At some point during Sunday morning worship, many of us sing
the
Doxology, which begins, “Praise God from whom all
blessings flow.”
A doxology is literally “a word of glory.” And while we may
not think of it in such terms, in its most familiar form, the Lord’s
Prayer ends with a doxology, “For thine is the kingdom, and the
power, and the glory, forever. Amen” (Matt. 6:13).
The doxology
As scholars have noted for centuries, this doxology is not found in the
earliest Greek manuscripts of the New Testament. Thus some have
questioned whether these words were spoken by Jesus or whether they may
have been the Spirit-inspired addition of a later disciple.
Either way, the doxology appears to have been drawn from I Chronicles
29:11, “Thine, O Lord, is the greatness, and the power, and the
glory, and the victory, and the majesty, for all that is in the heaven
and the earth is thine; thine is the kingdom, O Lord, and thou art
exalted as head above all.”
Moreover, notes N.T. Wright, this conclusion to the Lord’s Prayer “was
already well established within a century or so of Jesus’ day; and
it is actually inconceivable, within the Jewish praying styles of his
day, that Jesus would have intended the prayer to stop simply with ‘deliver
us from evil.’ … In any case, it chimes in exactly with the
message of the prayer as a whole: God’s kingdom, God’s power,
and God’s glory are what it’s all about.”
Two little words
The concluding doxology of the Lord’s Prayer begins with two little
words, “For thine,” words that we might easily skip over as we
look ahead to the bigger words that follow.
“For” translates a Greek word that may also mean “because,
wherefore.” As Spiros Zodhiates observes, “This conjunction
introducing the doxology contains the reasons why we should pray to God
and why we may expect an answer when we pray.”
“Thine,” of course, is the archaic English form of “yours.”
This word reminds us that the kingdom, power and glory belong to God and
not to us. Because all power and glory belong to God, God’s power
is not at our disposal and the Lord’s Prayer is not a magic formula
that forces God to give us the glory (or anything else) that we desire.
Since we examined the concept of God’s kingdom in an earlier study,
here we will consider God’s power and his glory. The final two
words of the prayer will be the topic of our closing study.
The power
It is no coincidence that we are taught to praise God for his power
right after we pray to be protected from temptation and evil. Alone in
the wilderness, Jesus rejected Satan’s temptation to exercise an
earthly power not grounded in a relationship with God (Matt. 4:1-11).
Jesus’ life and teachings stand over against our own temptations to
gain and use earthly power for our own benefit.
The Greek word here translated “power” is
dunamis,
from which we get “dynamic” and “dynamite.” It is a
word that emphasizes the ability to get things done. In praising God for
his power, we acknowledge that he not only has the right to rule his
kingdom, but that he has – and uses – the power to do so.
In the language of classical theology, God is omnipotent, which means
he is all-powerful. Although some today suggest that God’s power is
limited to influencing our opinions and attitudes, in fact God “is
able to do immeasurably more than all we ask or imagine” (Eph.
3:20). Praying the Lord’s Prayer reminds us of this reality.
The glory
The Greek
doxa, translated “glory,” means majesty,
grandeur, fame or good report. When applied to God, glory may be seen as
the sum of all his attributes. To praise God for his glory is the
essence of worship. To pray this way at the end of the Lord’s
Prayer is to anticipate the worship we will one day join in heaven.
Just as Jesus helps us properly understand power, so he also redefines
our understanding of glory. Jesus himself is the incarnation of God’s
glory (John 1:14). Yet when he spoke of his own glory and the glory of
God the Father, (as in John 8:54; 13:31; 15:8; 21:19) most of his first
hearers misunderstood. Jesus’ greatest glory is his atoning
sacrifice on the cross.
Thus with the doxology, “For thine is the kingdom, the power and
the glory,” we remind ourselves of why and how we are both rightly
related to God and able to speak to him these words of praise and glory.
Additional
Resources
N.T. Wright, The Lord and His Prayer (Grand Rapids:
Eerdmans, 1996); Spiros Zodhiates, The Lord’s Prayer
(Chatanooga: AMG Publishers, 1991). |