The Lord’s Prayer and Submission to the Will of God

In this short piece I wish to offer an interpretation of the most repeated and most familiar of prayers, the Lord’s Prayer. 

A modern view of prayer

When we reflect on it, on its spirit, nothing could be more different from the expressions of that piety which we routinely teach our children, a piety of taking Jesus into our hearts and of the need to establish a relationship with Jesus, partly if not wholly through asking things of him which in due course he will – or may not - provide  us what we ask for. What matters is our relationship to the Father, of which Jesus is the Mediator.

Nor is the Prayer easily related to how modern evangelical Christians speak of prayer, as if it is a sort of stuff: ‘He’s ill so he needs more prayer’. The idea of this is that prayer is a sort of force aimed in the direction of God, an unwilling or distant God, to get us what we want when other means fail, and even perhaps when other means haven’t failed. Sometimes we seem to think of prayer as a first-class delivery system, through the use of which we can ensure a rapid response.

A different model

This is a model of Christian prayer  taught by Jesus two thousand odd years ago about what his followers are to pray for  when they address  his Heavenly Father. It is not a prayer to Jesus taught by Jesus, but a prayer to his Father and our Father. Jesus is the mediator of our prayers, including teaching his people the spirit of prayer. He is not the one to whom are prayers are to be addressed.  No doubt Jesus’ prayers to his Father provide a kind of paradigm for the understanding of this prayer, the most familiar and yet the strangest of all prayers.

I suggest that the Lord’s Prayer is primarily intended to shape us, not to wake up the Lord. It is God-centred template for prayer. It emphasises not our needs but God’s transcendence and sovereignty. God, our Father, is in heaven, he is out Creator and Lord, and his name is to be hallowed, to be revered. He has a kingdom, and the petitioner seeks to align himself to the purpose of God with the bringing about of that kingdom. This has nothing to do with the problems in the Middle East, or the refugees, or the latest tragedy highlighted by the media. We are not asking the Lord to take charge of the H.M. foreign policy. It is not a prayer for peace, though elsewhere in the New Testament we are encouraged us to pray for peace.   The prayer is not that God's kingdom will be transformed into an earthly kingdom – the entirety of Jesus’ teaching on the kingdom is against such an idea. This is that God’s kingly reign in heaven may be extended on earth. This is exactly what the early disciples in their first encounters with Jesus thought that he was, a revolutionary Che Guevara figure. In the case of God's kingdom men and women enter it through penitence and faith in the Messiah, the mediator of the covenant.

But what about ‘Give us this day our daily bread’?  Isn’t this the real business of the prayer, to get us those things that we want, and persuade ourselves what we need? Isn't this the difference that being a Christian brings, the possession of a hot line to the Almighty? After all, isn’t God concerned with every detail of our lives? The spirit of this petition is - alas! - very different from that of promoting a sort of Christian consumerism.  It is a request for bread that we need in order to live. It shows our dependence on Almighty God. Give us day by day the bread we need. The bottom line. In the last analysis it is God alone who can keep us going physically. It is a prayer both of submission to God, and of contentment with his care. It is not a prayer which  contains within it all the aspirations of worldly ambition, and which we are free to extend to the entirety of our wish list. The reverse.  It is a prayer that the Lord will give us contented spirit.

Such minds must include a forgiving spirit.  Why should we hope for forgiveness from God when we are unforgiving to those who upset us?  Our showing forgiveness to others, and especially to those who have offended or harmed us in some way, is not a condition of God forgiving us, as a quick reading of the petition may suggest.  But rather, how can we in reason expect the Lord to forgive our trespasses if we in turn have a spirit that is unwilling to forgive those who trespass against us, a mean-spirited and selfish outlook? It is incongruous to hope for our own forgiveness while at the same time we are hard-hearted to others.

A prayer of self-denial

And finally, the prayer returns us to where we began. The kingdom, the power and the glory are not ours, much less is praying to be centred on such concerns, our own advancement. The kingdom that  has no end, and the power and the glory of it,  are the Lord’s alone. And those people have a part in this coming glory who enjoy his free forgiveness, and who themselves have a forgiving spirit.

So the prayer is a prayer of discipleship. 

Particular Baptists and the covenant

This is the fourth post in a series on Particular Baptist theology and its confessional roots. In it I shall sketch what are some good grounds for thinking that such theology takes a distinctive position on the covenant, or covenants, as we shall see. There is a considerable recent literature on this theme, from which I have learned a good deal. Because of this, my account will be sketchy. What I wish eventually to draw from this discussion of the covenants are some ecclesiastical consequences, which are touched on occasionally in the modern discussion. But more could be made of them, I believe. Such a view of the covenants seems to me to be critical for an overall account of the coherence of a Particular Baptist position.

