This prayer implies that all evil is contrary to His will. The one kind
is so, absolutely and always. The other is a method to which He has had
recourse, but not that which, if things had gone right, He would have
adopted.
So this prayer breathes confidence that God will overcome both kinds.
How much there is to make us believe that evil is eternal.
How apt we are to fall into despair, to lose heart for ourselves and our
fellows; to say that it has always been so, and it always will be so.
For all social reformers here is encouragement.
For ourselves, when we seem to do so little in setting ourselves right,
here is confidence.
But it must be _God_ who conquers the world's evil.
Our most potent weapon in the struggle with our own and the world's evil
is the earnest offering of this petition.
Think of the failure of godless schemes; how often we have been on the
verge of political and other millenniums.
Only the God, who cures sin, can cure the world's ills.
We are not to substitute praying for working. God may answer our prayer
by setting us to work.
Remember that you pledge yourselves to work for your fellows by that
_Us_, and to try to reduce, were it by ever so little, the sum of human
misery.
IV. The manner of God's deliverance from evil. God delivers us by
Christ, that is the sum of all.
He delivers us from sin by His answers to the previous petitions.
He delivers us from suffering by teaching us how to bear it, and by
showing us the meaning of it. The evil in evil is taken away. There
shines a brightness round about the devouring fire (Ezek. i. 4). 'All
things work together for good.'
Finally, He delivers by taking us to Himself.
This prayer goes beyond present experience. It is the yearning for full
redemption. It is the last which is answered. But there lies in it a not
indistinct prophecy of that great and blessed time when we shall be like
Him, and delivered from all evil.
For ourselves and for the world it carries the assurance that neither
sorrow nor sin shall be permitted to deform for ever the face of this
fair creation; but that the day comes when God's name being everywhere
hallowed, and His will done on earth, and His kingdom set up, and all
our wants supplied, and all our sins forgiven, and all temptations taken
out of the way, evil of every kind shall be scourged out of God's
universe, and 'the ransomed of the Lord shall return with joy upon their
heads, and sorrow and sighing shall flee away.'
Then shall this mighty prayer be answered, the prayer of God's children
in all ages, the prayer which He offers before the Throne who on earth
prayed, 'Not that Thou shouldest take them out of the world, but that
Thou shouldest keep them from the evil'; the prayer which the
white-robed souls offer when they cry, 'How long, O Lord, how long?' the
prayer which, all unconsciously, the sobs, and cries, and sorrows of six
thousand years have been offering; the prayer which is every hour being
answered in hourly mercies, and multitudes of forgivenesses and gracious
guiding; the prayer which has been steadily tending towards its
fulfilment, through all the ages during which God's name has been
growing in men's love, and His will more and more obeyed, and His
kingdom more and more fully come; the prayer which will be at last
completely realised when all His children shall stand before His Throne
happy and good, and the noise of earth's evil shall sound only in the
ear of memory, like the murmur of some far-off sea heard from the sacred
mountain, or the remembrance of the tempest when all the winds are
still.
If our prayer is, 'Deliver us from evil,' our life's experience will be
that 'He delivered us from so great a death and will deliver,' our dying
word will be thanksgiving to 'the angel who delivered us from all evil,'
and our death will bring the full deliverance for which while here we
pray, and admit us into that region of unmingled good and blessing and
purity, whose distant brightness we, tossing on the unquiet sea, behold
from afar and long to possess. 'After this manner pray ye,' and to you
the promise will be blessedly fulfilled, 'Because he hath set his love
upon Me, therefore will I deliver him. I will set him on high, because
he hath known My name' (Ps. xci. 14).
'THINE IS THE KINGDOM'
'Thine is the kingdom, and the power, and the glory, for ever.
Amen.' MATT. vi. 13.
There is no reason to suppose that this doxology was spoken by Christ.
It does not occur in any of the oldest and most authoritative
manuscripts of Matthew's Gospel. It does not seem to have been known to
the earliest Christian writers. Long association has for us intertwined
the words inextricably with our Lord's Prayer, and it is a wound to
reverential feeling to strike out what so many generations have used in
their common supplications. No doubt this doxology is appropriate as a
conclusion, and serves to give an aspect of completeness. It sounds cold
and cheerless to end our prayer with 'evil.' But the question is not one
of feeling or of our notions of fitness, but purely one of criticism,
and the only evidence which has any right to be heard in settling the
text of the New Testament is dead against this clause. If we regard that
evidence, we are obliged to say that the doxology has no business here.
How it stands here is a question which may be answered satisfactorily.
When the Lord's Prayer came to be used in public worship, it was natural
to append to it a doxology, just as in chanting the psalms it became the
habit to repeat at the end of each the Gloria. This doxology, originally
written on the margin of the gospel, would gradually creep into the
text, and once there, was naturally retained.
It does not follow that, because Christ did not speak it, we ought not
to use it. It should not be in the Bible, but it may well be in our
prayers. If we think that our Lord gave us a pattern rather than a form,
we are quite justified in extending that pattern by any additions which
harmonise with its spirit. If we think He gave us a form to be repeated
_verbatim_, then we ought not to add to it this doxology.
At first sight it seems as if the prayer without it were incomplete. It
contains loving desires, lowly dependence, humble penitence, earnest
wishes for cleansing, but there appears none of that rapturous praise
which is also an element in all true devotion. And this may have been
one reason for the addition of the doxology. But I think that that
absence of praise and joy is only apparent; the first clause of the
prayer expresses the highest form of both. The doxology, if you will
think of it, adds nothing to the contemplation of the divine character
which the prayer has already taught us. It is only a repetition at the
close of what we had at the beginning, and its conception, lofty and
grand as it is, falls beneath that of 'Our Father.' We might almost say
that the doxology is incongruous with the prayer as presenting a less
blessed, spiritual, distinctively Christian thought of God. That would
be going too far, but I cannot but feel a certain change in tone, a
dropping from the loftiest elevation down to the celebration of the
lower aspects of the divine. 'Kingdom, power, and glory' are grand, but
they do not reach the height of ascription of praise which sounds in the
very first words of the prayer.
Properly speaking, too, this doxology is not a part of the prayer. It
expresses two things: the devout contemplation of God which the whole
course of the petitions has excited in the soul--and in that aspect it
is the Church's echo to the Lord's Prayer; and the confidence with which
we pray--and in that aspect it is rather the utterance of meditative
reflection asking of itself its reasons for hope and stirring itself up
to lay hold on God.