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Light on I Puzz l ing Passages and Probl ems <*-*> i By R. A . T O R R E Y I
peace of God, which passeth all under standing, shall guard our hearts and our thoughts in Christ Jesus.” Can a follower of Jesus engage in war and be consistent with His teach ings? Why not? The Bible teaches us non- resistance to personal injuries, but nowhere that we should not defend and protect our wives and children and the oppressed. The man whose faith our Lord Jesus Himself praised above all others was a captain in the Roman Army, and our Lord never suggested to him that he should leave the army. (Matt. 8:10). The man whom God selected as the Gentile whose prayers and alms He should commend to all coming time, and who received a marvellous baptism with the Holy Spirit with his whole house, was a cap tain in the Roman Army; and after his baptism with the Spirit, and his bap tism with water, Peter never hinted for one moment that he should leave the army. If it is right for a strong bodied Christian man to step in when he sees a woman or child being assaulted by a monster and to defend and deliver that woman or child (even at the cost of the monster’s life), then it is right for us to engage in the most strenous fighting within our power to defend our wives and children and the women of children of other lands from the unspeakable outrages that the vilest monsters of modern history are seeking to inflict upon them.
Does our Lord’s Prayer cover all we need to pray for?” Most certainly it does not. “ The Lord’s prayer’’ was not given to us as a form of prayer, but as an illustra tion of the “ manner” of our praying. (Matt. 6 :9). The “ manner” of our praying as taught us by our Lord in this specimen, or model, prayer, should be without “ vain repititions” (v. 7), to “ our Father in Heaven,” with a supreme consideration for His glory and His will and His kingdom, with a sense of our moral weakness and dependence upon Him, trustful, etc. That it was not for one moment intended to cover every specific thing that we need to ask for, and that we are warranted in asking for, is evident from the fact that our Lord Himself explicitly taught us to ask for certain other things. For example, our Lord taught us to ask for the Holy Spirit (Luke 11:13); but there is no prayer for the Holy Spirit in the Lord’s prayer,” nor even any mention of the Holy Spirit. Our Lord also commanded us to “ pray the Lord of the harvest, that He will send forth laborers into His Harvest” (Matt. 9: 38), but there is no such petition in “ the Lord’s prayer.” The Lord taught us to ask in His name for anything of which we had need (John 14:12, 13), and went so far as to say that this was the way to obtain fullness of joy (John 16:24). The one who limits his pray ing to the petitions contained in “ the Lord’s Prayer” will have a very meager and unsatisfactory prayer life. It is when we are anxious “ in nothing; but in everything by prayer and supplica tion with thanksgiving let our requests be made known unto God” that “ the
Don’t forget to ask God to supply the needs of the Bible Institute of Los Angeles.
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