The Lord's Prayer - Ep 7

2026.07.06 Lord's Prayer Monday

Welcome to the Lord's Prayer podcast by Bridgeway Christian Church. The Lord's Prayer has been recited by Christians around the globe for centuries, but more than a beloved tradition, this prayer invites us to live the way of Jesus, to be shaped by his priorities, to partner with his spirits in bringing the kingdom of God to bear on our world. Every Monday during our summer devotional series, we'll read the Lord's Prayer and then members of our pastoral team will offer some devotional thoughts based on the text.

I'm Pastor Anthony and today I'm joined by Pastor Heather and Pastor Brian, and after I read the prayer, we'll discuss the line, On earth as it is in heaven. Let's read Matthew 6, 9 through 13. Our Father in heaven, hallowed be your name.

Your kingdom come, your will be done on earth as it is in heaven. Give us this day our daily bread and forgive us our debts, as we also have forgiven our debtors. And lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from evil.

Well, Pastor Heather, Pastor Brian, how are you guys doing? Doing well. Yeah, I'm excited to get into this, and so let's get started with our first question. So today's line marks the second mention of heaven in the Lord's Prayer, and before we discuss this line, let's look a little closer at the first dimension in the opening line of the prayer.

How can ancients' understandings of cosmology help clue us in to what Jesus meant when he said, Our Father in the heavens? So in the ancient world, people understood the universe to consist of two distinct parts. There was the earth that they stood on, and then the heavens that they could see. And we see this reflected in the very first verse of the whole Bible, which says, In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth.

What's interesting is that the Hebrew word there for heavens is plural, which we see reflected in the English translation. The Greek word that is found in the Lord's Prayer is also plural. So actually a better English translation would be, Our Father in the heavens.

The plural does a better job of reflecting the way Jesus' original audience would have thought about heaven. It isn't some far-off place where God lives, it actually consists of three different levels. Level one was what we would call the sky, where we observe clouds and birds and things of that nature.

Level two would be what we would refer to as outer space. Now keep in mind, the ancient world had no concept of the vastness of space. So they believed that the sun, the moon, the stars, they were all fixed in place on some sort of vast dome that was covering the earth.

This was their way of understanding the expanse, which if you go back to Genesis chapter one, six through eight, you'll see that referenced there. And then there was level three, which was beyond this visible dome. This was known as the highest heaven and was considered to be a transcendent realm where God dwells.

It is from this place that God rules and reigns. Now if all this sounds a little bit crazy, we see this understanding reflected in a lot of different places in Scripture. So for example, when Solomon is dedicating the temple in 1st Kings, he says, Or, Psalm 115 verse 16, This is meant to highlight the difference between God's dwelling place and humanity's.

Then if we look at the New Testament, Paul says in 2nd Corinthians 12, 2, that he had a vision where he was caught up in the third heaven, which was meant to infer that he was in God's presence. If you look at the text, he merely states this and moves on. He doesn't feel the need to explain this third heaven language because that was just commonplace understanding for his readers.

Now, with all of that said, one thing we need to be sure to remember is that first of all, these levels reflected an ancient understanding of cosmology. And second, they didn't imply distance. It's not as though heaven is literally somewhere out there in the great beyond where God is ruling and reigning from a distance.

So when Jesus talks about our father in the heavens, he's saying something about the reign of God. God reigns not from a place of disinterest, but from a place of highest authority. It is in this way he is reminding his audience that God's power is above every other power humans can conceive of.

Remember also that the ancients were generally polytheistic. So part of what Jesus is doing here is declaring that the God of heaven is greater than any of the gods of the surrounding people group. So this does a lot for us.

It establishes not only God's authority, but also heaven as a place where God's authority is most felt and experienced. So then, when we pray on earth as it is in heaven, that is what we are praying for. Yeah, that's such an important point of clarification, especially with our modern cosmological worldview.

You know, we're able to even travel to the heavens, right? And so we just have a very completely different picture and different relationship with the concept of heaven than Jesus' audience, right? I like in it, he writes, the way he's fond of referring to heaven as God's space. And I like the way he uses that language because it tries to get us out of our familiarity with the term heaven. And so God's space is this spiritual realm that God inhabits rather than a galaxy far, far away, right? So other biblical scholars also describe the separation of God's space from human space in terms of a veil.

That is heaven, God's space, the spiritual realm, is much closer than we imagine. Us humans aren't so privy or alert to its reality, at least that tends to be the case for us rational materialists in the Western world. So let's consider the episode in 2 Kings 6 where we get the expression chariots of fire.

The Syrians are at war with Israel, the Syrian king is making strategic plans, but Israel is evading their traps at every turn. And so the Syrian king suspects there's a traitor leaking intel to Israel, but one of his seers, like his prophet, says nope, there's no traitor. The Israelite prophet Elisha is able to tell his king what plans that you've made in secret.

