Praying the Bible
August 28, 2009
Praying the Scripture is something that I believe is often overlooked, but has incredible value. Recently I’ve been making an intentional effort to pray the Scripture and it has really moved my heart. Just to clarify what I mean by praying the Scriptures, I am not talking about what I call “pray reading.” Pray reading is where, as you read, you turn phrases and verses into prayer and basically dialog with the Lord over the Scripture. This is much slower than just reading the passage, but also helps bring real life into the passage and helps apply it deeper to your heart. This method of devotional reading is very valuable but it not what I am talking about here. If you’re not familiar with this, just leave a comment or send me an email and I can point you to some resources.
What I mean by “Praying the Scriptures” is extracting key phrases, promises of rewards, commands, warnings, and blessings from a book of the Bible or a passage of Scripture and creating a prayer list from these verses. For example, the book of Revelation uses the phrase “ears to hear” at least seven times. From that you could create the following point on a prayer list: “God give me ears to hear. Let me hear what you are saying, both to my heart, and my generation.” Under that prayer you write out the seven verses, reading those verses as you are praying so that your heart is filled with the combination of your own personal heart cry and God’s language describing the need of the human heart.
What this does is help really drive the Scripture into your heart. It does not replace reading and studying entire passages because that is very valuable, but by taking specific action points from the Scripture and specifically praying those we take God’s direction, or His law, and plant it deep in our heart all the while using the Biblical language that God gave us. It is an incredible way to go deeper in the Word and to plant in our hearts what God says really matters. By following the study of a passage with the repeated praying of the passage’s action points over time it helps us to set our hearts to obey the Scriptures in an intentional way rather than just hoping to remember what the Scripture says.
Using this method you will also start seeing patterns in a passage of Scripture. Often God hits the same topic more than once. How often something is repeated in the Scripture is very valuable because it underscores the importance of the directive to our hearts. The sad truth is that we quickly forget much of what we read, but when we intentionally pray the action points that the Scripture gives us, we begin retaining specific things that God directed us to do, to seek for, or to avoid.
The goal is to use this type of prayer as a pattern of heart engagement with the Word and obedience to the Word that we might be found obedient and mature on that great day. Without using techniques like this, there are many promises, and warnings, in the Scriptures that will never stay in our heart.
As far as methodology goes, praying this way does not have to be a rigid type of liturgy. As you develop prayer lists from various passage or books, keep a written record of them and periodically review them in your personal prayer time. God may highlight one particular thing in your prayer list one day and, if He does, just focus on that one thing. The goal is not to follow a certain liturgy or get every prayer point covered that one day, but that over time the Scripture goes deep in our hearts and, in doing so, increases our fellowship and communion with the One who is Holy and to whom we will give account.
In future days, I’ll post some examples of prayer lists I have developed from passages of Scripture. I would love to hear comments or see lists that others have developed.
Understanding the Spirit of Prophecy
August 13, 2009
…For the testimony of Jesus is the spirit of prophecy. – Revelation 19:10b (ESV)
I’ll admit up front that this post is long, but the topic is critical and the full consideration of it is has profound implications for how we interpret Scripture and therefore how we live.
Revelation 19:10 is an absolutely critical passage containing a massive, hidden gem. I’ll admit up front that we all know that Scripture repeatedly provides us with multiple meanings from a single passage. However, what follows is a critical, and I might argue the primary, meaning that is often lost on readers and has significant repercussions for the way you interpret Scripture. In short, Revelation 19:10 unlocks all prophecy by providing the key that is necessary to rightly interpret the prophetic Scriptures. Now let’s examine that key.
Given just how much of the Bible is dedicated to the writings of the prophets and how much of our theology is based on the proclamation of the prophets, understanding this key rightly has massive implications for how we read and understand the Bible. Once you grasp the key of Rev 19:10, you can better navigate the entire Scriptures and especially the Old Testament prophets. The lack of the application of this key has caused many to be confused as they read the Old Testament and also caused the development of faulty hermeneutics that allegorize passages that are intended to be literal. Let’s break down Revelation 19:10 then and find the critical key contained within it.
I want to focus on the final sentence of the verse. The verse says, depending on your version, that the testimony (or witness) of Jesus is the spirit (or essence) of prophecy. So we have the spirit, or essence, of all prophecy being connected to the witness of testimony of Jesus. So then at the root of prophecy you will find the declaration of Jesus and a testimony of Jesus. Prophecy, by nature, is a forward looking gift. We also know from I Corinthians 13 that prophecy will cease at the end of the age when Jesus comes. Therefore, the witness of Jesus given by the spirit of prophecy is forward looking but only necessary before the end of the age. In other words, it exists only to give testimony of Jesus in this age.
