Recently, I read about a little boy kneeling beside his bed with his
mother and grandmother and softly saying his prayers, "Dear God, please
bless Mummy and Daddy and all the family and please give me a good night's
sleep." Suddenly he looked up and shouted, "And don't
forget to give me a bicycle for my birthday!!" His mother said, "There is no need to
shout like that. God isn't deaf." The
little boy replied, "No, but Grandma is."[i]
A lot
of people grow up learning to pray this way—enumerating a wish list as if God
were a grandparent in the sky, waiting to grant their requests. The disciples likely heard their religious
teachers doing the same thing, but noticed that Jesus never prayed this
way. So they asked Him, “Lord, teach us to pray, just as John taught
his disciples (Luke 11:1).” [ii] In response, Jesus gave what we call the
Lord’s Prayer—and there are two versions found in Luke 11:2-4 and Matthew
6:9-13. Over the next few weeks, we’ll
learn to pray, Jesus’ way.
Matthew 6:9 begins the
prayer, “Our Father in heaven, hallowed
be your name.” From the very
beginning, Jesus wants us to understand that the name of God is sacred and
holy—that’s what the word “hallowed” means.
“Hallowed be thy name” means that God’s name is so much higher than any
human name. In fact, God’s name is so
holy that God didn’t want us human beings to name God—because God knew that
we’re bad at coming up with names. For
example, have you noticed how bad some of the names of Bible characters are? Some of them are hard to pronounce, but I’m
talking about some Bible names that are just bad. Like…
There are three separate
guys in the Bible named Dodo. Seriously,
can you imagine being David and going into battle and saying, “Yeah, I’d like
to take Samuel and Daniel and Dodo over there.”
Yeah, Dodo—I’m sure he’ll have your back. Then there’s a guy named On. I don’t know what to say about that, so I’ll
just move On, and talk about someone else.
Abraham’s nephew was probably the youngest of a big family. They had such huge families in those days—Finally,
after maybe fifty kids or so, when Daddy named this little baby, he wiped his
forehead and said, “Now that’s a Lot!”
See, I’m pretty sure that
people giving their babies names like this proved to God we weren’t good at
naming things. God wanted to name
Himself instead. If we got to name God,
we’d probably call Him something like Sky Daddy, or Super Judge, or Thunder
Chief! And, unfortunately, that’s how
many of us see God. But instead of
letting people name God, God defined Himself.
Exodus 3:13-15 says:
Moses
said to God, “Suppose I go to the Israelites and say to them, ‘The God of your
fathers has sent me to you,’ and they ask me, ‘What is his name?’ Then
what shall I tell them?”
God
said to Moses, “I am who I am. This is what you are to say to the
Israelites: ‘I am has sent me to you.’”
God
also said to Moses, “Say to the Israelites, ‘The Lord, the God of
your fathers—the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac and the God of Jacob—has sent
me to you.’
“This
is my name forever,
the name you shall call me
from generation to generation.
the name you shall call me
from generation to generation.
In Hebrew, I AM is YHWH,
because Hebrew has no printed vowels. If
it were pronounced, it would be Yahweh, but this is a name so hallowed that
many devout Jewish people refuse to pronounce it. To avoid pronouncing Yahweh, some have
altered and Latinized the name as Jehovah.
Even in English, some who refuse to pronounce the name of God render it
as G-d instead. The translators of the King James Version of
the Bible chose to honor God’s name by substituting the phrase LORD (all caps)
whenever YHWH is found. All of these are
ways of honoring the name of God by avoiding pronunciation or printing—which is
silly, considering God told Moses and the people to actually use the Divine
Name.
So, perhaps instead of
avoiding God’s name, we ought to call God by the many names we find in the Hebrew
and Greek scriptures, which all point to aspects of God’s character. The Bible uses male imagery for God such as lord,
king, father, and defender. Yet it also
compares God to a mother bear, mother eagle, mother hen, a woman in childbirth,
and a nursing mother. Still other names
for God are genderless—images such as a rock, or light, strength, song,
beginning and end, or living water.
Jesus started The Lord’s Prayer by honoring the name of God. Perhaps one way to do this is to recognize
the attributes of God when you pray.
Make your understanding of who God is more complete by calling God by
different names, perhaps according to the way you’re feeling that day, or
depending on your situation.
Another way to honor the
name of God is by not taking it in vain.
This is perhaps the most misunderstood of the commandments God gave
Moses. Many people think it means that
we shouldn’t use God’s holy name as a curse word (which we shouldn’t). But I think it goes deeper than that. When one person takes another person’s name
in marriage, they fully identify with that person, and become part of their
family. To then be unfaithful, or to act
as if they weren’t married, would be taking that person’s name in vain. In a country where claiming to be Christian
can be advantageous, many politicians and people of business join religious
organizations or call themselves Evangelicals, all the while behaving as if
they’d never heard of Jesus. If you
pray, “Hallowed be thy name,” you’ve got to be kind of person who strives to
live the principles of God. When you
pray, “Hallowed be thy name,” perhaps in addition to recognizing God for who
God is, you’re saying, “May I honor Your name, not just with the words I say
but the with the things I do.” To call
yourself a Christian means to try to live the character (or the names of God)
in your own life. Only when you do this,
does the rest of the Lord’s Prayer make any sense.
No comments:
Post a Comment