Expositions of Holy Scripture Volume I Part 42

But seeing that we have to do with a prayer, we have also to do with a prophecy. We know that if we ask anything according to His will, He heareth us, and therefore the sadder the want which is expressed, the fuller of hope is the prayer. This pet.i.tion gives a dark picture of human wants, but whatsoever thing we pray about or against, we thereby profess to believe to be contrary to G.o.d's will, and to be certain of removal by Him; and when our Lord commanded us to say 'Our Father, ...

deliver us from evil,' He gave us the lively hope that all which is included in that terribly wide word should be swept away, and that He would break every yoke and let His oppressed go free. The whole sum of human sorrow is gathered into one pet.i.tion, that we may all feel that every item of it is capable of attenuation and extinction; and so our prayer, in the very clause which seems to sound the lowest depth, really rises to the loftiest height, and the words which sound likest a wail over all the misery that is done under the sun, have in them the notes of triumph. 'The sweetest songs are those which tell of saddest thought.' The most jubilant and confident prayer is that which feels most keenly the burden of evil, and 'falling with its weight of sins 'upon the great world's altar-stairs,' cries to G.o.d for deliverance.

Consider, then:--

I. The width of this pet.i.tion.

What is evil?

Well, we leave G.o.d to decide what it is, but also we have no reason that I can see for limiting the impressive width of the word. It is a profound insight into the nature of evil which, in our own language and in other tongues, uses one word to express both what we call sin, and what we call sorrow. And I know not why we should suppose that our Lord does not include both of these here. There is what we call physical evil, pain, sorrow, meaning thereby whatever wars against our well-being and happiness. There is what we call moral evil, sin, meaning thereby whatever wars against our purity. Both are evil. Men's consciences tell them so of the one. Men's sensibilities tell them so of the other.

You cannot sophisticate a man into believing that he is not suffering when his flesh is racked or his heart wounded. It is evil to be in pain.

It is evil to carry a heavy heart. It is evil to be stripped of what we have long been accustomed to lean upon. It is evil to be crushed down by loss and want. It is evil to stand by the black hole that swallows the coffin that holds the light of our eyes. It is evil to have the arrows of calumny or hate sticking in our quivering spirits. It is evil to be battered with the shocks of change and doom in the world, to have to toil at ungrateful tasks beyond our strength. The life which turns the child's rounded features into the thin face lined and wrinkled, and the child's elastic run into the slow, heavy tread, is after all a life which in its outward aspects is a life of evil.

And many a man who has had little sympathy with what seem to him the hazy plat.i.tudes of the rest of the prayer, learns to pray this clause, and is always ready to pray it. For we may be sure of this, that they who make the world their all are they who feel its evils most keenly.

From how many lips unused to prayer are cries every hour going up in this sorrowful world which really mean, 'deliver us from evil'!

But it is not only these external evils which the prayer includes. It means every kind of sin, all dominion of what is contrary to G.o.d's will.

And the pet.i.tion is 'deliver,' pull us out, drag us from. It is a cry for the _entire_ emanc.i.p.ation or _utter_ extinction of evil in its effect upon us.

So this pet.i.tion in its clear recognition of evil sets forth man's condition distinctly, and is opposed to that false stoicism which tries to argue men out of their senses, and convince them that the fire which burns them is only a painted fire. Christianity has nothing in common with that insensibility to suffering which it is sometimes supposed to teach. Christ wept, and bade the daughters of Jerusalem weep also.

Christianity has deep words to say about evil and pain as being salutary and for our good, and about submission to G.o.d's will as being better than wild wishes to be delivered now and at once from all pain and sorrow. But it begins with full admission that evil is evil, and all its teachings presuppose that. Job was tormented by the well-meaning plat.i.tudes of his friends, who lifted up their hands in holy horror that he did not lie on his dunghill, as if it had been a bed of roses; and Job, who felt all the sorrow of his losses and ground out many a wrong saying between his teeth, was justified because he had held by the truth that his senses taught him, that pain was bitter and bad, and by the other which his faith taught him, that G.o.d must be good. He could not reconcile them. We can in part; but our Lord has taught us in this prayer that it is not to be done by denying or sophisticating facts.

