Another illustration, much briefer, Psalm 9, verse 10, "Those who know Your name put their trust in You." It doesn't mean those who know the name God in English or Hebrew or Greek or any other language will necessarily trust God, but those who know His name, those who know who He really is put their trust in Him. Those who know the fullness of His nature and character really understand Him.
You find this, and I don't need to beg the issue here, but you find this all through the Old Testament. Psalm 7:17, "I will give thanks to the Lord according to His righteousness and will sing praise to the name of the Lord Most High." We praised His name today. We praised His name. We do it every week, we praise His name. What are we saying? Are we offering homage to a title? No, to the person who bears the title. His name is all that He is. It is the sum of His personality, His character, His will and His authority. In Psalm 102:15 we read, "So the nations will fear the name of the Lord and all the kings of the earth Your glory." So there the name of the Lord and the glory of the Lord is equated. And you find that, Psalm 113:1, Psalm 135:1, Psalm 148:5, etc., etc., etc. Psalm 20 verse 7, "Some boast of chariots and some of horses, but we boast in the name of the Lord our God." We're talking about our God in all the glory of His person.
In John 17:6, Jesus said, "I have manifested Your name to the men whom You've given me out of the world." What did He mean, "I've manifested Your name? I've told them Your name?" No, I revealed who You are. If you've seen Me, you've seen the Father. Jesus showed them who God was, His true nature, His true person. He was the Father's glory incarnate, full of grace and truth. Name is not a title, it's a total, it's the whole person.
We understand that. The prophets of old said, "I come in the name of the Lord." Preachers today come in the name of the Lord. Ambassadors that go to a foreign country come in the name of the government, the name of the ruler, the name of the leader of their land. When you go out to sell a product, you come in the name of your company. When you go to court to defend someone, you come in the name of your client. It doesn't just mean the name itself, it means the person behind the name.
Putting it in plain terms, folks, here's how you pray. You go knowing that God loves you and cares for you as a tenderhearted, compassionate, merciful, gracious Father. And as you rush into His presence and say, "Papa, Abba," and celebrate that intimacy and that tenderness and that availability and that acceptance, you immediately stop and say, "Father, may Your person, Your identity, Your character, Your nature, Your attributes, Your glory be hallowed. This isn't about me, this is about You. I bring whatever I bring as a request to give You opportunity to put Your glory on display, if it will do that."
The very names of God identify the range of God's glorious attributes. You know, in English we...we either say Lord or God. You listen to people pray, they either say, "Father, Lord or God." We don't have enough words to get beyond those things. The Hebrews did. They could say, Elohim, the name that acknowledges Him as Creator, the third word in the Hebrew Old Testament. They can come to God as the Elohim, the plural name of the triune God, Creator recognizing Him as Creator like the hymn writer, "I sing the mighty power of God that made the mountains rise, that spread the flowing seas abroad and built the lofty skies." It's wonderful to come to God as Elohim, the Creator.
Or we can come to God as El Elyon, God the Most High. Blessed be Abram of the Most High God, possessor of heaven and earth, Genesis 14, referring to God not as Creator but as sovereign over the whole of the universe. Or we can come to God as Jehovah. We can take that "I AM," which means the I AM, the eternally existing one and we can even say Yahweh. We don't need to create a word, we can use the word Yahweh, the I AM that I AM. And in the Old Testament that word is connected to many other words. We can say Jehovah-Jireh which means the Lord who will provide. We can say Jehovah-Nissi, the Lord who is our banner, that is the King under whom we march. We can say Jehovah-Ropheka, the Lord our healer. We can say Jehovah-Shalom, the Lord our peace; Jehovah-roi, the Lord our Shepherd; Jehovah-Tsidkenu, the Lord our righteousness; Jehovah or Yahweh-tsabaoth, the Lord of hosts; or Jehovah-Shammah, the Lord is present; or Jehovah-meqaddeskem, the Lord who sanctifies. Or we could say Adhonai which is the word Lord. Or we could say, the greatest title of all, the Lord God and Father of Jesus Christ, the consummate title of God.
