Have you ever thought of the Lord’s Prayer as Apocalyptic? No, we’re not talking sci-fi, meteors crashing to earth, destruction, or end-of-the world, cataclysmic events, but the real essence of the word apocalyptic: revelatory.
Many of us as Christians are familiar with the book called Revelation, also known as “The Revelation of Jesus” or “The Apocalypse of John.” However, we rightfully get more than a little confused as we make our way through the letter. Its genre is apocalyptic, which is the Greek word for the concept of revelation. And its primary message is to reveal the consummation of Christ’s victory over Satan, sin, and death—which has already begun. The will of the Lord as foretold by way of the prophets of the Old Testament is fulfilled in Christ himself and will be once and for all time fulfilled at his coming.
Revelation was written in large part to comfort weary Christians who felt the tension of God’s kingdom of grace conflicting with the darkness of sin in the world. The seven churches to whom John wrote were all located in Asia Minor and were at the crossroads of business, trade, and innovation. Picture the affluence of New York City or Silicon Valley in your mind, and you’ll get a rough idea of what the trade ports and major cities were like in Asia Minor. In large cities, all kinds of sin—promiscuity, perversion of the arts, gossip, slander, political leverage for unjust gain, addictive behavior… you name it! — find a haven to fester in the shadows of anonymity.
Perhaps you can relate to living in such a culture. While we in the United States have enjoyed living in a culture that has not only espoused Christian principles and was steeped in it and driven by it from the beginning, a vocal number in our own culture have by-and-large tried chipping away at the infrastructure of Christian ethics, blatantly demonizing it. And like a splintered wooden deck is unsafe to tread, a culture that tries to thrive upon fragmented truth is bound to fail and hurt itself, incurring all kinds of splinters and festering wounds.
If you want anecdotal evidence of this splintering in our culture, many of my students here at Grace often tell me about how they are deemed “hateful” by their peers simply for being a Christian. And I know firsthand how much these youth strive to love Christ and those around them… It is heartbreaking to hear this!
But there is hope.
The very God who made us, who made the world, who has redeemed us from bondage to sin and delivered us into his kingdom of grace is the same one who will bring about his kingdom here on earth at the last. Church, his speaking is his doing. He doesn’t go back on his word.
This is why Jesus taught his disciples to pray and to own for themselves the following words:
“Our Father in heaven,
hallowed be your name.
Your kingdom come, your will be done,
on earth as it is in heaven…”
Friends, as followers of Christ, we too desire for God’s will to be done on earth. It is already being done in heaven. And he will certainly accomplish his will, for he cannot be thwarted by man. So when we pray, “Your will be done,” we in essence are pleading with God in agreement with Christ by his Spirit that his will is right and good and pure. And, oh, how we need it!
We by nature are “prone to rebel against [God’s] Word, to repine and murmur against his providence, and wholly inclined to do the will of the flesh, and of the devil.” And so by the Spirit, we pray against such things. We pray for “his Spirit [to] take away from ourselves and others all blindness, weakness, indisposedness, and perverseness of heart” and for “his grace [to] make us able and willing to know, do, and submit to [God’s] will in all things, with the humility, cheerfulness, faithfulness, diligence, zeal, sincerity, and constancy.” The very things that heaven itself and all its host already embrace. (Westminster Larger Catechism, 192).
Do you desire to pray for things that are agreeable to the will of God? May we continue to pray fervently for God’s will to be done here on earth as it is already being done in heaven.