Therefore so long as prophecy exists, there must be a testimony of Jesus still to be given. Implied in that is that for prophecy to cease, the testimony of Jesus contained within prophecy, must no longer be necessary. In other words, in our current age which is filled with darkness, we have need of prophecy to point us forwards to a testimony of Jesus that is yet future, but when we enter an age of light we will no longer need prophecy as a testimony to Jesus. Now we know that the majesty and mystery of Jesus will be proclaimed for all eternity. Therefore prophecy is aiming at a specific testimony of Jesus that is desperately needed in this age, but not in the age to come.
The one thing that marks the age to come above all else is that Jesus will physically reign in Jerusalem. The present age and the age to come are separated by many things, but the one primary thing is that presently we await Jesus’ return from the heavens whereas in the age to come He will be openly reigning over the whole earth from a throne in Jerusalem. So then prophecy gives a needed witness of Jesus until Jesus Himself is reigning on the earth bringing “that which is perfect” and eliminating the need for prophecy as we know it.
From that we can clearly say that the spirit of prophecy is aiming towards the installation of Jesus as King over the Earth at the end of the age. After that event occurs, prophecy is no longer needed. But why is the spirit of prophecy necessary in this age? It is because men’s hearts and minds are blind to the judgment to come and to the reality of Jesus’ rule. They are as mockers in Noah’s day (Matthew 24:37-38) and it requires the spirit of prophecy to confront the cloud of deception on the earth with the bold declaration that Messiah is coming.
Understanding this, we could now re-write Revelation 19:10 in the following way: the Spirit of prophecy, or the root life and essence of it, is the full revelation of the Messiah ruling over the whole earth. Implied in that definition is the declaration of the events that will lead to the installation of the Messiah on the earth at the end of the age. Therefore, prophecy’s life consists, not merely in its present accuracy with regard to current events, but rather in whether or not it contains the essence of the eternal mystery of God’s glorious day of judgment whereby God installs the Messiah over the earth, judges all wickedness, and restores creation by the Messiah.
The prophets collectively refer to this event as the “Day of the Lord.” The spirit of prophecy then always contains, not just direction concerning the situation at hand, but a witness to the ultimate “Day of the Lord.” This is quickly illustrated by a brief examination of the prophetic Scriptures. Not only is this found in the prophets, but a careful reading of the New Testament will point out continual references to the day of the Lord showing its preeminence in the minds of the apostles.
Here is how the lack of this key has caused confusion among many in reading the Scriptures. In the Scriptures, the prophets may address a particular situation, leader, or dilemma but as you read the prophetic words you begin to notice that prophecies almost always include elements of language that seem to supersede or go beyond the issue at hand. The prophetic will address an event but then add climatic language, usually in the first person for God, describing an ultimate victory or destruction always accompanied by a Divine claim of personally visiting the planet and extreme events that accompany that appearing. The problem that some face is that the specific event being addressed is clearly understood, but the climatic language almost seems to be hyperbole when it is only considered in relation to the actual events that unfolded.
The language of the prophets then becomes confusing for many and, not understanding the spirit of prophecy, is interpreted as allegorical by others. The reality is that these prophecies are merely operating according to the spirit of prophecy which means that, at their core, they are always aiming at the ultimate revelation of the Messiah on the Day of the Lord. The exaggerated language or visual language that supersedes the issue at hand is not allegorical, but rather it is the prophet seeing that the moment at hand is merely a picture or a parable of actual events and an actual day to come.
In a moment or crisis, the prophet is also seeing the ultimate crisis of the end of the age. In a period of judgment, the prophet may erupt in terrifying language which is not out of character with the prophecy but rather is connecting the present prophecy with the ultimate judgment at the end of the age. The description of rulers and characters in the prophets accompanied by unusual language is serving to illustrate something concerning the Messiah or something that is anti-Messiah.
The reality is that the ultimate events of the end of the age which are the full revelation of Messiah, the ultimate judgment of all evil, and the permanent installment of the Messiah as the supreme ruler and representation of God on the earth, are intricately interwoven with every period of history. In the age to come we are going to see that all of history was an exact parable illustrating the human predicament and constantly foretelling the ultimate conclusion of the age. We are going to find that God was so kind and loving that virtually all the events of human history are illustrations of some facet of the drama concluding in the restoration of all things.
