The Message of Prayer: Approaching The Throne Of Grace

Part 1

The foundations of prayer

Genesis 1 to Revelation 22

1. The conversation of friends

Prayer is the conversation of friends. It is not a mere convenience for letting God know what we are thinking or what we want. Prayer is that for which we were made. It is at the heart of God’s plan of salvation. To understand the tremendous privilege and import of prayer we need to see it in the context of God’s purpose to have a relationship with his people. ‘It is not possible for us to say, I will pray, or I will not pray, as if it were a question of pleasing ourselves; to be a Christian and to pray mean the same thing, and not a thing which can be left to our own wayward impulses. It is, rather, a necessity, as breathing is necessary to life.’1 In other words, prayer is part of the definition of what it means to be a Christian. A Christian is someone who knows God through Jesus Christ, and to know God is to converse with him. In this chapter we shall explore the theological context of prayer, namely God’s gracious purpose to have a relationship with a people who are his people.

1. The riddle of creation

In the account of creation in Genesis 1 we read:

Then God said, ‘Let us make man in our image, in our likeness, and let them rule over the fish of the sea and the birds of the air, over the livestock, over all the earth, and over all the creatures that move along the ground.’

So God created man

in his own image,

in the image of God

he created him;

male and female

he created them.

(Gen. 1:26–27)

The plural pronoun in verse 26 is suggestive. Instead of saying, ‘I will’, God says, ‘Let us’. It suggests a conversation within God,2 revealing a God who is plural and communal. God creates through his word and now that word is addressed to himself. God is personal and he exists in community. ‘God addresses himself, but this he can do only because he has a Spirit who is both one with him and distinct from him at the same time. Here are the first glimmerings of a trinitarian revelation.’3

Whereas the plants and animals are made according to their kinds (Gen. 1:11, 12, 21, 24, 25), the man and woman are made according to God’s likeness. What constitutes the image of God in man is a much debated issue, but one element is this communal nature. The God who is relational makes us relational beings. He did not make us solitary but as male and female. We are made to exist in community and we are made for community with God. The trinitarian community graciously extends its communal life. God did not make us because of a lack within himself. God exists, as he has for all eternity, in the fulfilled, complete relationships of the Trinity – Father, Son and Holy Spirit in perfect unity. God had no need of a relationship outside himself. Yet, in an act of sheer grace, he created us to share the trinitarian life. Karl Barth puts it powerfully in his exposition of the Apostles’ Creed:

If we make even a slight effort to look on God, to conceive Him as He reveals Himself to us, as God in mystery, God in the highest, God the Triune and Almighty, we must be astonished at the fact that there are ourselves and the world alongside and outside Him. God has no need of us, He has no need of the world and heaven and earth at all. He is rich in Himself. He has fullness of life; all glory, all beauty, all goodness and holiness reside in Him. He is sufficient unto Himself, He is God, blessed in Himself. To what end, then, the world? . . . How can there be something alongside God, of which He has no need? This is the riddle of creation. And the doctrine of creation answers that God, who does not need us, created heaven and earth and myself, of ‘sheer fatherly kindness and compassion, apart from any merit or worthiness of mine; for all of which I am bound to thank and praise Him, to serve Him and to be obedient, which is assuredly true’. Do you feel in these words Luther’s amazement in the face of creation, of the goodness of God, in which God does not will to be alone, but to have a reality beside Himself? Creation is grace: a statement at which we should like best to pause in reverence, fear and gratitude.4

The riddle of creation is not: Is there a God who made this world? That is to get things round the wrong way. Our starting point should not be the reality of the world but the reality of God. In effect, then, the riddle is this: Why is there a world made by such a God? Why should God make us when he was ‘rich in himself’? The answer to the riddle is grace. Creation is an act of grace in which God invites us to share the love of the trinitarian life. God graciously purposes to have a relationship with people. The riddle of creation is that God should desire to enter into a relationship with his creatures outside his trinitarian being. And this riddle is the foundation of prayer – and not only of prayer but of human existence.