And since the Syrians know that Elisha resides in the city of Dothan, the Syrian king then dispatches an army of chariots to surround the city in order to force Elisha out and capture him. Now when Elisha's servant sees the Syrian army surrounding the city, he despairs. He says, master, oh no, what are we going to do? But Elisha, completely unbothered, he simply prays, oh Yahweh, open his eyes.

And Yahweh opens the boy's eyes. And he sees on the mountainside, it's covered with horses and chariots of fire. The boy sees Yahweh's angelic army.

You see, initially the boy couldn't see through the veil that separated God's space from human space, but Elisha could, and that's why he was at peace. And when we pray on earth as it is in heaven, we pray that God would thin that veil, so to speak, that more of God's space, God's kingdom, power, justice, and goodness would manifest in human space. And so, yeah.

I love that story. Yeah, it's a fascinating, yeah. Love it.

And so, you know, if God's kingdom is a place where God is ruling and reigning, then how does that shape our understanding of what it means to pray for things to be on earth as they are in heaven? It helps to see that when we pray in this way, we are, once again, praying for God's rule and authority to be experienced. We are praying for a thinning of that veil. And to me, one, I like just simple ways of thinking about things, and a simple way to think about this is to contrast it with what happens when humans are seeking to rule apart from God.

Too often, this leads to the oppression of the marginalized, breakdowns in relationships, selfishness, materialism, addiction, economic hardship, anxiety, destruction of the planet, the perpetuation of injustice, and you get the point. When human ambition sets the agenda, the results generally aren't great. That's not to imply, of course, that everything humans do on our own is evil or wicked, but it does highlight the extent to which our sinful nature, when left unchecked, eventually causes harm and injustice.

So then, to pray for God's kingdom to come is to pray against all of that, and to pray for more of the fruit of God's rule. This means we are praying for justice, especially for the marginalized, for the restoration of relationships, love for our neighbors, generosity, freedom, provision, peace, creation care, and so much more that is in line with God's heart for us. All of this is evidence of God's rule and reign on the earth.

Another way to think about this is that we are praying for the vision that Jesus laid out in the Sermon on the Mount to become a reality on earth, even as we await his return when his kingdom will come in fullness. My last thing on this is, crucially, this line of the prayer is not meant to encourage passivity, as though our job is simply to present this request and wait for God to act. It's actually a commitment, where we recognize the opportunity we have to be a part of extending God's rule and reign through our lives.

Yeah, the way I see it is it's really a daily invitation, you know, to remember that the God I partner with is so much bigger than me. I just don't think that we can overstate how important that is to grasp, and then translate into action. You know, it's like for me, it's just like, okay, little old me with all my limitations, my weaknesses, my shortcomings, I get to partner with an all-powerful God of the universe in his work in the world.

And one of the primary ways that I do that is through prayer, that that's what Jesus is trying to teach us here, that that is both a privilege and a responsibility, and it changes what I pray for. It gives me confidence to pray for things that feel far beyond my ability to influence. You know, I mean, like, you know, here I am, you know, little old me in Rockland praying for peace in the Middle East, you know, the salvation of my friends, of justice, for healing, even the economy.

You know, it's like, left to myself, those things can feel so big that I wonder whether my prayers are making a difference. But when Jesus teaches us to pray, your will be done on earth as it is in heaven, he is reminding us, he's reminding me that I am partnering with a God who is not limited by what I can see or accomplish. And then suddenly those big prayers, right, they just don't feel so impossible, they feel like partnership with God and what he really wants to do in the world.

Yeah, yeah, I love that. And I'm reminded of N.T. Wright, the way he talks about the verse, God works together all things for the good, for those who love him, right? If you actually, like, take seriously the Greek syntax, really what it's saying is that God works all things for good in collaboration with those who love him, right? And so we collaborate with God in bringing good into this world. Yeah.

Yeah, you know, our participation in bringing heaven to bear on earth is part of the plan from the very beginning, right? It's what we're made for in Genesis 1, 26 through 28. We are made as God's image, to represent his just and good rule on earth. And think about Genesis 2. God makes the adam, the man, the human, out of the dirt of the ground and then places him in the garden.

That's what the text says. This means humanity was made outside of the garden, then placed in the garden to tend it. But humanity was not meant to keep the garden as is, but to extend the garden to the non-garden.

And why does this bit about the garden even matter? Well, the garden is God's space. Gardens along with mountains in the ancient Middle East were regarded as the habitation of the divine. So when humans were tasked in Genesis 1 to be fruitful and multiply and fill the earth, they were tasked with extending the goodness of God's space, the garden, heaven, to the ends of the earth.

And when we pray for the earth to match heaven, we pray and participate in bringing life and flourishing to the reaches of our world where there is wilderness and death. So practically speaking, we pray for the Spirit's empowerment and direction to do what is just and life-giving through the opportunities, influence, and means that God's given us. So good.