This is His name. This is His name. We can come to Him and call Him the Wonderful Counselor, the Mighty God, the Father of eternity, Isaiah 9:6. Or we can borrow the expressions out of the gospel of John, we can come to Him as the I am the Good Shepherd, I am the Door, I am the Way, I am the Truth, I am the Life, I am the Vine, I am the Resurrection, on and on. No wonder the hymn writer said, "O could I speak the matchless worth, O could I sing the glories forth which in my Savior shine. I'd soar and touch the heavenly strings and vie with Gabriel while He sings in notes almost divine. I'd sing the character He bears and all the forms of love He wears. Exalted on His throne in loftiest songs of sweetest praise, I would to everlasting days make all His glories known." And when we talk about His name, we're talking about all that He is.
And so we come to the second part, "Hallowed be Your name." What is that to say? We see the word "hallowed" and immediately we think of Halloween. Too bad that Halloween has corrupted this word. It starts...Halloween is from the same source, we won't bother to exegete Halloween, however. Hallowed, what an interesting word. It's so archaic you rarely hear anybody use it. It's just about disappeared from the English language and that's too bad. It's associated with old cloistered halls, hallowed halls, or long academic robes or dismal chants or medieval halos, or musty dim churches or mournfully morbid music, or other tired traditions. Hallowed has almost become a way to speak of something that's obsolete or that something that's only a memory of a past glory.
But what is the word in the original Greek? Hagiazan,connected to hagiazoand hagios, holy. I wish that maybe it had been translated that way but on the other hand it's good to have a word that needs a little bit of understanding and depth because it enriches us. If we saw holy we might think we understood that. It is the word "holy" and the word "holy" means "separate." Hagiazomeans to separate, to set apart. So what you're saying is this, "God, I acknowledge Your name, Your glory in all its fullness and infinite reality and I understand that Your name deserves to be set apart independent of me, my circumstances and anything in my life and my heart and my list. You need to do what You need to do in the glory of Your own person and purpose. You are not subject to me. You are a different kind of being. You live in a different place, in a different kind of life far beyond anything I could fathom. I would never be so stupid as to rush into Your presence and assume that I could tell You what to do because I knew. I set apart You in all Your glory to whatever it is that suits You."
To hallow can have two meanings. I can have two meanings. First, to hallow, to make holy, to set apart as holy can mean to make an ordinary thing holy by bringing it into contact with something that is holy, to make an ordinary holy by bringing it into contact to something that is holy. Now that is biblical because that's what happened to us. I'm not holy and you're not holy but God views us as holy because He's united us to...whom?...to Christ. So in our union with Christ, that which is unholy has been made holy. So we are now called holy ones, we are called saints. That's what the word saint is. So we are holy in the sense that we have been made holy by being brought into contact with one who is holy.
That's not the usage here because God doesn't need to be made holy by being brought into contact with someone else who is holy. It simply means here to treat as holy, to hold as holy. That is to say to recognize that God is different, separated, separated, separated, separated, holy, holy, holy, a different sphere, a different quality of being, a different power, a different knowledge, a different wisdom way beyond us. God is supremely separate from us. He absolutely belongs to a different sphere of life and being. And we come acknowledging that. He is vastly beyond us and above us.
