Chapter 12
THE LORD'S PRAYER 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 theocentric focus of this passage is God, who answers prayer. It identifies God as the father of His people. He is personal. As a father, He loves His children. They can come to Him in prayer without fear of reproach.
This is a corporate prayer. Those marked by God's covenant sign of baptism are told to raise their voices to heaven. They publicly identify God as the one who dwells in heaven. He is above the earth. This implies that He is sovereign over the creation. The second identification is His name. It is hallowed, i.e., holy or set apart. Those who have been set apart by God are told to announce the set-apart status of God.
Then comes the first request: that God's kingdom will come. But it is already here. Jesus said: "But if I cast out devils by the Spirit of God, then the kingdom of God is come unto you" (Matt 12:28).(1) Then why must we pray that it come? Because that which is definitively here already is also progressively arriving. At some point, it will be here finally: at the last judgment. "For he must reign, till he hath put all enemies under his feet. The last enemy that shall be destroyed is death" (I Cor. 15:25-26). By praying for the kingdom's advent, Christians extend the kingdom of God in history. They are praying for time to end, when heaven and earth will be equated morally.
This leads to the second request. "Thy will be done in earth, as it is in heaven." God's will is for men to be ethically perfect. "Be ye therefore perfect, even as your Father which is in heaven is perfect" (Matt. 5:48). The ethical perfection of heaven is to be progressively manifested in history: first, through individuals; second, through the institutions they influence. Men's obedience is one of the means by which God's kingdom comes. Obedience is the basis of dominion.(2)
Only when we have affirmed God's glory and holiness and have called for His kingdom's advent in history do we come to our requests for our own benefits.
Daily Bread Before the advent of capitalism, hunger was a universal threat. "Give us this day our daily bread" was no idle refrain. The experience of hunger was familiar to all but a tiny handful of rulers and those who served them. Famine was always a possibility: too much rain, too little rain, locusts, etc. Famine was one of God's three primary corporate judgments. "When they fast, I will not hear their cry; and when they offer burnt offering and an oblation, I will not accept them: but I will consume them by the sword, and by the famine, and by the pestilence" (Jer. 14:12).
Bread is the symbol of the food which sustains life. Jesus contrasted God's word with bread as the staff of life. "Man shall not live by bread alone, but by every word that proceedeth out of the mouth of God" (Matt. 4:4b).(3) This was an Old Testament doctrine (Deut. 8:3). Nevertheless, bread deserves its due. We are creatures. We must eat to live. Bread is a universally recognized food.
When covenant-keepers pray for bread, they are praying for life. They are asking God to enable them to survive another day. The token of God's favor is daily bread, just as the manna was in the wilderness. To pray for daily bread is not selfish. It acknowledges that God is the source of life, and that men are dependent on Him for their lives.
The modern capitalist order has produced bread in such abundance that this request has become more of a ritual than a serious request. Because God has provided the grace of the free market, a social institution that produces unprecedented wealth, He has already answered this prayer in the West. He has created the legal and social arrangements by which bread is supplied in abundance by third parties. The problem is, men no longer recognize the historical and cultural uniqueness of bread in abundance. They do not sense that they are in the presence of a miracle: an unplanned economic system by which most men will not starve in peacetime unless they are the targets of political oppression. Men fall into the trap of pretended autonomy which is described in the same chapter of Deuteronomy in which the warning against ignoring God's word in favor of bread appears. "And thou say in thine heart, My power and the might of mine hand hath gotten me this wealth. But thou shalt remember the LORD thy God: for it is he that giveth thee power to get wealth, that he may establish his covenant which he sware unto thy fathers, as it is this day" (Deut. 8:17-18).
The prayer for daily bread appears after the prayer takes men through the doctrine of God: His fatherhood, sovereignty, holiness, and righteousness. Those who affirm mentally what they have prayed for openly have both confessed and believed that this God is the source of bread. This is what God insists on. It is illegitimate to ascribe to man what has its source in God. This is a great evil of humanism, including modern free market theory. Economists ascribe to impersonal market forces and social arrangements that which God provides in His grace.
