to pray that it might be done on earth, where there was nothing like it yet, save in His ways Who thus led their desires Godward. This closes the first division of the Lord's prayer.
Next, comes what was suited to the disciples as the objects of divine compassion, in circumstances of sorrow and trial here below. First, their bodily need is confessed, then that of the soul. “Give us this day our daily [or, sufficient] bread, and forgive us our debts, as we forgave our debtors;” the last being put on the ground or pattern of the merciful spirit which had been so strongly inculcated on the disciples at the close of the chapter before. It was no longer to be “an eye for an eye, and a tooth for a tooth;” no longer evil for evil, but good only, good always. The model for their imitation was their heavenly Father, and not merely God as God; because as such He has vindicated Himself from time to time, and He shall yet deal most righteously with all that demands judgment in man. A Father in heaven, He makes His son to rise on the evil and on the good, and sendeth rain on the just and on the unjust, not to speak of His intimate and everlasting relations with His children, who enjoy the outflow of all His love. So here the Lord teaches His disciples, not as a question of remission for sinners, but of divine government as children, to say, “Forgive us our debts, as we forgave our debtors.” That is to say, we have this principle of forgiving mercy to others, not only enjoined on the disciples as the will of the Lord, but solemnly interwoven with their own habitual need of it when they lifted up their hearts to their Father.
The application and value of this to such as had been Jews must be manifest; because as a nation they were responsible to walk according to the law, the character of which was not, mercy in case of wrong, but the infliction of just punishment on the guilty. Thus it was that Israel of old was employed to purge the land of Canaan of its defiled and defiling inhabitants. And therefore it was that they themselves, when they and their kings thoroughly apostatized from God, fell under its terrible lash. “You only have I known of all the families of the earth: therefore will I punish you for all your iniquities.” But now another principle was about to govern—not earthly retributive righteousness, but heavenly grace, which has power to transform as well as forgive the guilty. The Jews who believed were then led on gradually out of their previous standing and set in a new place as children, having to do with their Father in heaven, and responsible to reflect His character on earth.
Again, we do well to remember who they were that the Lord instructed thus to plead with their Father. They were disciples, who were thereby shown the continual necessity of dependence upon Him and of confession. Nevertheless it is the Father besought to forgive the debts of His children, not of a poor sinner in an agony about his iniquity and without the knowledge of Christ. Scripture provides for such an one elsewhere, but it is not the question here; and if the Lord's prayer were applied to, or appropriated by, an unrenewed soul, as the prescribed means of blessing for his case, a real injury would be done. Does God make the forgiveness of an unconverted man depend, in any sort or degree, upon his forgiveness of others? By no means. This were to ask a very high practical requirement from a person in the lowest possible condition; it were to impose a new law more fatal to the sinner's hopes than that of Sinai: in a word, it would ruin and deny the gospel, which in that case would be of works and no more of grace. Thus, the very petition, which ignorance would cite to prove that men indiscriminately were provided for here, is enough to show the utter inapplicability of the Lord's prayer to their condition. It supposes a living with God by faith, and proves that the nature of the petitions is an additional ground for affirming that the prayer was not meant for men in their natural or unrenewed state. Those whom the Lord was instructing how to pray were persons ignorant, it is true, of redemption and of the new rights, its accomplishment would usher into, but possessed of real faith in the Lord Jesus—persons who would assuredly have gone to heaven, had they died then. They were, so far, on the same footing with the Old Testament saints; they were all alike forborne with, by virtue of a work not yet accomplished but sure; they were safe in God's mind, because He was looking on to that work. The disciples had the privilege of the Savior present with them; but the rich, blessed, perfect salvation which He was to bring in by His death and resurrection was still vague and dimly understood, if at all. In and for this condition of things the Lord's prayer was given.
Then they were to ask their Father not to lead them into temptation, which cannot therefore mean sin here. With temptation, in the sense of lustful evils, as James says, God tempteth not any man, as He, of course, cannot be Himself. But Scripture uses the word in the same chapter, and in other places from Genesis to Revelation, for a man's trial and sifting in a greater or a less degree. Take Peter's case in the Gospels. It was no sin that he should be put to the proof, whether he world in the face of shame confess his Master. The Lord had already warned him of his weakness; but the too confident apostle heeded not the word, slept when he should have been praying against the temptation, and consequently, when it came, he fell—fell miserably and repeatedly. It was quite right, therefore, for the disciples, conscious of their own powerlessness, to ask that they might not be led into circumstances so sorely trying. Knowing their liability to fail under its pressure, they ought humbly and earnestly to deprecate such a sifting. No such prayer is or could be in the Bible as, Lead us not into sin; for this would be to impute moral evil to God. The temptation here was the putting a person throughly to the proof, and the consequence of it would be that, if there were unjudged evil in the heart, it would come out to his humiliation. The undetected mischief working within would be brought to the surface and the light. The Lord Jesus Himself passed through every kind of temptation, first in the wilderness, and again at the close, in the garden of Gethsemane, when the power of darkness came upon Him to the uttermost. But He had nothing in Him that could be touched by Satan; as He said, “The prince of this world cometh and hath nothing in Me.” In us there is a great deal that is brought out by the temptation; and thus, if we do not lean very simply on the Lord, we break down in sin against Him. Therefore it is added in the next and last clause, “but deliver us from evil [or, the evil one];” because the effect of temptation ordinarily is that evil is manifested, and he who is its source and prime mover acquires advantage over the soul.
We do not enter into the doxology which concludes the prayer in the received text of Matthew; for while every body agrees in leaving it out of Luke, it is well known that its authority, even in the other Gospel, is worse than doubtful. Probably it was an accretion derived from ecclesiastical usage in the fourth century, or perhaps earlier. Chrysostom comments on the doxology without a note of distrust; but previously to him not a trace of it appears in any exposition or citation, either in the East or West. It would appear that the prayer began to be, or at least was, spoken of in the third century as “oratio legitima et ordinaria.” But this seems scarcely to have been the case in the days of Justin Martyr,1 who speaks of the ruler offering up prayer and thanksgiving gap ὅση δύναμις αὐτῶ (that is, extempore).
But that which we started with has been shown—the special suitability of the prayer to the class with which our Lord was then dealing. I do not go farther now; for the question of His will as regards latter times will be considered before we have done. But it is well to bear in mind, that, everlastingly true as is every word which our Lord spoke, we have to take care that all be rightly divided and applied. I yield to none in reverent admiration of the most sublime and the most pregnant form of prayer ever written. The question, nevertheless, remains, not of its intrinsic value, but of its due and intended use, after redemption and the descent of the Holy Ghost.
(To be continued.)