At thy right hand there are pleasures for evermore (Ps. 16: 11)

After this manner therefore pray ye: Our Father which art in heaven, Hallowed be thy name. Thy kingdom come. Thy will be done in earth, as it is in heaven. Give us this day our daily bread. And forgive us our debts, as we forgive our debtors. And lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from evil: For thine is the kingdom, and the power, and the glory, for ever. Amen (Matt. 6:9-13).

The second thing mentioned in the coda of the Lord’s Prayer is the power. As the Lord was training His apostles over the course of three years, He was not preparing them for indoor clerical work. They were given the mission of preaching the gospel to every creature, bringing all the nations of men into submission to the authority of Christ, and teaching them to obey all that Jesus had taught throughout the course of His earthly ministry. This obviously involves a transformation of the entire world, and just as obviously, this is something that cannot happen without a great exercise of power.

In this prayer, the disciples were taught to pray that God would perform certain things—the last one mentioned being “deliver us from evil.” Then the reason why these petitions were presented to the Father is given. For the kingdom is His, and the power, and the glory. God is not a paper monarch. He is no figurehead. His is the kingdom, certainly, but it is a kingdom suffused with power. The word here is dynamis. “For the kingdom of God is not in word, but in power” (1 Cor. 4:20).

Because the kingdom of God is a kingdom of power, then it follows that the emissaries of this kingdom should be able to proclaim it with power. “For the preaching of the cross is to them that perish foolishness; but unto us which are saved it is the power of God” (1 Cor. 1:18).

As we learned earlier in the prayer, we are to beseech the Father for His kingdom to come. We are to offer this petition because it is plain that He has every intention that His kingdom come with power.  

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At thy right hand there are pleasures for evermore (Ps. 16: 11)

After this manner therefore pray ye: Our Father which art in heaven, Hallowed be thy name. Thy kingdom come. Thy will be done in earth, as it is in heaven. Give us this day our daily bread. And forgive us our debts, as we forgive our debtors. And lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from evil: For thine is the kingdom, and the power, and the glory, for ever. Amen (Matt. 6:9-13).

As we come to the coda of the Lord’s Prayer, the kingdom, power and glory phrase, the first thing to comment on is its presence. In some versions of the Scriptures, the prayer simply ends with the petition to “deliver us from evil” (e.g. ESV). Other versions of the Scriptures include it (e.g. KJV, NASB, and NKJV). The difference is a function of the manuscript tradition that is being relied on—the Textus Receptus includes the phrase, and more modern critical texts do not. One of the reasons why I use the King James is that I prefer the Textus Receptus manuscript family. It is worth noting, quite apart from the manuscript issues, that the abrupt ending of “deliver us from evil” seems odd, like the petitioner ran into a wall while praying. The prayer really seems incomplete without the coda.

The petitions of the prayer are grounded in the fact that the kingdom, the power, and the glory belong to God forever. Let us begin with the kingdom.

This is the second time the kingdom has been mentioned in the prayer. The first time was in the petition for the kingdom to come. Here the fact that God possesses the kingdom is the basis for all the petitions, including the earlier prayer for the kingdom to come. This reinforces the fact that the Christian faith is a monarchy. Jesus Christ is the King of kings and the Lord of lords. As we preach the gospel to unbelievers, we are not canvassing votes, trying to get Jesus elected president. We are not trying to rally support for Him. He has been crowned, and Christians are the messengers and heralds, sent out into all the world to declare what has already been accomplished.

“And the seventh angel sounded; and there were great voices in heaven, saying, The kingdoms of this world are become the kingdoms of our Lord, and of his Christ; and he shall reign for ever and ever” (Rev. 11:15).

He is on His throne now, and has been reigning for the last two thousand years. When Jesus ascended into Heaven, He approached the Ancient of Days on the clouds of heaven and was given an everlasting dominion (Dan. 7:13-14). In that passage from Daniel, we may even have an anticipation of the blessing found in this coda. “And there was given him dominion, and glory, and a kingdom” (Dan. 7:14). 

And because “His kingdom [is] that which shall not be destroyed” (Dan. 7:14), it is possible for us to offer up all the petitions found in the Lord’s Prayer, doing so in full confidence. He is the King over all, which means that He can provide for us (daily bread), protect us (lead us not into temptation), and restore us (forgive us).

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At thy right hand there are pleasures for evermore (Ps. 16: 11)

After this manner therefore pray ye: Our Father which art in heaven, Hallowed be thy name. Thy kingdom come. Thy will be done in earth, as it is in heaven. Give us this day our daily bread. And forgive us our debts, as we forgive our debtors. And lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from evil: For thine is the kingdom, and the power, and the glory, for ever. Amen (Matt. 6:9-13).

The first part of this petition is a prayer that we not be led into temptation. This requires a personal context—that of a tempter. And this in turn helps us understand the translation of the second part of the petition. Should it be deliver us from evil or deliver us from the evil one? While the King James renders this as evil generally (along with the ESV), I think it would be better to take it as evil one.

