Teach Us to Pray by Justo L. González

Author:Justo L. González
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing Co.

6

Our Father who art in heaven, hallowed be thy name. Thy kingdom come. Thy Will Be Done on Earth as It Is in Heaven. Give us this day our daily bread. And forgive us our debts, as we forgive our debtors. Lead us not into temptation. But deliver us from evil. For thine is the kingdom, and the power, and the glory forever. Amen.

A Petition That Affirms a Promise

We now come to the last of the three petitions that, according to Thomas Aquinas, are not petitions, strictly speaking, but rather affirmations of the promises of God that will be fulfilled in the future. Like the two previous petitions, this one, even though worded as if we were asking something of God, actually involves a commitment on our part. We are committed to act as those who know that the promises of God will be fulfilled in the future and that this knowledge calls us to certain actions and attitudes in the present. Just as when we ask that God’s name be hallowed we don’t claim that God should be made holier, now when we ask that the will of God be done we don’t mean that there is any doubt it will be so.

Tertullian considers this petition so important that he discusses it even before the petition calling for the coming of the kingdom. His interpretation, which has been the most common throughout church history, is that we are really asking God to fulfill the divine will:

What, moreover, does God will, but that we should walk according to His Discipline? We make petition, then, that He supply us with the substance of His will, and the capacity to do it, that we may be saved both in the heavens and on earth; because the sum of His will is the salvation of them whom He has adopted.1

Likewise, during the Protestant Reformation John Calvin affirmed that this petition regarding the will of God is implicit in the previous one regarding the coming of the kingdom and cannot be separated from it, since

[t]he third petition is: that God’s will may be done on earth as in heaven. Even though it depends upon his Kingdom and cannot be separated from it, still it is with reason added separately on account of our ignorance, which does not easily or immediately comprehend what it means that “God reigns in the world.” It will therefore not be absurd to take it as an explanation that God will be King in the world when all submit to his will.2

Thirteen centuries earlier, Cyprian had written eloquent words regarding the meaning of this petition:

Now that is the will of God which Christ both did and taught. Humility in conversation; steadfastness in faith; modesty in words; justice in deeds; mercifulness in works; discipline in morals; to be unable to do a wrong, and to be able to bear a wrong when done; to keep peace with the brethren; to love God with all one’s heart; to love Him in that

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