Once we understand this paradigm, we will see that the correct hermeneutic when interpreting the Scripture is far more literal than we thought it was. We read over the prophets thinking that their predictions refer only to events past and pass over the extreme language where the prophet sees a glimpse of the judgment at the end of the age in the midst of the present judgment. In reality, we were meant to consider the tragedy the prophet was confronting as a picture and then carefully consider the prophet’s language and prepare our hearts with trembling for the yet future day that the prophet was seeing.
Jesus Himself obviously communicated a literal hermeneutic to the apostles when He opened the Scriptures for them because when you read the New Testament you see the writers interpreting Old Testament passages that perhaps could be seen as allegorical or figurative before the appearance of Jesus, as literal. If you sift through the Old Testament references used by the apostles you will find them connecting all sorts of verses that we would not naturally consider to be literal and using them as literal prophecies of elements of Jesus and His life.
Amazingly you will find a tremendous amount of the apostles theology came from the Psalms, a book which we look at primarily as emotional and figurative. That alone should give us pause because the Psalms have far more to say about the ultimate events of the age and the installation of Messiah as a global ruler than they do of His first appearance as a redeemer.
Since we are approaching so many of these passages in hindsight after the Lord’s first appearing, we don’t seem to notice that, absent the knowledge of the first coming, we would not naturally interpret these passages as literal. This becomes especially terrifying when we consider the events of the second coming because most of our interpretation of the Day of the Lord and the ultimate events of the age is not literal.
We seem constantly in search of a code to explain the Scripture rather than wrestling with the Scriptures as a literal record of the events and issues of the age. The Angel’s declaration to John in Revelation 19:10 clearly directs us that the prophecy and events recorded in the Scriptures is critical for us since all true prophecy contains a witness to a great and terrible day that is yet future. It should radically affect the way we live when we realize with clarity that these prophecies are not hyperbole, nor merely symbolic, but literal declarations of a day to come.
Demystifying Prayer
August 4, 2009
We were recently discussing some of the ways prayer is misused and it immediately came to me that perhaps some of our error in praying is that we have so mystified it that we really do not have a solid paradigm for exactly what we are doing when we pray. Because our governmental model of the universe is not sound and because we do not see intercession as a primarily governmental occupation, our prayer suffers and is subject to all sorts of frustrations and excesses. We may use a lot of volume and many repetitions (Matthew 6:7) and even consistently “bind satan” and yet our prayers seem to have little effect.
My argument here will be that the lack of a governmental model of prayer is at the root of many of our issues in prayer. Now, while this is entitled “Demystifying Prayer,” I will acknowledge up front that prayer is inherently mystical in the sense that fallen man is communing with the Divine which is a relationship that is beyond human capacity. The issue though is that we have added a mystical layer on top of prayer that makes it frustrating and unfruitful. If we remove the unnecessary mysticism we will find that we begin to pray in a much more Scriptural and far less frustrating manner. Understanding the governmental model behind prayer helps to clear our hearts so that we see prayer less as an ethereal thing and more as something substantial and real.
Rather than seek to examine all the possible errors of our methods of prayer as if we are the proper authority on prayer, let us simply examine the proper paradigm of prayer. When we pray out of the proper paradigm, we will naturally adjust the way we pray.
We obviously do not have the space to examine Luke 18, but let us suffice it to say that Luke 18 presents the model for intercession. We can get a basic grasp of how we are to prayer from Luke 18:1-8. If you’re not familiar with the passage, take a moment now and read it. We learn the following from Luke 18:
- There is injustice, sin, and evil on the earth. It is caused by the adversary working through fallen humans and the systems of this age.
- We are affected by it in a substantial way. In fact, it is the oppression from evil that we experience and observe that becomes the groundwork for our intercession.
- The proper response then to the predicament we find ourselves in is to go to the judge who alone can rescue us and beseech him until He answers.
- The judge may appear silent, but each request is moving him. He will act. In fact, Jesus asks the leading question of whether He will find men interceding with a confidence that God will act. Even if He withholds His action until the Day of the Lord, we are still to have faith that He will act.
If we properly understand the governmental paradigm of Luke 18, it will clear the fog that surrounds intercession and lead us to more effective praying. The problem is that we have so thoroughly adopted Greek dualism that we see God as completely dwelling in another realm and do not see Him in His governmental position over our realm. Some see our job in prayer as trying to get Him to cross the boundary of His realm into our reality and do something. Others see our job in intercession to be attacking opposing spirit beings so that God can do what He desires in our realm. The reality is that intercession can be long, painful, and deep but our model for it does not need to be confusing, nor overly mystical.