First, a brief discussion of the differences between the Westminster Confession (1647) on the covenant, and the Baptist Confession of 1689. Then a discussion of the distinctive position adopted by some Baptists and some others.  The hermeneutical implications for the Baptist view of the church  will come in a following post.

The Confessional position

This is part of the wording of the covenant of grace in the Baptist Confession of 1689

It pleased the Lord to make a covenant of grace, wherein he freely offereth to sinners life and salvation by Jesus Christ….This covenant is revealed in the gospel: first of all to Adam…and afterwards by further steps, until the full discovery thereof was completed in the New Testament.

This wording presents quite a different form of the revealing of the gospel from that of the Westminster Confession. The emphasis is on the gradual unfolding rather than a sharp revelation of the covenant that the Westminster Confession provides. (One covenant of grace, two administrations.) In the Baptist account there is a gradualist understanding of this ‘discovery’ (i.e. disclosing) of the covenant. The differences must not be exaggerated, but they are quite distinct, and the Baptist wording gives the covenant of grace a flavor of its own. (The Savoy Declaration (1658) is different in wording but very similar in meaning to the 1689 Baptist Confession, speaking of the covenant ‘being differently and variously administered in respect of ordinancies and institutions in the time of the law,  and since the coming of Christ in the flesh’. Yet it is ‘one and the same’…’covenant of grace (7.5))

The gradualist approach that we notice is to be understood as permitting a disentangling of the gospel from the law, in the case of Moses, and those matters which according to the Epistle to the Hebrews by now have ‘faded away’. (In the case of Abraham, the wording makes possible a similar disentangling of the progeny of Abraham as regards the scope of the covenant of grace. We’ll look at Abraham next time). With these disentanglings there comes an appreciation of the fact that under the Mosaic covenant different things were going on under the same administration. Some of these things were babyish representations of that covenant, destined to pass away. Others were social institutions that were intended to guard the integrity of the covenant people from the surrounding culture. (Gal.4. 2-3) Throughout there were also typical elements foreshadowing the coming of the covenant of grace in its fullness. I think that this may best be understood if we first consider the Mosaic covenant, and then the Abrahamic covenant. This appreciation of the gradual implementation of the covenant also provides for Jeremiah 31. 31, widely quoted and alluded to the New Testament,  being given its full weight. as we shall note later.

Moses

Paul’s teaching about the purpose of the law in Galatians is significant and critical. It is an important fact for him that the law came after the covenant was established, when it was first promised to Adam and given explicit covenantal form to Abraham. In that covenant with Abraham there is both an eternal and a temporal element. The law when it came to Moses was in fact a fulfillment of the covenant to Abraham in its temporal sense. The Mosaic law, as long as it endured, was as a fence, a guardian, ‘until Christ came, in order that we might be justified by faith’. ‘But now that faith has come, we are no longer under a guardian, for in Christ Jesus you are all sons if God through faith. For as many of you as were baptized into Christ have put in Christ’.  Although we often concentrate on the failure of Israel, Paul does not focus on failure. (Gal. 3.24-7)  The law despite the faithlessness of the people nevertheless served to keep a nation together until, despite exile and colonisation, until the coming of Christ. This temporary arrangement served the purposes of the outworking and flourishing of the covenant of grace, but was not itself an expression of that covenant, except in certain typological respects à la Letter to the Hebrews. It embraced both the moral, the judicial and the ceremonial law, looking forward to what which was to come in ‘the fullness of time’, when God sent his Son. The blessings of the covenant to those who are largely but not universally embedded within the line of Isaac.

But why did that covenant have this role as a guardian? It was the preservative condition for a time, preserving those Jews benefitting from its terms from cultural exposure to the surrounding nations and cults, for example. Its law and its penalties helped to erect and keep in place a preserving barrier for the coming of the messianic age. It did not itself confer the benefits of the covenant of grace.

But there were beneficiaries of the covenant of grace during that period as we can see from the heroes of faith of Hebrews 11, and from the deep faith of a remnant of the nation who welcomed the Messiah who came at the appointed time, in the fulness of time. In the detail of the OT there is evidence of a remnant within the nation who had received ‘circumcision of the heart’ (Deut.10.16; Rom. 2.28-9). Such poor and needy Jews, who feared the Lord, whose piety is expressed in the Psalms, who in the time of Elijah did not ‘bow the knee to Baal’, and so on.

