40 Days, Day 22: Matthew 6:9-13 CEV

Question: 

What did you hear in Matthew 6:9-13? "You should pray like this: Our Father in heaven, help us to honor your name. Come and set up your kingdom, so that everyone on earth will obey you, as you are obeyed in heaven. Give us our food for today. Forgive us for doing wrong, as we forgive others. Keep us from being tempted and protect us from evil." (CEV)

Answer: 

This verse is the from the Contemporary English Version of the Bible. Rather than write about the original Greek, I will simply provide the links to my articles about these verses below. Then I will discuss certain features the people going through this program may find interesting.

First, the addition of "help us honor your name" is interesting. It recognized that this line is a request to God, but it brings "us" into it in a way that Jesus did not. What Jesus said was "Let it be sanctified, this name of yours." The name "your name" is a specific name, the name of God as OUR Father, the one in the skies.

The "come and setup your kingdom" is somewhat closer to the Greek. The word translated as "come" primarily means "start" so "set up" works. Also, we should understand the word translated as "kingdom" is a much more general idea. It is the rule of a particular leader, his reign, his kingship, and the realm in which people recognize his sovereignty. The realm of the Divine is within us, as Tolstoy said, our sense of to whom we owe our loyalty.

However, the phrase "so everyone will obey you" only related to what Jesus said through the word translated as "kingdom." So it is a reaction to the way the verse was translated in the KJV, but even that verse says nothing about "obeying" specifically either in the skies or on the earth other than the assumption that we obey our ruler. However, what Jesus said was "Let it happened, this desire of yours, as in the sky also on earth." The writers of the NEV version assumes that the Father's desire is to be obeyed. I can find nothing in Jesus's words that supports that idea. What the Father seems to desire is for us to be enlightened, lifted up from earthly concerns to higher, more spiritual ones.

The change of "bread" to "food" in the next verse also loses more than it gains. Jesus uses bread specifically because it is his analogy for what nourishes us, which is our trust in the Divine and the divine within us. He says specifically not to worry about bread, drink, or clothing. The Father provides them if we first seek his

The "forgive us for doing wrong" statement continues the who "sin" idea that takes use away from the "debt" idea. Since our debt to God starts with our being born, this version seems to indicate that we are doing wrong by being born. This idea may appeal to radical environmentalist, who are anti-human, but this certainly wasn't Jesus's view. The problem here is de-emphasizing what Jesus said, which was about debt to focus on "sin", which was not his focus. This "cult of sin" focus continued through the use of the words "temptation" and "evil", which are also not what the words Jesus used mean. I wrote about these words in yesterday's article, so I will not repeat them here.