We have not a God, like the Absolute of the thinkers, alone in His absolute Being, uncommunicating and non-communicative, who ‘broods’ in that silence . . . but a God who emerges from this silence and solitude by creating us as His counterparts and communicating Himself to us. And His will is that this creature should make use of this communication and call upon Him. To answer to the creative loving call of God with responsive love; this is the destiny for which man was created, and this call is the foundation of his being.5

We are created to be God’s ‘counterparts’ and to answer his loving self-communication with ‘responsive love’. God is not some abstract absolute force or sense of transcendence; he is personal: he hears, sees, smiles. He is the God who inclines his ear and opens his eyes (2 Kgs. 19:16; Dan. 9:18 ESV). Although this is anthropomorphic language by which God accommodates himself to our limited understanding, it nevertheless speaks truly of God’s nature and enables us to experience prayer as personal and relational.

2. A broken relationship

The community with God for which mankind is made is pictured in the walking of God with Adam and Eve in the cool of the evening (Gen. 3:8). It is hard for us to imagine what this involved, but we can perhaps be guided by the later theophanies in which God accommodates himself to people by appearing in human or angelic form. However it happened, it beautifully expresses the relationship with God for which we were made. Yet, while the Hebrew of Genesis 3:8 suggests a habitual activity,6 the walking together in the garden is mentioned in the narrative at the point at which the experience is lost. For this time, when God comes to walk with Adam and Eve, they are hiding. Their futile attempts to hide from God are a stark indication that their act of rebellion has immediately broken their relationship with him. Because of sin we can no longer appear before one another naked – as we are – without feeling shame (Gen. 3:7). Still less can we appear before God. H. C. Leopold says, ‘Mistrust and fear have . . . taken the place of the trust and the free communion with Yahweh, that had previously prevailed. Instead of running to Him they run from Him. Communion with the heavenly Father is no longer their highest delight. It is shunned as an evil and vexatious thing.’7

The root problem is not, however, that mankind now shuns the presence of God but that God excludes us from his presence. Humans rejected the rule of God and the fellowship of God. We determined to live in our own way outside a relationship with God. Thus we are cut off from Eden. The angel with the flaming sword becomes a symbol for our separation from God (Gen. 3:23–24). When Cain murders his brother we read, So Cain went out from the LORD’s presence and lived in the land of Nod, east of Eden (Gen. 4:16). In Genesis 3:23 Adam and Eve found themselves east of Eden. Now Cain is further east. In Genesis 11:2 mankind is still moving eastward – away from Eden – this time to the plain of Shinar where they erect the tower of Babel in defiance of God. The geography of humanity’s early movements highlights their distance from God. In every sense, we are a long way from walking with God in the garden.

3. The promise of a people

In Genesis 12 God begins the movement back to the presence of God. The story begins with a promise. This promise to Abraham is that which shapes the story of the Bible and salvation, and ultimately the history of the world, and beyond history the consummation of all things. At the heart of that promise is the promise of a people. Abraham will have offspring who will become a nation (Gen. 12:2). In Genesis 17 God makes it clear that the promise is not just for a people but a people who will be God’s people. I will establish my covenant as an everlasting covenant between me and you and your descendants after you for the generations to come, to be your God and the God of your descendants after you (Gen. 17:7). The sign of circumcision is given as a sign that Abraham’s descendants are God’s own people (Gen. 17:9–14). At the heart of God’s saving purposes are a people who are God’s people. God is creating a people who know him and are known by him. His purpose is to restore the broken relationship of Eden.

By the time we come to the opening chapter of Exodus the single man Abraham has become a great nation as God promised. But they are a people in slavery and exiled from the Promised Land. When God meets with Moses in the burning bush he says, I have indeed seen the misery of my people in Egypt . . . I am sending you to Pharaoh to bring my people the Israelites out of Egypt (Exod. 3:7, 10; my emphasis). God promises to rescue his people and bring them to the land promised to Abraham. Again at the heart of the promise is the restoration of relationship: I will take you as my own people, and I will be your God (Exod. 6:7). Their redemption from slavery is also a redemption to something. They are rescued to know and worship God. The land is to be the place where God lives with his people. The promise that ‘I will be their God and they will my people’ runs throughout the biblical narrative and is the foundation for the Bible’s understanding of prayer. ‘Prayer in the Old Testament is not special content, particular technique, or the quality of a person’s spirituality,’ says Christopher Seitz. ‘Rather, it is talk with the living God!’8 It is this covenant relationship that gives biblical prayer its rich texture.

