1. The history of Israel is compact of prayer. “That tide of fire, the Assyrian and his army,” rolled back by the prayer of the prophet Amos, spoken as he marked the slow advance of the coming judgment, “O Lord God, cease, I beseech thee: how shall Jacob stand? for he is small,” is only one example out of many. It is, indeed, the simple truth to say that the Hebrews have taught the world how to pray. Prayer is an instinct of the unsophisticated soul. Whether to gods or to saints or to demons or the dead, all nations have prayed. But the prayers differ as the religions differ; and as the Hebrews are the world’s acknowledged masters in religion, it is from their prayers that we have by far the most to learn. “Ye shall not pray as the Gentiles do.” Hebrew prayer itself underwent development, and the difference that Jesus made was very great; but it is still to the Bible, to the Old Testament and the New alike, that we must go when we would learn to speak with God. Old Testament aspirations were fulfilled rather than abolished by Christ. The piety of the millennium which preceded Him has a value of its own, and a value even for us. For more than twenty centuries men have lifted up their hearts to God in the words of the Hebrew Psalter, because there they have found their deepest thoughts most finely interpreted and expressed; and the older the world grows, the more profound and wonderful seems that prayer which Christ taught His disciples. These things can never be outgrown or superseded; they are eternal, because they are simple and true. We know not how to pray as we ought, but the Bible may be our teacher and guide. For prayer, though in its nature spontaneous, may be directed; though an instinct, it may, like any other instinct, be trained. “One of his disciples said unto him, Lord, teach us to pray.” So prayer can be taught, and the modern Church has much to gain by recalling her prayers to the Biblical standard.
2. One characteristic—perhaps the most prominent and notable of all the characteristics which distinguish the Bible prayers from those we find in other devotional books—is that they contain so much of narrative. We observe this in the Psalms. A large proportion of these call to remembrance events in the past history of Israel; and certain of the longest are historical from beginning to end—historical, be it observed, without ceasing to be really prayers. The same feature is found in the prayers scattered through the other books of Scripture. The explanation is not far to seek. God’s works, next to His Word, are the authentic revelation of His mind, and the devout commemoration of them is fitted to strengthen faith exceedingly, and to encourage in prayer. The worshippers beseech the Divine help, because it has already in the past been so signally manifested; or they offer their thanks for the Divine guidance of the nation in ages long gone by; or they look at the sins which they confess in the light of the ancient goodness of God, of which they have proved themselves so miserably unworthy. But the striking thing is this: they do not content themselves with vague assertions of that goodness; they relate it definitely—sometimes briefly, and sometimes very elaborately—to their national history. It is done briefly, but characteristically, by Jehoshaphat when, in his prayer for help in battle, he says, “Didst not thou, O our God, drive out the inhabitants of this land before thy people Israel, and gayest it to the seed of Abraham thy friend for ever?” Similarly, Judas Maccabaeus, before a battle, begins his prayer for victory thus: “O Saviour of Israel, who didst quell the violence of the mighty man by the hand of thy servant David, and didst give the host of aliens into the hands of Jonathan, the son of Saul, and his armour-bearer.” David, in a prayer of thanksgiving, is also represented as recalling the goodness of God in the time of the Exodus: “What one nation in the earth is like thy people, even like Israel, whom God went to redeem unto himself for a people, and to make him a name, and to do terrible things for thy land, before thy people, whom thou didst redeem to thee out of Egypt, from the nations and their gods?”
A very beautiful and striking illustration of this phenomenon occurs in the prayer of thanksgiving which is offered for the first-fruits. The prayer at first seems curiously out of place in this connexion: it is a tolerably minute summary of the facts of Israel’s early history. “A wandering Aramean was my father; and he went down into Egypt and sojourned there, few in number, and he became there a nation, great, mighty and populous. And the Egyptians dealt ill with us and afflicted us, and laid upon us hard bondage; and we cried unto Jehovah, the God of our fathers, and Jehovah heard our voice, and saw our affliction, and our toil, and our oppression; and Jehovah brought us forth out of Egypt with a mighty hand, and with an outstretched arm, and with great terribleness, and with signs, and with wonders; and he hath brought us into this place, and hath given us this land, a land flowing with milk and honey.” Then at the end come the simple words: “And now, behold, I have brought the first of the fruit of the ground, which thou, O Jehovah, hast given me.”
In many ways, this prayer is most characteristic and instructive. Behind it lies the thought: “We love him, because he first loved us”. It further suggests that gratitude must be expressed, not in word only, but also in deed. It links the ages each to each: God did that then, therefore we do this now. It keeps alive the memory of the gracious past. But the point with which we are immediately concerned is that the goodness of God is vividly brought before the mind of the worshipper by a historical recital. The great words “goodness” and “loving-kindness” were not allowed to degenerate into empty phrases; they were filled with radiant and indisputable historical fact. So much is this the case that some of the longer Psalms practically form a brief history of early Israel. The past was ever with them: it was kept alive not only in history, but in prayer. [Note: J. E. McFadyen, The Prayers of the Bible, 183.]
A nation whose history, like our own, is brightened with a long series of blessings and deliverances received from God, should keep His great acts in mind, and should gather encouragement from them to hope in God, and cast itself on Him when dangers befall and darken all the sky. And it is the same with the Church. Those who are most familiar with the history of the Church, unless they have been undevout and careless readers indeed, will be the least ready to look forward with gloomy forebodings regarding the time to come. Remembering the years of the right hand of the Most High, they will confide in Him that, when tempests and dangers have done their work in humbling men for their sins, and stirring them up to seek God, they will be stilled, and the sun will shine forth again. [Note: W. Binnie, Sermons, 116]