One of the most important teachings of modern economics is that the value of each additional unit of any scarce resource is less to the individual than the previous unit. This is the doctrine of declining marginal utility.(4) An application of this law is men's declining thankfulness about bread. Men become less thankful for food as they become full. The enormous output of food in the modern world has left bread as a nearly ignored substance. It takes active mental discipline to pray this prayer meaningfully. Men must learn to thank God for the means of such massive production of bread, including the social order.(5)
If bread were removed for a time, men would learn to pray this prayer enthusiastically. But that would be a time of judgment. The difficulty is to maintain the attitude of reverential subordination to the God who provides bread, the symbol of life. Men forget God when they get rich. Wealth, which is a blessing of God for covenantal faithfulness (Deut. 28:1-14), becomes a snare. Solomon said it best: ". . . give me neither poverty nor riches; feed me with food convenient for me: Lest I be full, and deny thee, and say, Who is the LORD? or lest I be poor, and steal, and take the name of my God in vain" (Prov. 30:8b-9). This is a prayer worth repeating. The lust for more food, like the lust for more money, is a mark of addiction. Solomon knew this, too. "When thou sittest to eat with a ruler, consider diligently what is before thee: And put a knife to thy throat, if thou be a man given to appetite. Be not desirous of his dainties: for they are deceitful meat. Labour not to be rich: cease from thine own wisdom" (Prov. 23:1-4). He had tasted many dainties. This had produced only vanity.
Forgiven Debts The next request acknowledges that men are debtors. They are debtors above all to God, who sustains them, but they are also debtors to other men. The familiar liturgical version of this prayer, "forgive us our trespasses," does not appear in this text or a parallel. The verses immediately following do mention trespasses: "For if ye forgive men their trespasses, your heavenly Father will also forgive you: But if ye forgive not men their trespasses, neither will your Father forgive your trespasses" (Matt. 6:14-15). The two words have similar applications, but "debts" is the more judicial language. The word conveys the idea of a contract. The one who prays the prayer is the guilty party. He has broken the contract. But others have broken debt contracts with him. When covenant-keeping men forgive others, they are themselves forgiven by God. The debts to God are cancelled. Whatever amount was owed to the man in debt to God counts as a representative payment -- a token payment -- to God.
In some corporate sense, men can say, "we owe the debt to ourselves." But to say this, there must be a way to settle up the accounts, cancel all debts, and send everyone home a debt-free person. Only God can do this. Only He can settle all of the accounts. He alone can do this because of the magnitude of the debts owed to Him by all men. Whatever men owe to others is dwarfed by what they owe to God. They owe God everything, for His grace is the source of everything they own. He is therefore in a position to cancel any man's debts. This prayer asks God to cancel a person's debt to Him. God then asks him who prays to do the same, but on a much smaller scale.
What kind of debts are in view here? The context of the prayer is the sovereignty of a holy God. The context is ethics. Every person is in debt to God ethically. The debt is the equivalent of a trespass. We have broken God's laws. Others have broken His laws by injuring us. When we come to God asking for forgiveness for an ethical trespass, He asks us to do the same for others. But God does not ask us to forgive every trespass and every trespasser. He asks us to forgive those who ask for forgiveness, even as we ask God for forgiveness. Even as we may be asked to make a restitution payment to God, so they may be asked to make a restitution payment to us. And just as there are times when we cannot or will not make our restitution payment to God, yet still ask for His forgiveness, so sometimes are we to forgive those who make no restitution payment to us, yet still ask for our forgiveness.
A Token Payment
Restitution is basic to settling ethical debts, i.e., transgressions.(6) When a man calls on God to forgive him, he must be ready to make restitution. But He cannot pay God all of what he owes to God. His restitution payment is a token. When a transgressor calls on his victims to forgive him, he must be ready to make restitution. This restitution can involve lifetime servitude if he is a criminal. If he is a less flagrant debtor, he may owe money, service, or goods. But what if he owes more than he can restore? Then he is in the same predicament we are in with respect to God. This prayer reminds us that we can repay God by not demanding all of the restitution payment that is owed to us by some debtor. We accept a token payment from him, just as God accepts a token payment from us.
The token payment is important, however. It is a mark of humility, an admission that a larger debt is owed. It allows the debtor to admit his debt. He must ask for an act of grace on our part -- an undeserved gift. After all, this is what God does for us. To ask God for forgiveness without offering any restitution payment is not to take seriously either the debt or the debt relationship.
The ultimate restitution payment was made by Jesus Christ on the cross. But this does not negate the necessity of a token payment. If we have sinned against another person, and we cry out to God for forgiveness, we must make restitution to our victim. If we have sinned against God, we can and should suffer some token loss. Under the Mosaic covenant, this would have been an animal sacrifice (Lev. 6:6). Under the New Covenant, it is a dedicated life: "I beseech you therefore, brethren, by the mercies of God, that ye present your bodies a living sacrifice, holy, acceptable unto God, which is your reasonable service. And be not conformed to this world: but be ye transformed by the renewing of your mind, that ye may prove what is that good, and acceptable, and perfect, will of God" (Rom. 12:1-2). A life of full-time service is our token payment.