Covenant partnership means that God cannot and does not use the divine prerogatives of power to reduce Israel’s response to monotones of praise, submission, or silence. Such limitations on human response effectively eviscerate genuine covenant relationship, substituting instead enforced obedience and passive devotion. Covenant partnership also means that Israel cannot and does not withhold from God the full range of human experience.9

God redeems his people from slavery through the exodus and brings them to Sinai, where he makes a covenant with them and gives them his law. Together the exodus and Sinai define Israel’s identity as a nation, constituting them as the people of God. God’s purpose to restore his relationship with mankind is focused on one nation. But his intent is that by being near this people the nations will be drawn to life under his gracious rule (Deut. 4:5–8). At Sinai the people meet with God. Or rather they almost meet God. For rescue from Egypt is only a picture of the redemption God intends for his people, a redemption from the root problems of sin, judgment and death. When they encounter God at Sinai it is a long way from the experience of Adam and Eve walking in the garden. They must ritually purify themselves, reminding them that their sin cuts them off from God. Limits are placed around the mountain because those who step on to it or press forward to see the Lord will die – the Lord will break out against them (Exod. 19:12, 21, 24). As the firestorm of God’s presence covers the mountain, we read, Everyone in the camp trembled (Exod. 19:16). God is present with his people, but it is hardly the intimate relationship for which we were made.

The instructions for the construction of the tabernacle, and later the temple, capture this sense of presence and distance. The tabernacle represents God’s presence with his people, but at the same time its various courts and the curtain in front of the Holy of Holies keep people from the consuming presence of God. God’s presence with his people at this point is mediated by symbols. The pillars of cloud and fire, the ark of the covenant and the tent of meeting express God’s presence with his people to protect and guide them. When the people of God break camp, the tabernacle is taken down and goes with them so that God ‘travels’ with his people. But it is a mediated presence. He is with them through symbol and sign. The symbols point forward to something else. They partially fulfil the promise to Abraham that God will have a people who are his people. But the partial nature of the fulfilment points forward to a coming reality.

At Sinai, too, the people sin against God by constructing a golden calf. In response God says he will give them the land, But I will not go with you, because you are a stiff-necked people and I might destroy you on the way (Exod. 33:3). But, argues Moses as he intercedes for the people, there is no point in prosperity in the land without the presence of God (Exod. 33:15–16). The genius of Moses is to recognize that salvation is fellowship with God.

Because God is with his people they drive out the nations. The book of Joshua presents the conquest of the land as the battle of God. Even when the people are repeatedly unfaithful to God, he does not disown them as his people. Instead he sends his judges to rescue them. Not until David has brought rest to the nation from its enemies and, more significantly, not until God has promised a ‘house’ (a dynasty) to David does David’s son, Solomon, build a ‘house’ (a temple) for God. As the temple is consecrated God’s glory descends, so that the priests have to evacuate the building (1 Kgs. 8:10–11). This is the place God has chosen for his Name to dwell (1 Kgs. 8:29). In his prayer of dedication, Solomon asks God to be attentive to prayer offered towards the temple (1 Kgs. 8:29– 51). But we are not to mistake the temple for the reality to which it points, for the God whom the heavens cannot contain does not live in something made by human hands. The prayer made towards the temple is answered from heaven (1 Kgs. 8:27–30).