Israel and ‘not Israel’

Then at the time of the coming of the Messiah there were individuals such as Anna and Simeon and the extended family of Jesus – his mother Mary (and no doubt Joseph), Elizabeth and Zechariah, whose lives we get a glimpse of, particularly in Luke’s gospel – in the words of the Magnificat and of Zechariah’s prophecy in Luke 1, in which the events of the new covenant are described using the conceptuality of the Old. Mary speaks of God remembering his mercy ‘as he spoke to our fathers, to Abraham and to his offspring for ever’ (Lk. 1.55); and Simeon who ‘was waiting for the consolation of Israel’  (2.25) and Anna the prophetess who spoke of God ‘to all who were waiting for the redemption of Jerusalem’. (2.38)

At the same time there is evidence of the weaving of Gentiles into the history of Israel, and even of them being in the human line of the Messiah, typified by Ruth the Moabitess. So it was true of the history of Israel throughout, as it was true in Paul’s time: ‘So too at the present time there is a remnant, chosen by grace’ (Rom.11.5). And as Peter declared at the Council of Jerusalem, as the Gentiles were grafted in, in that sense that ‘the tent of David was being rebuilt…..that the remnant of mankind may seek the Lord, and all the Gentiles  who are called by my name.’ (Acts 15.16) There are two principles at work here: ‘Not all who are descended from Israel belong to  Israel’ (Rom.9.6) and ‘Those who were not my people I will call “my people”’. (v. 25) Who are these? Those ‘whom he has called, not only from the Jews only but also from the Gentiles’. (Rom. 9.24) Paul then cites Hosea’s prophecy, part of which has just been quoted, and words from Isaiah.

In the next post we shall look a little at the Abrahamic covenant, and then try to make sense of all this in terms of the outworking of the covenant of grace in  pre-Incarnation and post-Incarnation history.

Christian Theism and the Particular Baptists

Above  is Edward Reynolds, (1599-1676) a member of the Westminster Assembly who conformed to the Church of England in 1662, and later became Bishop of Norwich. John Flavel referred to him as 'a living library, a third university'. Beneath is Benjamin Keach, (1640-1704) , a signatory to the Baptist Confession of 1689.  He seems to be rather surprised to be so near a bishop.

In what I intended (and still intend) as a brief account of Baptist Reformed Confessional theology began with the striking fact that the Particular Baptists of the seventeenth century were content to use the confessional language of their persecutors and would-be persecutors, including the phrase of God, that he is ‘without body, parts and passions’. This phrase was ascribed to Almighty God in all major English confessional documents of the Reformation and subsequently into the seventeenth century, including the Baptist Confession of 1689. We then thought of divine passionlessness, and saw that it was connected with divine immutability as it is found, for example, in Hebrews 6.  And we also considered divine partlessness, or simplicity, God's metaphysical oneness. We now consider further the connectedness of these with other features - not parts, of course - of God.

I

To think consistently and clearly about God our Creator, who is or has become our Redeemer in Christ, is unfamiliar to many and it is not easy. Such thinking calls for discipline, and also patience. Consistency should be our aim, since the Lord our God is one Lord. He cannot be at odds with himself. While recognising God’s ultimate incomprehensibility, we should not take short-term relief by appealing to paradox, tension, antinomy and the like. Sometimes people object to the discipline of theology as if it was an attempt to ‘master’ God, to pin him down, or to put him in a box. But to try and think in a straight and consistent way about God is not to make God a plaything. Sad to say, to characterise as clearly as we can what a Pit Bull Terrier is, is not to tame such an unappealing animal. Defined or not, the reality of the dog, and the terror it may arouse, are just as real. Modernity has become used to thinking of God as our buddy, as a familiar friend, or as our benign grandfather. So as we make plans, we may automatically think that God must have the plans that we have. That our plans become his plans. If not, whatever is going on? But that would be a serious misapprehension. God may have plans besides the plans we have, or things may be such that both God and ourselves cannot achieve the same goals. The biblical way is for us to commit ourselves to God's plans insofar as he has revealed them. 'Thy will be done, as in heaven, so on earth'. It is both lazy and presumptuous to bring down God to our size. He is altogether beyond our imagination, too wonderful and strange to be fully captured in our words. This is so even though it is in our words that he reveals himself as our covenant God, our redeemer.

The basic posture that we are to adopt is to think of God, who transcends our own fleeting existence in space and time, as coming down in grace to us. He comes down to us in his revelation, adapting himself to our language, using figures and similes in order to address us. And he comes down in the Incarnation, which is not God becoming man, as milk becomes cheese, or wood becomes ash, or a boy becomes a man. This God, immaculate and immutable in his perfection, takes on human nature, and so humbles himself to be our mediator and friend.