When we have given God everything, how can we give Him anything extra? How can we make a token payment if we have nothing to spare? By distinguishing between faithful service in general and faithful service in particular. We serve God when we make a profit. We also serve Him by giving things away. But the two forms of service are not equal. Giving things away is blessed spiritually. Jesus said: "It is more blessed to give than to receive" (Acts 20:35b). But it takes spiritual discipline of a high order to internalize this fact and make it a way of life. So, when a man owes a debt to God, a good way to pay his token is to give something away to someone who can make good use of it. It is good for the recipient, and it is good practice for spiritual growth. The giver is the judge of what constitutes a meaningful token. It must not be too great, for man should never imagine that he can buy God's favor.(7) It must not be too small, persuading the believer that a trespass is a trifle. The token payment, like the punishment, should fit the trespass. The token mentioned here is our forgiveness of what others owe to us. We forgive a little to others; God forgives much to us.
A Web of Debt
Economic debt is a secondary application of this verse. Debt is here seen as a liability, something to be avoided, and if this is not possible, then forgiven. The modern world is now engulfed in an ocean of debt. Promises have been made that cannot be kept. In civil government and fractional reserve banking, these promises have made an entire civilization dependent on the continual expansion of debt in order to pay off past obligations, both political and economic. If either debt or economic growth should falter, the entire debt system will collapse in a wave of broken promises: bankruptcy. At this late date, the public's confidence in the social order is based on faith in an escalating supply of promises that cannot be kept.
The enormous wealth produced by the capitalist system has made the prayer for daily bread a formality. But the prayer for debt forgiveness has grown more relevant under capitalism, as the world's assets have been monetized through the banking system. People eat better than ever, but they are in debt for most of their lives. Debt has become a way of life. The burden of debt is not seen as much of a burden. But when depressions come, men feel the pressures of debt. This is why governments prefer to inflate. There are more debtors who vote for short-run debt relief through inflation than lenders who vote for monetary policies that offer long-term restrictions on money creation.(8)
There is so much debt today that no one can calculate it or trace its effects. We live in a gigantic web of debt. The connections are subtle. Most capital assets for which there are organized markets have debts on them or on the institutions that own them. In the investment world, the threads of debt encompass every nook and cranny of the capital markets. No one has designed this system. It has evolved through the borrowing and lending decisions of individuals. It is an example of what Adam Ferguson two centuries ago described as the product of human action but not of human design.(9) Should the credit system break down, due to a banking crisis, this will pull every institution down with it. Debt forgiveness -- repudiation -- will be accomplished through universal bankruptcy.
Our bread is produced by means of a debt-encumbered system of production. A breakdown in the credit markets would call into question the ability of all producers to get their products into the hands of consumers. This applies to farmers above all. In the United States, about two percent of the population lives on farms. These people feed the rest of the nation and much of the world. Agriculture has always been heavily dependent on debt. But today's debt system extends beyond the farms into every aspect of the food chain. When men one day cry out in desperation, "forgive us our debts," God will grant them their request. But on the next day, they will be praying for their daily bread. The web of debt will be shred to pieces by the breakdown of the credit system, which means the breakdown of fractional reserve banking. The breakdown of the bank payments system will contract the division of labor: the interdependent system which puts bread on our tables, the economists insist. There will be less bread on our tables when all of our debts are forgiven in a massive wave of bankruptcies.
Deliverance "And lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from evil." This is a call for guidance. To minimize the opportunities for sinning, men are to call upon God to keep them out of temptation. This is a call for a subsidy. Men should desire to smooth the crooked pats of life, to walk neither to the right nor to the left. "Only be thou strong and very courageous, that thou mayest observe to do according to all the law, which Moses my servant commanded thee: turn not from it to the right hand or to the left, that thou mayest prosper whithersoever thou goest. This book of the law shall not depart out of thy mouth; but thou shalt meditate therein day and night, that thou mayest observe to do according to all that is written therein: for then thou shalt make thy way prosperous, and then thou shalt have good success" (Josh. 1:7-8).
Deliverance from evil implies that we are already trapped in the vice of sin or the devices of evil-doers. We got into the mess; now we want out. We call out for God to pull us out of the mire.
We seek a subsidy in both cases. We admit that we cannot achieve these goals in our own strength. The sinner acknowledges that he is a sinner. He does this so that he will be enabled to sin less. This is the kind of subsidy God wants to provide. It is a subsidy to righteousness. Such a subsidy is a necessity in a world under the effects of original sin. Were it not for this subsidy, men would be totally depraved. Society would be like the pre-Flood civilization: fit for destruction. It could not continue. But God subsidizes righteousness for His glory's sake. This enables His people to extend His kingdom in history.