4. A tale of two psalms

Psalm 48 describes Mount Zion as beautiful in its loftiness, / the joy of the whole earth (48:2). The kings who advance against it are astounded at what they see, and flee in terror (48:4–5). The reader is invited to take a tour round the walls and marvel at its splendour (48:12–13). By the standards of geography and politics, however, these are ridiculous statements. Mount Zion was not the greatest mountain in the world and certainly not the loftiest. The city of Jerusalem was not of special significance in the economy or politics of the region. But the psalmist is reflecting a theological reality: what makes Jerusalem great is that God is with her; what makes her secure is God’s presence. God is in her citadels, / he has shown himself to be her fortress . . . God makes her secure for ever . . . Mount Zion rejoices . . . because of your judgments (48:3, 8, 11). What makes Jerusalem so special is that she is the city of our God, his holy mountain (48:1). Jerusalem, with the temple at its heart, is the symbol of God’s presence with his people. Psalm 48 is a statement of Israelite faith. It is Israel’s relationship with God that singles her out among the nations.

How poignant, then, to read Psalm 137. By the time Psalm 137 is written things have changed radically. Jerusalem has fallen. The temple has been destroyed. The people are once again in slavery. To remember Zion now is to weep (137:1). The books of 1 and 2 Kings, together with the great prophecies of Jeremiah and Ezekiel, are written to demonstrate that this has not happened because God was unfaithful to his promises but because the people were unfaithful. The destruction of the temple was the result of God’s judgment – a fulfilment of the covenant warnings in Deuteronomy. At the point at which the temple is dedicated – the high point of the old covenant kingdom – the explanation of its collapse is given in a word from God to Solomon. If the people turn from God they and the temple will be destroyed: all who pass by will be appalled and will scoff and say, ‘Why has the LORD done such a thing to this land and to this temple?’ People will answer, ‘Because they have forsaken the LORD their God, who brought their fathers out of Egypt, and have embraced other gods, worshipping and serving them – that is why the LORD brought all this disaster on them’ (1 Kgs. 9:8–9).

In the end Israel presumed too much on God’s presence. They mistook the sign for the reality. They put their trust in the bricks and mortar of the temple building – despite the warnings of Jeremiah (Jer. 7:1–15). But what Ezekiel sees in a poignant reversal of 1 Kings 8:10–11 is that the glory of God has departed from the temple building (Ezek. 10:18–19). Jerusalem has fallen. The temple has been destroyed. The people are exiled. All the symbols of God’s presence with his people have gone. All that is left is the bare promise of God and it is on this promise that the prophets reconstruct hope for God’s people. Jeremiah speaks of a new covenant in which not only will there be restoration after judgment but symbol will give way to reality. The law will be written on people’s hearts and knowledge of God will be unmediated. At the heart of this new covenant is once again the promise of a relationship:

I will be their God,

and they will be my people.

(Jer. 31:33)

Ezekiel sees a vision of a new temple in a new Jerusalem (Ezek. 40 – 48). His book closes in dramatic fashion with the name of the city: THE LORD IS THERE (Ezek. 48:35). Once again God will be with his people. Once again he will be their God and they will be his people.

When the returning exiles rebuilt the temple it was not Ezekiel’s temple they built. It was not even a replica of Solomon’s temple. Those who remembered the previous temple wept when they saw the meagre scale of the replacement (Ezra 3:11–13). This was not the fulfilment of God’s promises. Even as they encouraged the people to complete the rebuilding (Ezra 6:14), the post-exilic prophets directed their attention beyond the replacement temple to a far greater work of God. Haggai promised that the glory of this present house will be greater than the glory of the former house (Hag. 2:9). The prophet Zechariah saw in a series of visions a greater building project that God himself is going to accomplish (Zech. 1 – 6). Shout and be glad, O Daughter of Zion, the Lord declares to Zechariah. ‘For I am coming, and I will live among you,’ declares the LORD (Zech. 2:10).

5. The presence of God

Over five hundred years after the ministries of Ezekiel and Jeremiah a young woman from a backwater of an occupied territory gave birth to a child. The child was Emmanuel, which means God with us (Matt. 1:23). The child, of course, was Jesus and the angel who calls him Emmanuel was quoting from Isaiah (Is. 7:14). The promise to Abraham, reiterated by the prophets, was being fulfilled: God is with his people.