II

To begin to grasp this we must learn a new language that befits talking about the Creator who transcends us in ways that Scripture has in characterizing God. The church has coined words like ‘Trinity’ and ‘impute’ to refer to divine realities, that God is three and one, and that in Christ, he has counted our sins to himself, and his righteousness to us. In a similar way there is a language about God that the church, from the Patristic period onwards, has adopted to speak – daringly it must be said - of God as he is in himself.  It is best to think of such language not as the language of a science, theology, but rather as providing us with a grammar. It is not that theologians can see further than anyone else, or are cleverer than other people, or that they can provide explanations for us, like consultant engineers do, for example. Rather, theologians attend to grammar, theological grammar, to try to epitomize God and his ways, to help not to go off the rails by onesidedly stressing data in Scripture at the expense of other data. This is stammering about God, for by it we cannot comprehend God as he is in himself. For how can the finite encompass the infinite? Rather we talk of him in such a way as to avoid fundamental biblical errors in our talk, in the present case we endeavour not to confound the Creator with any of his creatures.

So to speak of God’s simplicity, his being without parts, is to speak not of a simplicity that is to be pitied, but of the oneness or unity that befits the Creator of the ends of the earth. The Lord our God is one Lord.  To imagine that the Creator is composed out of parts,  made out of stuff that is more basic than he is, is to be suppose that his parts were not created, implying that God is not the creator of everything. In physical nature there seems to be a divisibility all the way down. But in God, the creator of nature, there is unity, indivisibility. So one way of thinking about this is to affirm that God does not consist of parts that are more basic than he is.   To think that would reduce him to the level of a creature. So Christian trinitarianism does not assert that God has one part who is the Father, another part the Son and another the Holy Spirit. If we are going to be faithful to the biblical witness we must distinguish three persons in the Trinity, but these three persons are not three parts. Mysterious? Certainly. Incoherent? Certainly not. For this is the fundamental feature of the Christian religion.

So we begin to learn to talk of God, the God of the Bible, when we construe his unity in this sense. Last time we applied this simplicity to eternity and to time. God is not subject to ‘ever rolling stream’, he is not bound by time. For one thing, time is a sign of change. We change by gaining and losing parts, by coming to have thoughts and beliefs, and modifying them, and we have brain cells and body muscles, we age. We are in time. But God has created the universe, with ourselves a part it, from a standpoint outside time. He does not change, he alone has immortality (I Tim. 6.16). So to talk of the age of God, or his memories and anticipations, would be to talk of him in creaturely, not in creatorly terms.

Being atemporal, God is immutable. This does not mean that God has decided to be immutable, but that he is. To suppose his immutability rested upon his decision is confused. For if this we so, on what would we base our confidence in his promises? So God is essentially or necessarily immutable. As the writer of the Letter to the Hebrews shows, such immutability is one of God’s great-making properties. (Heb. 6. 13-18). He is immutable by nature.

And closely connected with God’s simplicity and his atemporality is his aseity. ‘Aseity’, independence, is an unfamiliar word, yet the idea behind it is a vital one. It is the root idea behind the affirmation of the underivedness of God,, that God is a se, from himself. This does not mean that God has created himself, he is uncreated. This idea of aseity has a strong element of negativity to it, as all the expressions we are considering have. So aseity does not mean that God has made himself, that would be incoherent, but that the child’s question ‘God made me, but who made God?’ rests upon a misunderstanding. In learning the grammar of his faith, the child has slipped up, misspoken. But the mistake is easily corrected. How could anything or anyone have made God, for he is the Creator of everything except himself? He is uncreated. It makes no sense to say that God was made, for to do so once again confounds the Creator-creature distinction. It is a mistake in the grammar of our language of God. The Creator-creature distinction is fundamental to all Christian theology; we must never lose sight of it.

The interconnectedness of the simplicity, the timelessness, the immutability and the aseity of God, (and of God’s full activity) lies at the heart of Christian theism. It is important to stress that this connectedness is not only a work of human reason, but that it is first and foremost grounded in God himself, and made known in Holy Scripture. We noted this about immutability, and it is so with eternality and aseity and the rest. We may make distinctions in our thought of God, as when we say that God is three persons. But such distinctions are not divisions in the reality of God. 

III

The modern separation of the elements of theological education, the development of separate specialisms, whether in the College or Seminary, or in the pew or the Bible-study group, is a mixed blessing. To be sure, we have the benefit of the various disciplines, Old Testament, New Testament, the Ancient Near East, historical theology, biblical theology, and so on. But who or what is to put Humpty-Dumpty together again?   We must learn to cultivate an appreciation of the synoptic standpoint of our Creator, to whose one universe of creation and redemption every page of Scripture testifies.  Not only is he our Creator, but the very same God is our Redeemer, and wherever the Lord is spoken of in Scripture it is this Lord. His word is the one word of the one God. His indivisible reality provides the basic hermeneutical key to every passage of Scripture.

So the Particular Baptists, so long as they remain true to their historic confessional position, are theists in this, the grandest sense, classical theists. 

Next time in this short series we shall look at the first of two ways (I am not saying that there are only two such ways), in which the early Calvinistic Baptists took a different line from the Westminster Confession and, it seems, from the bulk of Reformed theologians.