Then let us use this prayer in all its breadth, and feel that it covers all which makes our hearts heavy, and all which makes our consciences sore.

'From all evil and mischief--plague, pestilence, and famine, as well as envy, hatred, and hypocrisy--from sin, from the crafts and a.s.saults of the devil,--Good Lord, deliver us.' 'In all time of our tribulation; in all time of our wealth, in the hour of death, and in the day of judgment,--Good Lord, deliver us.'

II. The unity and source of the evil.

The singular number suggests that all evil, multiform as it seems, is at bottom one. It is a great weltering coil, but wilderness and tangle as it appears, there is a tap root from which it all comes, like a close-clinging ma.s.s of ivy which is choking the life out of an elm-tree.

If that root were grubbed up, all would fall. It is like some huge sea monster 'floating many a rood,' but there is only one life in it. The hydra has a hundred heads, but one heart. And the place in the prayer in which this clause comes suggests what that is--sin.

That place implies that all human sorrows and sufferings are consequences of human evil. And that is true inasmuch as many of them are distinctly and naturally its results. Disease is often the result of dissipation, poverty of indolence, friendlessness of selfishness. How many of the miseries of our great cities, how many of the miseries of nations, result from criminal neglect and injustice! 'Man's inhumanity to man makes countless thousands mourn.' Ah! if all men were saying from the heart, 'Thy will be done,' how many of their griefs would be at an end! And it is true that sorrows are the consequences of sin inasmuch as suffering has been introduced by G.o.d into the world because of sin. He has been forced by our rebellion to use judgments, and that to bring us back.

And it is true that sorrows are the consequences of sin inasmuch as the sting is taken out of them when our sins are forgiven and we love G.o.d.

Then they so change their characters as scarcely to deserve to be called by their old name, and the paradox, 'sorrowful yet always rejoicing,'

becomes a sober fact of experience.

III. The divine opposition to evil.

This prayer implies that all evil is contrary to His will. The one kind is so, absolutely and always. The other is a method to which He has had recourse, but not that which, if things had gone right, He would have adopted.

So this prayer breathes confidence that G.o.d will overcome both kinds.

How much there is to make us believe that evil is eternal.

How apt we are to fall into despair, to lose heart for ourselves and our fellows; to say that it has always been so, and it always will be so.

For all social reformers here is encouragement.

For ourselves, when we seem to do so little in setting ourselves right, here is confidence.

But it must be _G.o.d_ who conquers the world's evil.

Our most potent weapon in the struggle with our own and the world's evil is the earnest offering of this pet.i.tion.

Think of the failure of G.o.dless schemes; how often we have been on the verge of political and other millenniums.

Only the G.o.d, who cures sin, can cure the world's ills.

We are not to subst.i.tute praying for working. G.o.d may answer our prayer by setting us to work.

Remember that you pledge yourselves to work for your fellows by that _Us_, and to try to reduce, were it by ever so little, the sum of human misery.

IV. The manner of G.o.d's deliverance from evil. G.o.d delivers us by Christ, that is the sum of all.

He delivers us from sin by His answers to the previous pet.i.tions.

He delivers us from suffering by teaching us how to bear it, and by showing us the meaning of it. The evil in evil is taken away. There s.h.i.+nes a brightness round about the devouring fire (Ezek. i. 4). 'All things work together for good.'

Finally, He delivers by taking us to Himself.

This prayer goes beyond present experience. It is the yearning for full redemption. It is the last which is answered. But there lies in it a not indistinct prophecy of that great and blessed time when we shall be like Him, and delivered from all evil.

For ourselves and for the world it carries the a.s.surance that neither sorrow nor sin shall be permitted to deform for ever the face of this fair creation; but that the day comes when G.o.d's name being everywhere hallowed, and His will done on earth, and His kingdom set up, and all our wants supplied, and all our sins forgiven, and all temptations taken out of the way, evil of every kind shall be scourged out of G.o.d's universe, and 'the ransomed of the Lord shall return with joy upon their heads, and sorrow and sighing shall flee away.'

