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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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 straightforward, and concerns our earthly needs. The prayer has begun by hallowing the name of the Father in the heavens, and then prays that His kingdom which is also in the heavens would descend to earth. Having come down to earth, the next petition concerns how we will stay alive in the meantime. What shall we eat while the kingdom is coming?

The petition contains the request proper (give), and it contains the timing of the request (this day), and it contains the amount needed (bread for the day).  

When we ask God to give us bread, we are looking for something that many unbelievers receive as well, and they receive it without asking. And if we failed to make this request on a given day, we would also likely find our bread anyway. How is it then that this request is not a superfluous one? The answer to this is not so that we might have bread today (which God in His kindness gives abundantly), but rather that we might learn the important lesson of where all bread comes from. We don’t ask for the things we need so that God can find out we need them. We ask for things from God so that we might remember that we need them . . . and Him. Earlier in this sermon, Jesus had explicitly said that God gives rain to both the just and the unjust (Matt. 5:45). Both the just and the unjust get the water, but the just get the fullness of the blessing.

It is the same with this bread. Unbelievers get bread too, but believers get the bread of life as well as the Bread of Life. In John, the Lord identifies the manna that was given in the wilderness as “bread from heaven.” The word for bread (artos) is the same as the word used in the Lord’s Prayer. “Our fathers did eat manna in the desert; as it is written, He gave them bread from heaven to eat” (John 6:31). And the Lord teaches us that there are two layers to it. There is the physical sustenance that we receive, which unbelievers also do, and then is also the kind of faith which receives spiritual nourishment alongside the physical nourishment. “I am the living bread which came down from heaven: if any man eat of this bread, he shall live for ever: and the bread that I will give is my flesh, which I will give for the life of the world” (John 6:51).

Putting all this together, we should never ask for our daily bread unless we are also seeking Christ. We thank the Father for the buttered toast in the name of Jesus, and as we do so, we are communing with Jesus as well.

At the end of this chapter, the Lord teaches us that we should not borrow difficulties from tomorrow, as though we might run out of them today. Each day has plenty of trouble, and the Lord’s teaching is that each day has plenty of provision as well. We are asking God for “just on time” provision, and we are asking God for enough provision to last us until tomorrow, when we will ask again. If someone assumes that they need not do this because they have enough bread in the pantry and freezer to last them for weeks, they have forgotten another lesson from this great sermon. “Where thieves break in an steal, where moth and rust destroy.” Even when we think we have plenty of bread, we are dependent upon God for every moment of every day, and every bite of every meal.

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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 petition right after thy kingdom come is the prayer that our Father would see to it that His will is accomplished on earth the same way as it is accomplished in Heaven. As already mentioned, the obvious meaning of this is that we are praying that we would be as obedient to the will of God here on earth as the angels are in Heaven. May God’s will for earth be done with the same alacrity that happens when He wills for something to be done for Him in Heaven. Presumably angels don’t do their chores while moping, grumbling, and dragging their feet. Delayed obedience is disobedience, and sluggish obedience is disobedience. So we are asking God to make us quick to hear His will, and just as quick to respond to it.

But we also noted another way to apply this request. Our Father is located in Heaven (ouranos), and we are talking about what happens in Heaven (ouranos), and just a moment before this petition, we all just hallowed the name of God the Father in Heaven. Putting this together, our desire should be to have the name of God glorified and lifted up on earth the same way we glorified and lifted it up in Heaven. If we flip this around, we will have a hard time asking God to establish His name in the earth if we have been trivializing it through our clichéd prayers and pop worship in the heavenly places.

So as His name is worshiped and hallowed properly here on earth, His kingdom comes to earth. It is, after all, the kingdom of Heaven. When we pray for the kingdom to come, we are asking for a reunification of Heaven and earth sadly divorced through the rebellion of man.

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