Lords’s Prayer 2:42
Lord’s prayer part 2
Thy kingdom come
The kingdom of God is a most important concept in this Gospel (see on 3:2). There is a sense in which the kingdom is a present reality, but here it is the future kingdom that is in mind. The petition looks to the coming of the time when all evil will be done away and people will gladly submit to the divine Sovereign
“Your kingdom come, your will be done on earth as it is in heaven” expresses the desire that the acknowledgment of God’s reign and the accomplishment of his purposes take place in this world even as they already do in God’s throne room. The first half of the prayer thus focuses exclusively on God and his agenda as believers adore, worship, and submit to his will before they introduce their own personal petitions
10) Thy kingdom come. On “kingdom” see 3:2. This kingdom is the heavenly reign and rule of God through Christ in the gospel of grace. Where Christ is, there this kingdom and rule is, and, of course, also those who through him participate in the blessings of this rule and kingdom, the kings and priests unto God. “Let it come” means by its own inherent power, and the aorist is effective (R. 855): “let it come actually and completely
Thy will be done
The prayer looks for the full realization of all that the kingdom means and for the will of God to be perfectly done (the words your will be done are absent from the Lukan version). The word will may be used of the act of willing (e.g., Rom. 1:10) or of the thing that is willed to happen; that which takes place may be done either by oneself (e.g., Eph. 1:9) or by others (21:31).
The prayer looks for the perfect accomplishment of what God wills, and that in the deeds of those he has created as well as in what he does himself. It points to no passive acquiescence but to an active identification of the worshiper with the working out of the divine purpose; if we pray that way we must live that way
Thy will be done, as in heaven, just so on earth. This is God’s good and gracious will, Luther (John 6:40). The thought is not that he has more than one will but that the highest aims and purposes of his one will regarding us center in his grace. That will centers in Christ who came to do his Father’s will and will carry it to its goal.
If no opposition interfered with God’s will, a prayer such as this would not be needed; but here the same undercurrent of hostility in “the devil, the world, and our flesh” is implied. In this petition God’s children put their own wills into complete harmony with their Father’s will and thus into opposition to the will of all his foes. Let us realize this when we pray thus. Let us also realize that our lives are placed wholly under our Father’s will, and that we accept what his blessed will sends us, also crosses, trials, sufferings, etc. “As in heaven,” etc., applies only to the third petition; for in the second we cannot say that the kingdom can “come in heaven”; it has always been there. Ps. 103:21 shows how God’s will is done in heaven. In this way it is to be done also on earth—perfectly, with every creature being an agent of that will; καί, “just so,” R. 1181
We see something of the cost of praying this prayer by reflecting on the way Jesus used it (Luke 22:42). In heaven God’s will is perfectly done now, for there is nothing in heaven to hinder it, and the prayer looks for a similar state of affairs here on earth
Give us this day our Daily Bread
Until now the petitions have concerned the great causes of God and his kingdom; at this point Jesus’ attention moves to the personal needs of the worshiper. It is interesting that immediately following the prayer for the perfect establishment of the kingdom of heaven and the accomplishment of the will of God we have a prayer for bread here and now.
Communion. They easily made these connections since Jesus had spoken of himself as “the bread of life.” These words appear in the sixth chapter of the Gospel of John where, after feeding the five thousand, Jesus says, “Do not work for the food that perishes, but for the food that endures for eternal life, which the Son of Man will give you” (v. 27). Then, after discussing the “bread from heaven” that God had given in the form of manna in the desert, Jesus ends his teaching by declaring that he is the bread of life and that those who come to him will never hunger. Therefore it was logical and easy, when the Lord’s Prayer was said during Communion, to connect the petition for daily bread with the Communion bread that the congregation was sharing.
Tertullian, after a few words about the daily bread, says,
We may rather understand, “Give us this day our daily bread,” spiritually. For Christ is our Bread; because Christ is Life, and bread is life. “I am,” saith He, “the Bread of Life”; and, a little above, “The Bread is the Word of the living God, who came down from the heavens.” Then we find, too, that His body is reckoned in bread: “This is my body.” And so, in petitioning for “daily bread,” we ask for perpetuity in Christ, and indivisibility from His body
most ancient writers came to the conclusion that the petition actually referred to three different meanings of the word bread: first, the physical bread that nourishes people each day; second, that spiritual bread which is Christ and by which Christians are nourished in their worship; and third, the bread of the Word, which nourishes Christians every day
The fourth petition is Give us this day our daily bread. The daily bread refers to [1] all the things that are necessary for sustaining present life … [2] or the sacrament of the body of Christ, which we receive daily, [3] or spiritual food.…
Asking God for daily bread is a discipline in what Jesus directed his disciples to do: not worry too much about tomorrow. In the Sermon on the Mount, very soon after the introduction of the Lord’s Prayer, Jesus speaks of the birds of the air, who “neither sow nor reap nor gather into barns,” and yet God feeds them (Matt. 6:26). The petition also reminds us of the parable that Luke records:
Then he told them a parable: “The land of a rich man produced abundantly. And he thought to himself, ‘What should I do, for I have no place to store my crops?’ Then he said, ‘I will do this: I will pull down my barns and build larger ones, and there I will store all my grain and my goods. And I will say to my soul, Soul, you have ample goods laid up for many years; relax, eat, drink, be merry.’ But God said to him, ‘You fool! This very night your life is being demanded of you. And the things you have prepared, whose will they be?’ So it is with those who store up treasures for themselves but are not rich toward God.”
He said to his disciples, “Therefore I tell you, do not worry about your life, what you will eat, or about your body, what you will wear. For life is more than food, and the body more than clothing. Consider the ravens: they neither sow nor reap, they have neither storehouse nor barn, and yet God feeds them. Of how much more value are you than the birds! (Luke 12:16–24)