The word evil is an adjective, and in either case it is being used as a substantival adjective. We are either asking to be delivered from the evil thing or from the evil one. When we say “the good die young,” there is a noun implied in there, meaning that we are intending to say that the good men die young. In the same way, we are asking for deliverance from the evil what? The adjective here is poneros, and there are other places where this same word, without any accompanying noun, is simply translated as evil one.

“I do not ask that you take them out of the world, but that you keep them from the evil one” (John 17:15, ESV).

“But the Lord is faithful. He will establish you and guard you against the evil one” (2 Thess. 3:3, ESV).

Ultimately the argument here should be contextual. Is the Lord changing subject in the middle of the sentence (from personal temptation to a concern about general evils befalling us)? I think it makes better sense to see the petition as continuous, wanting to be delivered from the temptations of the devil, and from the devil himself.

If this is the case, there is no problem with Christians thinking of the devil in personal terms, and as a personal adversary. “Be sober, be vigilant; because your adversary the devil, as a roaring lion, walketh about, seeking whom he may devour” (1 Peter 5:8). We have warrant for doing this in the Lord’s Prayer, which He Himself taught us to pray, while avoiding the other extreme of thinking that the prince of the power of the air has nothing better to do than to follow Herbert Schwartz around in an effort to get him to give way to the false promises of popcorn gluttony. As individual Christians, we are not that important. But at the same time, we are not unimportant either, and the Lord has taught us how to pray.

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At thy right hand there are pleasures for evermore (Ps. 16: 11)

After this manner therefore pray ye: Our Father which art in heaven, Hallowed be thy name. Thy kingdom come. Thy will be done in earth, as it is in heaven. Give us this day our daily bread. And forgive us our debts, as we forgive our debtors. And lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from evil: For thine is the kingdom, and the power, and the glory, for ever. Amen (Matt. 6:9-13).

This petition has been confusing to some. Just a few chapters before this, right after the Lord’s baptism, we are told that the Spirit drove Jesus into the wilderness in order to be tempted by the devil (Matt. 4:1). But we are also told that God tempts no one (Jas. 1:13).

The word involved in all these places is peirazo (or peirasmos) and it has two distinct meanings, and those distinct meanings provide us with the answer to our question. The word can mean either tempt or test. In English, these are distinct words for distinct things. In Greek, they used the same word for distinct things—revealing that we are dealing with an actual human language. After all, remember that the English word cleave even has opposite meanings. It can mean making one into two, as with a meat cleaver, or it can mean making two into one, as when a man leaves his father and mother and cleaves to his wife (Gen. 2:24). We can readily tell which is which by the context. The difference between testing and tempting is that when God tests us He wants us to succeed. When the devil tempts or entices us, he wants us to fail.

As James teaches us, God never entices us to sin. He does not lure us into sin the way the tempter does. But He does allow us to get into situations where we are tempted, and tempted by someone who does desire our failure. We are instructed to pray to God the Father, asking Him to minimize or eliminate all such occasions. To this request, He may say yes or no, but we are required to avoid all such occasions of sin. When in the providence of God He allows us to go through such a trial, from His vantage point it was a testing, and from the devil’s it was a temptation.

“Oh, let the evil of the wicked come to an end, and may you establish the righteous— you who test the minds and hearts, O righteous God!” (Psalm 7:9, ESV).

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At thy right hand there are pleasures for evermore (Ps. 16: 11)

After this manner therefore pray ye: Our Father which art in heaven, Hallowed be thy name. Thy kingdom come. Thy will be done in earth, as it is in heaven. Give us this day our daily bread. And forgive us our debts, as we forgive our debtors. And lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from evil: For thine is the kingdom, and the power, and the glory, for ever. Amen (Matt. 6:9-13).

The next petition is a bear. It is the one part of the prayer that the Lord goes back to comment on after He is done teaching the prayer (Matt. 6:14-15). There He says bluntly that if we forgive, our heavenly Father will forgive us. He says also that if we refuse to forgive, then our trespasses will not themselves be forgiven.

The word used in the prayer is the word for debt or obligation, while the word in the Lord’s commentary is the word for sin or trespass. The word rendered as forgive is the same word throughout. We ask God to forgive our obligations to Him, and we show our understanding of what we request by extending that same forgiveness of obligations that others owe to us. When the Lord goes back to comment on it, and uses the word for sin or trespass, this shows that He is including the obligations we create by our misbehavior, or by our falling short. This means that when we ask God to forgive us for those things that we did on purpose, we must also be fully prepared to forgive others for the things they did to us on purpose.

We often confuse forgiveness with pardon. We are prepared to pardon others for the things they did accidentally. If someone bumps into you in a crowded room, jostling you accidentally, he will say, “Pardon me,” and you will say, “Don’t mention it.” But forgiveness is required when the person does it on purpose. We often respond that we can’t forgive that—he did it on purpose. But the only things you can forgive are those things that were actually sins. That is what God forgives in us, is it not?

So the reason it is a bear is that we tend to judge others by their words and actions, and we tend to judge ourselves by our intentions and motives. He did this, while I meant that. This is simply a way of using unequal weights and measures, and it is not surprising that those who wrong us come up short so frequently.

The thing we must seek to learn in all this is the perspective to see ourselves as one of the characters on the stage, and to look at the scene as a whole—instead of trying to interpret every scene with one character missing (you).

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