Such good reminders. And, you know, these misunderstandings about heaven are obviously commonplace, from images of chubby baby angels playing harps, you know, to kind of the warped eschatology of the late great planet Earth and the Left Behind series for all my 80s folks. You know, it's really easy to get the wrong idea about heaven.

So kind of what does the Lord's Prayer help us understand about the nearness of heaven? I think it's really important to first of all understand what the Bible more broadly says about heaven, which, quick plug, we're going to talk about this at Coffee and Theology here this summer, don't miss it. We obviously can't get too far into the details here, but the Bible doesn't describe heaven as some far-off place we get to go to when we leave the world behind. It certainly doesn't describe heaven as a place we get zapped off to in the blink of an eye.

Those ideas are great for selling books and movie tickets, but they're not biblical. Rather, the book of Revelation describes Jesus returning and ushering in the new heavens and the new earth. It says in Revelation 21 1 through 3, This is the ultimate vision of the kingdom of God coming in its fullness, which, to reference N.T. Wright again, his new book, God's Homecoming, goes into this in great detail.

I highly recommend it. But this is the vision. There are no people being zapped off the earth with their clothes left in a pile, no cars being unmanned, if you've seen that license plate frame.

It's God returning to earth to dwell with his people. And while we await that day, we can pray for more and more breakthrough of the kingdom of God or the kingdom of heaven in our world today. Yes, we don't experience heaven in its fullness until Jesus returns, but we can experience glimpses of heaven on earth in this life as we observe beauty, love, justice, and other kingdom values in our world.

I love these words from author Brad Nelson, whose book on the Lord's Prayer is wonderful. He writes, Praying our Father in the heavens invites us to live with the conviction that the heavenly unseen realm is as real and present as the air we breathe, that every place can become holy ground if we have eyes to see it. That's good, right? That's a great line.

This feels a bit like a left turn, but it really, it kind of reminds me a little bit that there's this Netflix movie that's called Don't Look Up. I don't know if you guys have seen it. Well, we have Netflix in the news.

Well, anyway, we'll discuss that later. Did you say you've seen it? No, I've heard of it. Okay, well, there's this Netflix movie about two astronomers who discover this massive comet ascended towards Earth.

It's satirical, but they try to warn the political leaders, the media, the public, but, you know, that kind of we're headed for doomsday. Everybody's going to be destroyed. But their message gets ignored.

It gets politicized. It's drowned out by celebrity gossip. Can't imagine.

Yeah, and endless distractions. And the whole movie, it actually was quite entertained, but the whole movie is about how distracted everyone is from what matters most. And that, honestly, I can be the same way in prayer.

There is a point here, you know, that I usually start with me, my needs, my schedule, my problems, my concern. And when Jesus is teaching us to pray, your kingdom come, your will be done on earth as it is in heaven, right? He's inviting me to lift my eyes before he ever teaches us to pray for our daily bread. He's pointing us towards God's name, God's kingdom, God's will.

He reminds us that God is doing something much bigger than my own little corner of the world. And that's a perspective shift that I just find myself needing over and over and over again. Yeah, Pastor Heather, your point about distraction, I mean, it is spot on.

I think in our distraction, we become convinced that heaven, even God himself, is farther from us than he actually is. God could be staring us right in the face, yet our distraction obscures just how near he is. So here's how close God wants to be.

Let's go back to the Exodus in wilderness, right? In Deuteronomy 32, a chapter known as the Song of Moses, right, we have Moses, he's led Israel out of Egypt, through the wilderness to Mount Sinai, through more wilderness and skirmishes with hostile nations, and they've been through a lot. And now they're on the verge of entering the promised land. But they were never alone.

God was there every step of the way. In verse 10, Moses reminds the people of Israel, Now we're all familiar with the expression, apple of his eye, or like some form of it. And it actually originates from this verse in Deuteronomy.

But it's an interesting translation of the Hebrew. The translation goes at least as far back as the King James, but it's not a literal translation. The underlying Hebrew idiom is ishon ayin.

The word ish means man, and then when you add the own ending, it means little man. Then the second word ayin means eye, as in an eyeball. So the phrase ishon ayin literally means little man of the eye, or little man in the eye.

And so it refers to how two people can be so close to each other, face-to-face, that they can see their own reflection in the pupil of the other person's eye. This is what Moses is singing about. God was so close to his people in the wilderness that it's as if God could see his own reflection in their eyes.

That's how near heaven can be to earth. And that's what Jesus teaches us to pray. It's just as he said, Pastor Heather, he's inviting us to lift our eyes away from our distractions, and oftentimes that means away from our phones, and find our reflection in our Father's eye.

That's really beautifully said. Well, thank you for listening. We hope that this is inspiring to you as you pray for God's kingdom to come and for it to be on earth as it is in heaven.

We appreciate you joining us. Be sure to check out the show notes for a few more resources, and don't forget to join us on Thursday for prayer. We'll see you then.

Bye-bye.