Now we understand something of this. The Sabbath Day according to the Ten Commandments was to be remembered and to be kept holy, remember that? That simply means it's to be treated as if it were not like the other six days. It's different from the other days. Don't do what you do on the six days, you work on the six days. The seventh day is holy, it's separated. You treat it differently. You worship God on that day you don't work. Priests in the Old Testament, according to Leviticus 21:8, were to be considered as holy. They weren't like the rest of people. Their whole lives were set apart to service to God. So we have some illustrations of that. In Numbers chapter 20 God said to Moses when they were walking in the wilderness, "I'll provide water, just speak to the rock. Speak to the rock and I'll put My power on display." Well Moses was feeling a little heady, a little selfish, wanted to make the people think that he carried the power so instead of speaking to the rock like God told him, what did he do? Took a stick and hit the rock as if it was a display of his own power and God came down and said, "You did not sanctify Me. You did not treat Me as holy because you did not reverence Me and pay Me My due honor." And the word in the Septuagint is hagiazan, same word. You didn't hallow My name. You didn't recognize that I told you to do it a certain way to which you are to respond. Moses' act was an act of disobedience, but more than that, first of all it was an act of irreverence, it was an act of irreverence, it said, "God, I am more interested in what I want to do than what You have to say." To hallow the name of God is to hold His matchless being in reverence, utter awe. To hold Him as unique above and beyond everyone else. In some ways it equates hagiazan, equates with doxazanwhich means to glorify or honor, or eulogian(?) which means to bless or praise, or hupsoowhich means to exalt or lift up. It's all of that. We're lifting up Your glory. This is about You. You never go to God in prayer without the highest level of veneration.
And again I say, this is a protection, you see, against the tendency to get too familiar. This is a kind of a trend in Christianity today, the Abba Father and you get people treating God in a rather sentimental fashion that doesn't really rush into His presence because there's an open invitation but immediately struck by the awesomeness of God, crying out hallowed be Your name.
The Jews did understand that. As I said, they really did understand the transcendence of God, if not the imminence. They never prayed a prayer in which they used the term "Father." When they did use it, they used it, "Father of creation, Father of the nation," they never used it without immediately adding another title cause they were afraid that Father was just too intimate. They would say, "O Lord, Father and Ruler of my life." And these are some Jewish prayers that I have found from their traditional ceremonial prayers. They always added something else. Or they would say, "O Lord Father and God of my life." Or they would say, "O Father, King of great power, Most High Almighty God." And maybe the most familiar of all the Jewish patterns of prayer is what's called the Shiminah Ezra(??) it's a series of eighteen prayers. Every one of them starts, "O Father, O King, O Lord." Which means You are my Father, but You are my King, and You are my Master. Around the Day of Atonement which is Yom Kippur, the highlight of the Jewish year, there...during that time of the Day of Atonement are ten days of penitence, ten days of prayers, ten penitential days. And for those days there are multiple prayers to be recited. They are called the Abinu Malkaenu(??), because forty-four times in those prayers they say this, "Our Father, Our King...Our Father, Our King...Our Father, Our King," celebrating the intimacy of God and celebrating the transcendence of God. Celebrating God as one to whom they can come and say, Abba, but celebrating God as one to whom they must bow as sacred and holy. Always want that balance.
So to hallow is to set apart from everything common, everything profane, everything earthly, everything human, everything temporal, everything spacial, everything to set apart from that God to esteem and prize and honor and reverence and adore Him as infinitely holy. So often we've said hallowed be Thy name and had no meaning to it at all, just passed by our lips. What we're saying is, "God, I acknowledge Your glory, the fullness of who You are and I want You to be set apart. I want You to display Your glory. That's first and foremost."
Jesus illustrates this so magnificently in John 12 where He's looking at the cross and verse 27 of John 12. "Now My soul has become troubled." Of course, He was anticipating separation from God, sin-bearing and He was the sinless one. No one could even comprehend this kind of agonizing anticipation. "Now My soul has become troubled," and then He says, "and what shall I say?" What am I going to say? "Father, save Me from this hour?" Is that what I'm going to say? "Father, save Me from this hour." That would be the normal response. That would be what would rise up in your tortured soul. "But...He says...for this purpose I came to this hour." So what does He say? Verse 28, "Father, glorify Your name, hallowed be Your name." He's feeling the crushing weight of what's going to happen, the rejection of the Jewish people, the hatred and hostility, the agonizing physical trauma that will be exacerbated in the terrible, terrible infliction of wounds that will occur in the hours to follow and then the crucifixion, the ultimate pain, the separation from God Himself, in the anticipation of that what is normal would be, "Father, Abba, You care, You have compassion, You love Me, then save Me from this hour." But there's something greater than saving Me from this hour, there is a purpose and He says, "This is the purpose for which I came to this hour. Father, glorify Your name." Ultimately that's the same as saying, "Hallowed be Your name." Whatever puts You on display, and boy did the cross put God on display, did it not? As a Judge and as a Savior, as a God of wrath and a God of mercy, as a God of justice and a God of grace.
