Luke 11:2 And he said to them, When you pray, say, Our Father which are in heaven, Hallowed be your name. Your kingdom come. Your will be done… When at Jerusalem I read this prayer to one of the rabbis, he said, "There is not one single prayer, not one single demand, which is not already contained in the Old Testament." I said, "Very well, let us see." "Now," I said, "can you give me a parallel passage to 'Hallowed be Thy name?'" He quoted in an instant the forty-third verse of the eighth chapter of First Kings. "Hear Thou in heaven Thy dwelling place... that all people of the earth may know Thy name to fear Thee." And farther, he said, "'Blessed be the name of the Lord'; what means this but 'Hallowed be Thy name'?" "Let us go on — 'Thy kingdom come!'" He immediately gave me the passage from the seventy-second Psalm. "He shall come down like rain upon the mown grass: as showers that water the earth. In His days shall the righteous flourish; and abundance of peace so long as the moon endureth. He shall have dominion also from sea to sea, and from the river unto the ends of the earth." "Let us go on — 'Thy will be done in earth, as it is in heaven!'" "Does not the psalmist tell us — 'Teach us to do Thy will, O Lord?'" "Let us proceed — 'Give us this day our daily bread?'" "You find this prayer in the Proverbs — 'Give me neither poverty nor riches, feed me with food convenient for me.'" "Forgive us our debts, as we forgive our debtors!" "This you find in the one hundred and thirty-second Psalm — 'Lord, remember David, and all his afflictions,' and in the seventh Psalm, and the fourth verse — 'If I have rewarded evil unto him that was at peace with me.'" "Lead us not into temptation." He said at once — "O Lord, correct me with judgment; not in Thine anger, lest Thou bring me to nothing." And then he quoted the Apocrypha, with which he was well acquainted. "Take away the desire of sensuality; to the spirit of licentiousness do not deliver me." "What is this but 'Lead us not into temptation'?" "Deliver us from evil." He quoted — "Deliver me from the workers of iniquity." I said, "Have you done?" He said, "Yes." "Then," I said, "you have just shown that our blessed Lord was in the right, when He told the Jews, that He 'came not to abolish the Law, but to fulfil it.' And have you in the whole of the Old Testament a prayer which is not contained in the Lord's Prayer?" He admitted that there was not one. So you see how this prayer, the Lord's Prayer, according to the testimony of a Jew opposed to Christianity, is an abridgment, a wonderful abridgment, of the whole of the gospel, and of the whole of what Moses and the prophets have told us. So that the great and holy Stolberg says — "the child prays in it in simplicity, and the learned in vain tries to fathom its depths." (J. Wolff, D. D.) Parallel Verses KJV: And he said unto them, When ye pray, say, Our Father which art in heaven, Hallowed be thy name. Thy kingdom come. Thy will be done, as in heaven, so in earth. |
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