The Presbyterian Layman Foundations of the Faith
The Lord’s Prayer: Who art in heaven
Robert P. Mills, Posted Wednesday, Nov 22, 2000
Suggested Scripture Readings: Psalm 33:13-15 Matthew 6:9, 17-21 Colossians 3:1-3 Revelation 8:1-4; 22:1-5 |
By praying to our Father “in heaven,” wrote the Puritan divine Thomas Watson, we learn that “we are to raise our minds in prayer above the earth.”
That remains an important lesson, for modern understandings of prayer are as diverse as modern understandings of God. Those who believe themselves to be divine will consider prayer nothing more than internal dialogue. Those who worship the earth will pray to rivers, trees and mountains, earth, wind and fire.
But those who accept the Biblical revelation that God fills and yet transcends the cosmos will, when we pray, raise our minds above internal obsessions and idolatrous devotion to creation to the very throne of God. Drawing his disciples out of themselves and away from idolatry may well have been what Jesus had in mind when he taught us to pray to “Our Father, who art in heaven.”
Heaven is a place
When we pray to God “in heaven” we acknowledge that heaven is a place, not just a symbol, myth or metaphor.
Moments before he was stoned by a furious mob, Stephen, “full of the Holy Spirit, looked into heaven and saw the glory of God, and Jesus standing at the right hand of God” (Acts 7:55). As Wayne Grudem notes, “He did not see mere symbols of a state of existence. It seems rather that his eyes were opened to see a spiritual dimension of reality which God has hidden from us in this present age, a dimension which nonetheless really does exist in our space/time universe, and within which Jesus now lives in his physical resurrection body.”
That heaven is a place also underlies both Jesus’ promise to his disciples, “In my Father’s house are many rooms; if it were not so, I would have told you. I am going there to prepare a place for you” (John 14:2) and his ascension (Acts 1:9-11).
Of course, to recognize heaven as a “place” is not to confine it within material or spatial limitations. Instead, heaven is perhaps better conceived as a spiritual place, a reality not immediately accessible to human perception or investigation yet no less real because of our incapacity. Heaven is instead the realm where reality is most real, where God is most fully present.
Descriptions of heaven
“Heaven itself is ineffable, beyond words,” writes Jeffery Burton Russell, “Yet we have no way of discussing heaven except in the only speech we know, human language.” He notes that to express heaven’s reality we use “the language of earthly delight: sound (melody, silence, conversation); sight (light, proportion); taste and smell (banquet, sweetness); touch (embracing the beloved).”
Ultimately, however, heaven cannot be defined both because it is unique and because it lies beyond our experience. “No eye has seen, no ear has heard, no mind has conceived what God has prepared for those who love him” (I Cor. 2:9).
Because we call God the Father who is ‘in heaven,’ we are bold to pray for such absurdly extravagant gifts as bread for the world, peace among the nations, healed marriages, cured cancer, rain.” – William Willimon and Stanley Hauerwas |
Other Biblical references similarly describe heaven by way of negation: Heaven will have no temple, for God himself will be its temple (Rev. 21:22). There will be no marriage in heaven (Matt. 22:30). Heaven will have no night or day, since God himself will be its light (Rev. 22:5). There will be no suffering in heaven (Rev. 21:4).
Yet Scripture does include tantalizing glimpses into the reality of heaven. Heaven includes a multitude that no one can number (Rev. 7:9). Those in heaven feast on spiritual food and drink the water of eternal life (Luke 14:14; Matt. 26:29; Rev. 21:6; 22:1-2). There will be treasures and rewards in heaven (Matt. 6:6, 18-20; I Cor. 3:8). Of these rewards Donald Bloesch observes, “We are accepted into heaven on the basis of faith alone, but we are adorned in heaven on the basis of the fruits of our faith. … there will be distinctions in heaven, though no unlawful discrimination.”
Coexistence
But perhaps the most important lesson to learn about heaven, certainly the lesson that has the most impact on our prayers, is that heaven is not merely a future reward but a present reality, a spiritual sphere coexisting with the world of space and time.
At the outset of Revelation, John passed through a “door standing open in heaven” (Rev. 1:1) into God’s presence, where the “prayers of the saints” rise up before God’s throne, an assurance of the vital connection between our earthly activities and the realm of God (Rev. 8:3-6).
We have this assurance because as Christians we are united with Christ, we are “in Christ,” and as such we already belong to heaven. Indeed, God has already “raised us up with Christ and seated us with him in the heavenly realms in Christ Jesus” (Eph. 2:6).
Our lives even now are “hidden with Christ in God” and therefore “the things above” are to be the focus of our attention, the goal of our lives while on earth (Col. 3:1-3). Although we live on earth, we are citizens of heaven (Phil. 3:20). As we fix our gaze on Christ above, the life of heaven becomes an increasing reality as we are “being transformed into his likeness with ever-increasing glory” (II Cor. 3:18).
In heaven, we are seated with the ascended Christ, who himself is at right hand of the one he taught his disciples to call “Our Father in heaven.”
Christian prayer
From heaven, God the Father oversees all creation (Psalm 33:13-14). Thus, to be instructed to pray to our Father in heaven is to be invited to adopt God’s heavenly perspective.
“When we look at things,” write William Willimon and Stanley Hauerwas, “our vision tends to be myopic. Most of the time it is difficult to see much beyond ourselves. God tends to take a larger view.” Or, as the writer of Ecclesiastes puts it, “God is in heaven and you are on earth” (Ecc. 5:2), a not-so-subtle reminder of the meaninglessness of life lived “under heaven,” that is, lived from a purely material perspective, apart from the spiritual realities of heaven.
In contrast, those holding citizenship in heaven are charged to bring the earthly and heavenly spheres into alignment in our own lives, especially in our prayers. Either we conform ourselves to the world’s pattern (“let the world squeeze us into its mold” in J.B. Phillips’ paraphrase of Romans 12:2) or we allow God to transform us by renewing our minds, in part by “rais[ing] our minds in prayer above the earth.”
Praying to God who is “in heaven” also leads us away from the temptation to capture and confine God within the realm of our own experience. That God is in heaven means that he cannot be contained in structures made with human hands. God is with us – presently through his Holy Spirit, supremely in Jesus Christ – yet he is wholly other. God is intimately involved with his c
reation, yet not identical with it. We do not pray to creation but to our Creator.
Extravagant gifts
Finally, Willimon and Hauerwas remind us that “The God whom we have been taught by Jesus to address as ‘Our Father’ is the one who rules the whole cosmos … Because we call God the Father who is ‘in heaven,’ we are bold to pray for such absurdly extravagant gifts as bread for the world, peace among the nations, healed marriages, cured cancer, rain.”
Our prayers can be strangled by a narrow view of God. When God is squeezed into the mold of science or modern liberal theology, the Christian’s legitimate desire boldly to approach the throne of God slowly asphyxiates.
We pray for extravagant gifts only when we remember that we to pray “Our Father, who art in heaven.”
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