Describing the coming of Jesus, the apostle John says, The Word became flesh and made his dwelling among us. We have seen his glory, the glory of the One and Only, who came from the Father, full of grace and truth (John 1:14). Made his dwelling is literally ‘tabernacled’. The signs of tabernacle and temple have given way to reality. The verse is also an allusion to Exodus 33 where Moses asks God to show him his glory. God allows Moses only a glimpse his glory: you will see my back; but my face must not be seen (Exod. 33:23). In contrast to this partial revelation, John says that in Christ We have seen his glory . . . full of grace and truth (John 1:14). God’s glory is revealed in the One who is the exact representation of his being (Heb. 1:3) and in whom all the fulness of the Deity lives in bodily form (Col. 2:9). No-one has ever seen God, but God the One and Only Son, who is at the Father’s side, has made him known (John 1:18). The temple symbolized the presence of God, and in John’s Gospel Jesus identifies himself as the true temple (John 2:19–22). Now the God who cannot be approached is among his people in human form in the person of his Son.

At the Last Supper Jesus makes a new covenant, constituting believers as the people of God. Through his death, which the bread and wine anticipate, Jesus is going to achieve God’s saving plan to have a people who are his people. The Son is going to bring us into relationship with the Father. The apostle Peter can now say, Once you were not a people, but now you are the people of God (1 Pet. 2:10). To the Jews of the old covenant God had said – in a tragic reversal of the covenant promise – that they were no longer his people (Hos. 1:9). And the Gentiles were never a people – never the people of God. But now those who are in Christ – whether Jew or Gentile – have become members of God’s family. All that the temple represented is now true of the community of believers, and the church is the place where God dwells on earth (Eph. 2:19–22).

Mark 11 records how Jesus enters Jerusalem in triumph and surveys the temple. Mark begins his Gospel with a quotation from Malachi that speaks of one who will prepare for the coming of the Lord (Mal. 3:1; Mark 1:2–4). The Malachi quotation continues, Then suddenly the Lord you are seeking will come to his temple . . . But who can endure the day of his coming? (Mal. 3:1–2). In chapters 11 to 13 Mark portrays Jesus as the Lord who has come to his temple in judgment. Only animals bought in the temple courts could be sacrificed, and these animals could only be bought with temple currency. It was a scam to exploit those who came to sacrifice. Jesus clears the temple of the traders and moneychangers with a quotation from Isaiah:

Is it not written:

‘My house will be called

a house of prayer for all nations’?

But you have made it ‘a den of robbers’.

(Mark 11:17)

In the book of Isaiah God speaks of a time when he will bring foreigners who bind themselves to the LORD to his holy mountain and give them joy in my house of prayer (Is. 56:6–7). But the temple has become a place of exploitation rather than a place of welcome for the nations. Mark sandwiches this story between the cursing by Jesus of a fig tree and the discovery that it has withered (Mark 11:12–14, 20–25). The fig tree thus becomes a parable of God’s judgment on the Jerusalem temple.

In Mark’s Gospel a series of confrontations with the Jewish leaders then take place in the temple courts (Mark 11:27; 12:35, 41). They try to catch Jesus out, but it becomes clear that they are the ones being judged. They are like the tenants of the vineyard who reject the authority of the owner and kill his son, but will be judged by the owner (Mark 12:1–12). Then in Mark 13, in response to the disciples’ praise of the temple, Jesus predicts its destruction (Mark 13:1–2). God will have a place of prayer for the nations, but it will not be the Jerusalem temple. Instead it will be the one to whom the temple pointed: Jesus Christ. In Christ all nations find fellowship with God, and in Christ’s name all nations can pray to the Father.

As Jesus dies the curtain in the temple is torn from top to bottom (Mark 15:38). The symbol of God’s inaccessibility becomes in that moment a symbol of his accessibility. Through the death of Christ God can be known. The writer to the Hebrews contrasts the terror of the encounter with God at the earthly Mount Sinai with the privilege that is now ours in Christ (Heb. 12:18–24). Unlike the Israelites of old we come gladly to the assembly of the heavenly Jerusalem. We come to God through the blood of his Son. The sin that once separated us from God has been cleansed through the sacrificial blood of Christ. The relationship is restored.