In short, to intercede is simply to approach the throne of grace to find help in our time of need. When we pray we are approaching a King. This King is enthroned above all other kings. He presently, at this time, has full authority and dominion over all of creation. When we perceive the need for wrongs to be made right, we simply stand before the King, as did Queen Ester, and beseech Him to act on our behalf and break in.
We must see that prayer is primarily a governmental function. The secret to prayer is not figuring out which spirit is the problem or which language will finally move His heart, but to realize that when you step into the place of prayer the Scriptures tell us that you are standing before a very real God on a very real throne that hears the cries of His people (Exodus 2:23). We do not fully consider the idea of God as a real and present King reigning over the earth, but this is the Biblical paradigm. Just consider some of the most significant theophanies in the Scriptures and you will repeatedly see the revelation of a King upon a throne and the recipient of the vision being undone at the present ruling majesty of the living God over both the recipient of the revelation and the entire earth.
Just the recognition that you are approaching the King of the universe in a governmental capacity should dramatically alter your perspective of prayer. You are beseeching this great King, asking Him to move on your behalf. We are subject to His rule and yet He invites us as men to take on His heart and beseech Him for the very things He desires to do. This is a stunning partnership that few of us really take the time to comprehend, and this partnership takes place in a governmental paradigm where we beseech the King to act.
Beyond the issue of partnership, is the core, fundamental motivation behind intercession and that is the issue of evil. Most of our intercession at this time arises primarily from the problem of evil. The problem is that, absent the proper governmental paradigm, we lose our way and can end up trying to attack evil in our prayers rather than following the Luke 18 model of simply going to the King and asking Him for justice. To better illustrate this, if you were in a kingdom and there was a usurper propagating evil what would you do? Would you go to the usurper and ask him to stop, or would you go to the king, the one who has full power and authority, and ask him to drive the usurper out of the kingdom?
The obvious answer is that we would enter the king’s courts and appeal to the king. Is this not exactly what the Scriptures exhort us to do? What then should be our primary approach to evil and spiritual warfare? Should it be to incessantly bind the devil, which the Scriptures clearly say is bound at Jesus’ coming and not until then, or should it be to appeal to the King to break out in power and stop the infusion of darkness?
Now, as we ask the King to break in, we recognize from Luke 18 that we are also in a place where we are awaiting the ultimate justice of the Day of the Lord. This keeps our hearts in faith with regard to the issue of delay. The question is not whether or not the King will act on our behalf, but rather it is a matter of when. Remember that in the book of Revelation, it is bowls of the saints prayers that sure as the fuel for God’s judgment as He breaks in on the earth. All the intercession throughout the ages that has been delayed, is finally answered in that great day. On that day full justice comes and the usurper is totally destroyed.
Intercession then, seen in its complete context, is to stand before the creator and to ask Him to break in now and demonstrate a preview of the goodness, kindness, and liberation that is coming in His ultimate act of justice on the Day of the Lord. When we ask Him to execute justice, heal, deliver, or liberate men we are asking Him to demonstrate who He is now as a prophetic picture of what He will ultimately do on a global level in the present.
How much would it alter your prayer life if you began to see your intercession as literally standing before the Judge of the universe beseeching Him to break in a rule on a particular issue? What if, rather than searching for more powerful language or new techniques, you merely closed your eyes and saw yourself before the throne of Hebrew 4:16? How would that alter the entire way you approach prayer and the language you use? What if you began to understand that when God delays His justice that He is also filling a bowl in heaven with the cry for justice and that bowl is going to overflow one day when the world is immersed in the justice and judgment of God? Your “unanswered” prayers are not unanswered, but rather assembled by the King into a great bowl of prayers that He is going to answer in His time and in response to His saint’s continued cries.
What if that King not only tolerated your petitions as the king did with Esther, but what if the King had actually invited you to come and beseech Him in your time of need? In our case we are welcomed by the Sovereign of the universe to approach Him and make known our needs, or our injustices.
Read Revelation 4 and consider the throne room of the King of the Universe, the “One upon the throne.” Then, take the thing you need to intercede before the Lord as though you were a subject being welcomed by the King to petition Him for the thing that you need Him to act on. You will find that addressing God in the proper governmental context is far more satisfying than trying to find better language, stir up more volume, or attempting to randomly bind spiritual enemies. Approach and address Him as a just and willing King. You just may see your prayer time transformed.