So there is Jesus illustrating exactly what it means to pray this way. What might rise out of your heart, the natural normal response, "Get me out of this, I don't like this, Father, You're My Father, I'm Your child, Abba, I'm coming, I'm crying. But there's a nobler reality, You are apart from My circumstances, apart from My world, apart from My being, the eternally holy and sacred one and whatever brings You glory, do that...no matter how profound My momentary affliction might be." That's hallowing the name of God.
You cannot even do that unless you believe that God is who He is. A lot of people who sing that prayer in churches that don't believe in the true God and don't know Jesus Christ, it's meaningless. If you want to hallow His name, then you have to believe in the God who is God. You cannot come to God, Hebrews 11:6, unless you believe that He is...that He is who He is, till you come to the true God who is God the Creator, Sovereign of the universe, and who manifested Himself in Jesus Christ. You come to Him and you submit to His glory, you hallow His name. It's a God-conscious life. Psalm 16:8, "I've set the Lord always before me." I love to think of it in a very practical way. My whole life is lived looking at the world through God-colored glasses. You know what I mean by that? Everything is interpreted with respect to God. How does this reflect His glory or an assault on His glory? Trying to feel the pain that God feels or feel the joy that God feels, depending on what it is you experience. Psalm 16:8, "I've set the Lord always before me." That's what it means. God, it's Your purpose, it's Your kingdom, it's Your will, Your glory. That's where all prayer starts. And this gets very practical.
There's an old English poem that I love, probably most people won't like it, but I'm sort of a poet at heart. And this one captured me a lot of years ago and it kind of spun me around a little bit. It's just the way I look at the issues of...the simple issues of life. Henry Ernest Hardy wrote it, it goes like this: "O London town has many moods, and mingled mongst its many broods a leavening of saints. And ever up and down its streets if one has eyes to see, one meets stuff that an artist paints. I've seen a back street bathed in blue, such as the soul of whistler new, a smudge of amber light where some fried fish shop plied its trade, a perfect note of color made. O it was exquisite. I once came through St. James Park betwixt the sunset and the dark, and O the mystery of gray and green and violet, I would I never might forget that evening harmony. I hold it true that God is there. If beauty breaks through anywhere. And His most blessed feet who once life's roughest roadway trod, who came as man to show us God, still pass along the street."
I love that. God in the back street. God in St. James Park. God in a fish shop. That's a life of reverence, isn't it? He sees God everywhere. He sees God on display everywhere. And is raptured by the glory of God. Most people's awareness of God is spasmodic. At times acute, most of the time absent. Too bad...too bad. Hallowing His name means I have set the Lord always before me. O God, before I ever talk about my bread, my sin, my life, know this, I desire Your glory to be displayed. That colors everything...everything.
Father, we thank You this morning for the way in which You have given us such clear teaching, with all that can be said about prayer, with all that has been said and written about prayer, with all the mystical and obscure intonations that have come and gone, here's the greatest lesson we could ever learn. And in just less than a handful of words, hallowed be Your name says it all. We rush into Your presence with all our anxieties, all our cares. And before we cry, Father, save me from this hour, we stop and say, "But maybe, maybe for Your purpose we've come to this hour." And so with our Savior we stop and say, "Father, glorify Your name. Hallow Your name. Put Your glory on display. Hear this prayer offered in Your name if and how it will bring You glory." And may we know that in such praying we are aligning ourselves with displays of glory which will enrich our lives beyond all comprehension. I don't want You to give me what I want, I only want You to give me what You know is best for me. I don't want to have anything that elevates me, I want to have what glorifies You and humbles me. It is Your glory we seek. Thank You, Father, for letting us come and giving us a context in which to pour out our hearts in which there's a guarantee that You will only do what in the end will honor You. We are protected and comforted in that reality and eager to embrace it in Your Son's name. Amen.
No comments:
Post a Comment