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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 Chris...
