The Lord’s Prayer – with new eyes
I can’t shake off the version I was taught as a child:
Our Father, who art in heaven,
Hallowed be thy name.
Thy kingdom come,
Thy will be done,
On earth, as it is in heaven.
Give us this day our daily bread.
And forgive us our trespasses,
as we forgive those who trespass against us.
And lead us not into temptation,
but deliver us from evil:
For thine is the kingdom,
and the power, and the glory,
forever and ever. Amen.
I can’t, for example, say ‘forgive us our debts’ as some versions put it. Or replace ‘thine’ with ‘yours’ easily, it’s so ingrained. Not that the newer versions are inaccurate. There’s an interesting debate to be had over ‘trespasses’ or ‘debts’ in translating Greek and Aramaic…but that’s for others to argue over.
This post is about looking at the very familiar Lord’s Prayer but with new eyes…
We tend to think that this prayer is answered if we have faith when we pray, rather than know in ourselves that this prayer has already been answered and we are now to live it out in our lives.
This post is about looking at the very familiar Lord’s Prayer but with new eyes…
For example ‘give us this day our daily bread’. We might pray this as if it is our prayer that extracts from God our daily bread, whereas it has already been given. The challenge is for us to believe it has been given not that it lies in the present or near future…if we ask.
Jesus’ mission was to bring the Old Testament or Old Covenant to a close and inaugurate the New Testament or New Covenant as prophesied principally by Jeremiah and Ezekiel.
In the Old Covenant , the temple consisted of three parts. First the outer court for the people, then the Holy Place where the priests ministered, and then the Holy of Holies where the High Priest was permitted to go once a year, with the blood of a lamb, to make Atonement for Israel.
In the Holy of Holies, apart from God’s presence, there was the ‘ark of the covenant’, a wooden box overlaid with gold, with three items inside.
1. The tablets of stone on which the ten commandments had been carved
2. A pot of manna – the bread miraculously provided each day during the Exodus
3. Aaron’s rod – a dead piece of wood, a rod, which miraculously budded
In the New Covenant, each believer is a temple within which God abides by His Spirit. Jeremiah and Ezekiel gave us the details of the New Covenant:
The days are coming when I will make a new covenant
with the people of Israel and with the people of Judah.
This is the covenant I will make with the people of Israel
I will put my law in their minds and write it on their hearts.
(Jeremiah 31 v 31f)
I will give you a new heart and put a new spirit within you; I will take the heart of stone out of your flesh and give you a heart of flesh. I will put My Spirit within you and cause you to walk in My statutes
(Ezekiel 36 v 36,37)
If our physical bodies relate to the outer court in the Old Testament temple, and the Holy Place relates to our souls (that precious part of us that gives us individuality, our minds, emotions, and will), our spirit is represented by the acacia box in the Holy of Holies.
When we believe and are born again, our old heart of stone is removed and we are given a new heart, a new spirit. Our ‘new’ spirit is joined with His Holy Spirit so that, just as in the Holy of Holies in the physical temple where God’s presence dwelt, so, now, the Holy Spirit dwells in us. Genuine Christianity turns out to be a spirit/Spirit operation.
‘Do you not know your body is a temple of the Holy Spirit?’ 1 Cor 6 v19
Jeremiah and Ezekiel as prophets, both saw that the tablets of stone laid in the acacia box were really just figurative copies of the heavenly original, the Old Covenant foreshadowing the New Covenant in which we live. Now, in the New Covenant, the law of God is no longer external carved out in stone, it’s internalised; the Holy Spirit writes the law on our hearts and we learn a whole new way of living…just like Jesus. As C. S. Lewis said we have become like ‘mini-Christs’.
Equally, God has placed in us the heavenly reality of the pot of manna, the miraculous provision of ‘daily bread’, manna from heaven. The Lord’s Prayer has been answered in the New Covenant. Now, wherever we are, whatever our circumstances, we have the pot of manna in our spirit, and it pours out eternally the living word by the Holy Spirit. It is not something we need to pull down from heaven it has been given.
This post is not really about Aaron’s rod but when Jesus instructed his disciples to pray ‘deliver us from evil’ the bible tells us the last enemy is death. But now we have ‘rod that budded’ in us. Resurrection is our new normal.
Jesus was the first prototype of this new humanity of ‘living temples’, now in Christ, we have become like Him…not because of our goodness, holiness, or our religious performance, membership, or attendance of any church…but simply having faith that this is what God has made possible through Christ.
We are not a huge stone-built temple stuck in one location, in Jerusalem, but mobile temples, through whom God pours out His life.