6. The conversation of friends

Jesus not only gives us access to God. He makes us family. He invites us to call God ‘Father’,10 while he himself calls us his friends. But before Jesus came to earth, God had already entered into friendship with people. Abraham (2 Chr. 20:7; Is. 41:8; Jas. 2:23) and Moses (Exod. 33:11) were called the friends of God, and Job speaks of the friendship of God blessing his house (Job 29:4). Now God spectacularly widens his circle of friends. Jesus glories in the title friend of sinners (Matt. 11:19; Luke 7:34; see also Luke 5:20; 12:4; John 11:11). Shortly before his death he said to his disciples, I no longer call you servants, because a servant does not know his master’s business. Instead, I have called you friends, for everything that I learned from my Father I have made known to you (John 15:15; see also 15:13–14).

It was for this we were made: to know God; to be with him; to enjoy friendship with him; to share the life of the trinitarian community. ‘In obedience the Christian is the servant, in faith he is the child, but in prayer, as the servant and the child, he is the friend of God, called to the side of God and at the side of God, living and ruling and reigning with Him.’11 ‘God does not want us as objects, but as covenant partners, partners who can converse. He desires our conversation input, our spontaneous gratitude, our free concurrence, but also our patient or impatient questioning; and even our vehement protest is dearer to him than a silent, unconvinced acquiescence.’12

To say that we should seek friendship with the One who created the far reaches of the universe, who is the ruler of all history and who dwells in unapproachable light, sounds like outrageous hubris. Yet this is the gospel. Prayer is an expression of the very heart of God’s eternal plan to have a people who are his people; to know us and to be known by us. We readily bask in the reflected glory of knowing someone even moderately important or famous – how much more can we glory in friendship with the trinitarian God! ‘Prayer means conversation with God, calling upon God . . . The person who has grown up with the traditions of the Church takes this for granted. He is not conscious of the astonishing character, the boldness and ‘‘irrationality’’ of this act.’13

7. The fulfilment of prayer

But even prayer is not the reality – not ultimately. The Bible closes with John’s vision of the new Jerusalem: I saw the Holy City, the new Jerusalem, coming down out of heaven from God, prepared as a bride beautifully dressed for her husband. And I heard a loud voice from the throne saying, ‘Now the dwelling of God is with men, and he will live with them. They will be his people, and God himself will be with them and be their God’ (Rev. 21:2–3).

All that Jerusalem represented to the old covenant people of God, and which was celebrated in Psalm 48, is fulfilled in the new creation. God has come to dwell with people, to protect and to be with them. The covenant promise of a people who are God’s people is fulfilled and consummated. God enters into an eternal relationship of intimacy and security with his people. Revelation 21 echoes the language of Ezekiel’s vision of a new Jerusalem and a new temple, for this is the fulfilment of God’s purposes: I did not see a temple in the city says John, because the Lord God Almighty and the Lamb are its temple (Rev. 21:22). Prayer is not ultimate but penultimate, a pointer to the day when we shall see God face to face. It directs our attention forward to our participation in the trinitarian community. Prayer is an anticipation of the day when we shall truly know even as we are truly known (1 Cor. 13:12). Come, Lord Jesus (Rev. 22:20).

1 K. Barth, Prayer and Preaching, p. 19.

2 See Blocher, In the Beginning, pp. 79–97; and Clines, ‘Image of God in Man’, pp. 53–103, for discussions of both the image of God and the plural Let us.

3 Blocher, In the Beginning, p. 84.

4 K. Barth, Dogmatics in Outline, pp. 53–54.

5 Brunner, Dogmatics, vol. 3, p. 328.

6 See V. P. Hamilton, Genesis 1 – 17, p. 192.

7 Leopold, Genesis, p. 156.

8 Seitz, ‘Prayer in the Old Testament’, pp. 5–6.

9 Balentine, Prayer in the Hebrew Bible, p. 263.

10 Bradshaw, Praying as Believing, p. 17.

11 K. Barth, CD III/3, p. 286.

12 Hendrikus Berkhof cited in Stroup, Reformed Reader, vol. 2, p.