For Thine is the Kingdom

For Thine is the Kingdom

To go back to Jeremiah 32:38 it is because of the promise the people have of belonging to something bigger than themselves, “They shall be my people and I will be their God.” That is the source and foundation of all of our hope and peace. We belong body and soul to our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ and we will have our needs met in no other. It is because of this majesty that we see the way the martyrs and the elders bow and shout at the foot of the throne of God.

As you likely already know the Lord’s Prayer is repeated, not verbatim for reasons we’ll get into here in a second, in Luke 11. Most of the content is the same, but the last petition (among other differences) which is in the prayer in Matthew 6 is absent from the latter. One of the things this teaches us is about how Christ intended for us to use the Lord’s Prayer. It’s not a mantra we repeat, but a model for the way in which we are to approach our Heavenly Father so it makes sense that they don’t match up one for one. Each in their own way gives help to our devotional life and grants support for hearts that are seeking to bring troubles to the Lord of peace.

With that being said I rarely, if ever, get into technical stuff in these lessons. It’s not really the place for it and not really why I do these bi-weekly devotionals. Yet, it is important at this point to know something about translations of the Bible and Q.107. If you have an ESV you’ll notice that the words used in Q.107 are completely absent. If you have an NASB you’ll see something like this: [For Yours is the kingdom and the power and the glory forever. Amen.’]. Now, why do I mention it? There are those (like the translators of the ESV/NASB and others) who do not believe that this last clause of the Lord’s Prayer is Christian Scripture. Without getting even further into the weeds here we all know that the English Bibles we use are translations from the Hebrew in the Old Testament and Greek in the New Testament. There are two “families” of manuscripts that while agreeing 98% of the time have some differences, and Matt. 6:13 (plus John 7:53-8:11, 1 John 5:7, etc…) is chief among them.

As you also already know I prefer the KJV for private devotions and preach and teach from the NKJV on Wednesday nights, Sunday mornings, etc… I do that for a reason, because I believe that the “Received Text” (see our Westminster Confession of Faith Ch. 1, Section 8 for more info) which undergirds the KJV/NKJV is from the more faithful family of Greek manuscripts. I also believe that the word of God is inerrant not just in the autographs (the actual copies that the Bible writers wrote), but in the apographs as well (the copies passed down to us).

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