Then shall this mighty prayer be answered, the prayer of G.o.d's children in all ages, the prayer which He offers before the Throne who on earth prayed, 'Not that Thou shouldest take them out of the world, but that Thou shouldest keep them from the evil'; the prayer which the white-robed souls offer when they cry, 'How long, O Lord, how long?' the prayer which, all unconsciously, the sobs, and cries, and sorrows of six thousand years have been offering; the prayer which is every hour being answered in hourly mercies, and mult.i.tudes of forgivenesses and gracious guiding; the prayer which has been steadily tending towards its fulfilment, through all the ages during which G.o.d's name has been growing in men's love, and His will more and more obeyed, and His kingdom more and more fully come; the prayer which will be at last completely realised when all His children shall stand before His Throne happy and good, and the noise of earth's evil shall sound only in the ear of memory, like the murmur of some far-off sea heard from the sacred mountain, or the remembrance of the tempest when all the winds are still.

If our prayer is, 'Deliver us from evil,' our life's experience will be that 'He delivered us from so great a death and will deliver,' our dying word will be thanksgiving to 'the angel who delivered us from all evil,'

and our death will bring the full deliverance for which while here we pray, and admit us into that region of unmingled good and blessing and purity, whose distant brightness we, tossing on the unquiet sea, behold from afar and long to possess. 'After this manner pray ye,' and to you the promise will be blessedly fulfilled, 'Because he hath set his love upon Me, therefore will I deliver him. I will set him on high, because he hath known My name' (Ps. xci. 14).

'THINE IS THE KINGDOM'

'Thine is the kingdom, and the power, and the glory, for ever.

Amen.' MATT. vi. 13.

There is no reason to suppose that this doxology was spoken by Christ.

It does not occur in any of the oldest and most authoritative ma.n.u.scripts of Matthew's Gospel. It does not seem to have been known to the earliest Christian writers. Long a.s.sociation has for us intertwined the words inextricably with our Lord's Prayer, and it is a wound to reverential feeling to strike out what so many generations have used in their common supplications. No doubt this doxology is appropriate as a conclusion, and serves to give an aspect of completeness. It sounds cold and cheerless to end our prayer with 'evil.' But the question is not one of feeling or of our notions of fitness, but purely one of criticism, and the only evidence which has any right to be heard in settling the text of the New Testament is dead against this clause. If we regard that evidence, we are obliged to say that the doxology has no business here.

How it stands here is a question which may be answered satisfactorily.

When the Lord's Prayer came to be used in public wors.h.i.+p, it was natural to append to it a doxology, just as in chanting the psalms it became the habit to repeat at the end of each the Gloria. This doxology, originally written on the margin of the gospel, would gradually creep into the text, and once there, was naturally retained.

It does not follow that, because Christ did not speak it, we ought not to use it. It should not be in the Bible, but it may well be in our prayers. If we think that our Lord gave us a pattern rather than a form, we are quite justified in extending that pattern by any additions which harmonise with its spirit. If we think He gave us a form to be repeated _verbatim_, then we ought not to add to it this doxology.

At first sight it seems as if the prayer without it were incomplete. It contains loving desires, lowly dependence, humble penitence, earnest wishes for cleansing, but there appears none of that rapturous praise which is also an element in all true devotion. And this may have been one reason for the addition of the doxology. But I think that that absence of praise and joy is only apparent; the first clause of the prayer expresses the highest form of both. The doxology, if you will think of it, adds nothing to the contemplation of the divine character which the prayer has already taught us. It is only a repet.i.tion at the close of what we had at the beginning, and its conception, lofty and grand as it is, falls beneath that of 'Our Father.' We might almost say that the doxology is incongruous with the prayer as presenting a less blessed, spiritual, distinctively Christian thought of G.o.d. That would be going too far, but I cannot but feel a certain change in tone, a dropping from the loftiest elevation down to the celebration of the lower aspects of the divine. 'Kingdom, power, and glory' are grand, but they do not reach the height of ascription of praise which sounds in the very first words of the prayer.

Properly speaking, too, this doxology is not a part of the prayer. It expresses two things: the devout contemplation of G.o.d which the whole course of the pet.i.tions has excited in the soul--and in that aspect it is the Church's echo to the Lord's Prayer; and the confidence with which we pray--and in that aspect it is rather the utterance of meditative reflection asking of itself its reasons for hope and stirring itself up to lay hold on G.o.d.