Kingdom, Power, and Glory These are three marks of a king. God is here acknowledged to be the great king under whose authority all other kings operate. The Lord's prayer moves from God in heaven to God in history. Men are to pray their prayers of request as a means of achieving this extension of the kingdom from heaven to earth. We pray to the God of heaven for our daily bread, debt annulment, reduced temptations, and deliverance from evil so that we might better extend God's kingdom, power, and glory in history.
Our prayers for ourselves are sandwiched in between God's kingdom in heaven and His kingdom on earth. That which was definitive when Christ cast out demons becomes progressive through the prayers of His people.
The suggestion that God's kingdom has no institutional manifestation in civil government, yet does in church government and family government, is to restrict the reign of the king. Kingdom, power, and glory are thereby confined to the spheres of the voluntary. When magistrates bring civil sanctions, however, they are supposedly not allowed to see themselves as oath-bound covenantal agents of the God of the Bible. The kingdom of God is said to lack visible incorporation in the civil realm. There is neither formal power or public glory for God in the civil realm, according to modern political theory.
Forever, Amen
Forever is more than a long time. God's kingdom, power, and glory extend from history into eternity. This points to progressive sanctification in history, which will culminate in the defeat of death and the end of time (I Cor. 15:26). The prayers of Christians are to extend God's kingdom, glory, and power in history.
This implies a goal of victory in history: the replacement of Satan's kingdom by God's. This is social sanctification. This is not exclusively a trans-historical sanctification; it must also be historical. The request to have God's will done on earth as well as in heaven testifies to the historical frame of reference.(10)
There is continuity between today's kingdom, power, and glory and tomorrow's. This continuity is manifested by the prayers of God's people -- above all, the Lord's prayer. As surely as His people pray today for daily bread and their deliverance from evil, so have other sons prayed in the past and will pray in the future. The continuity provided by this prayer points to the continuity of God's kingdom, power, and glory in history. If men expect their prayers for bread and deliverance to be answered, then they must expect progressive personal sanctification. Similarly, when they pray the closing words, they must expect to see God's kingdom, power, and glory to persevere in history. But if there is no expansion, then what kind of a kingdom is it? What kind of power will He exercise? What kind of glory will be His? He exercises power representatively, through mankind. To pray this prayer is to pray for the regeneration of mankind. This may take millennia, but it will not take forever.
Conclusion The Lord's prayer moves from heaven to earth and from the present into eternity: forever. It proclaims a comprehensive kingdom of God in history, which extends into eternity. It calls for an ethical subsidy to covenant-keepers, which is a subsidy to the progressive establishment of God's kingdom. Such a subsidy is necessary to offset, let alone overcome, original sin.
God offers us bread for the asking. He offers forgiveness of our debts. We, in turn, are to forgive the debts of others. Our forgiveness is a token payment to God for what we owe him. The debts here are moral debts: violations of God's law. To a lesser extent, they are economic debts. The message is clear: don't build up debts to others, either moral or economic.
The top priority of this passage is the power of corporate prayer in transforming history, to bring history into conformity to eternity's standards. The kingdom of God is at the beginning and end of this prayer. The kingdom of God provides the context of our daily bread and our mercy: received and extended.
Footnotes:
1. The parallel in Luke is unexpected: "But if I with the finger of God cast out devils, no doubt the kingdom of God is come upon you" (Luke 11:20).
2. Ray R. Sutton, That You May Prosper: Dominion By Covenant (2nd ed.; Tyler, Texas: Institute for Christian Economics, 1992), ch. 3.
3. Chapter 1, above.
4. The assumption here is that tastes do not change. If tastes do change, this law is not always applicable. Certain addictive substances may be marked by increasing marginal utility for a time, as the addiction takes hold. Cigarettes are a good example.
5. For two decades, I have planned to write an essay on the economics of thanksgiving, and publish it in November, when the United States celebrates Thanksgiving, one of the nation's two great feast days, the other being Christmas. I always remember this project in November, when it is too late to publish it. Today is November 11, 1997.
6. Gary North, Tools of Dominion: The Case Laws of Exodus (Tyler, Texas: Institute for Christian Economics, 1990), ch. 17.
7. North, Tools of Dominion, ch. 30; North, Leviticus: An Economic Commentary (Tyler, Texas: Institute for Christian Economics, 1994), ch. 1.
8. A computer-driven collapse of fractional reserve banking, coupled with paper shortages and even electrical power blackouts that shut down printing presses that print paper money, would end the inflationary process.
9. Adam Ferguson, An Essay on the History of Civil Society (1997), p. 187; cited by F. A. Hayek, "The Results of Human Action but not of Human Design" (1967), in Hayek, Studies in Philosophy, Politics and Economics (University of Chicago Press, 1967), p. 96n.
10. Are we to imagine that God requires the church to pray corporately ("Our Father," not "My Father") for something that can never come to pass? Yet this is the teaching of amillennialism.
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