Chapter 10
For Thine Is the Kingdom, and the Power, and the Glory
Matthew 6:13c
22 min read
At a glance
This king [David] gives nothing away. He gives back.
A king who gives his crown back
11 Chr 28:2-3
David
stands up, on his feet, with the no of his God in his mouth
21 Chr 28:11-14; 29:3
the giving away
building plan, gold and silver by weight, his own treasure, the kingdom
31 Chr 29:11-14
the prayer
"everything is from You, and from your hand we have given it to You"
41 Chr 29:23
Solomon
sits on the throne of YHWH, not on that of his father
"Amen, I say to you"
with the Son the amen goes first: He confirms his own words
"for ever. Amen."
under this prayer it stands at the end, where Israel had it: with the one who answers
The closing line gives everything back to the Father; the closing word, the Son gives to us.
- DOCUMENTED Kingdom, power and glory stand together in one prayer, in the mouth of one man (1 Chr 29:11-12).
- CONSTRUED That Matt 6:13 points back to this prayer.
- CALCULATED ἀμήν 106 times in the gospels: 101 open a saying, 5 close something, and the fifth is Matt 6:13. The 106 counted by machine, the five closing amens checked one by one.
I. On His Feet
There is an age at which clothes no longer help. The book of Kings says it without ceremony: the king was old, they covered him with blankets, and he did not get warm.
That is the man who now stands up.
The whole assembly has been called together; what happens today, everyone must see. And then comes a sentence that would have been recorded of no other king: and David the king stood up, on his feet. On his feet — the writer adds it, because with this king it no longer goes without saying.
What he has to say begins with what was refused him. He tells it himself, aloud, in front of everyone:
And then the answer he received, passed on word for word:
All his life he has won wars, and those very wars are the reason. The man who won everything tells his people why the thing he wanted most was denied him. He does not contest it. He stands there on his feet, with the no of his God in his mouth — and he has not finished speaking.
II. By Weight
Then the giving away begins.
First the building plan. The house he may not build, he has drawn, and he lays the design in the hands of his son. Then the gold and the silver — not scattered about, but weighed out, the weight given for each object. And on top of everything already there, his own treasure: the king's personal gold. And the kingdom itself goes to the boy who must build the house.
To that boy he says:
Courage, delivered as building material — the last thing this father still has to give. He himself will never enter the house. Solomon stands there with someone else's building plan in his hands and a task bigger than he is.
And then the old man goes to pray, with everyone present.
III. The Shadow
The prayer does not open with a petition. It opens with a blessing, upward:
That "our father" can go two ways in Hebrew. It can belong to Israel — the God of Israel, our father, and then it is Jacob; whoever reads it that way has solid ground underfoot, because further on in this same prayer David calls the patriarchs, in so many words, "our fathers".
But the men who later rendered this prayer into Greek read it differently: they wrote "our Father" in the form of the address, the same form as "God of Israel" beside it — said to Him, not about Jacob. To their ears David was not blessing the God of an ancestor. He was blessing his Father.
Then he lists what belongs to that Father, and he leaves nothing for himself:
In the middle of that same prayer he says something else, and it is no ornamental line:
He says it in the same breath as "Yours is the greatness", and between those two sentences there is no break. His days are running out and cannot be lengthened; the kingdom is Yours. The first can be borne because the second is true.
And he draws up the day's account, aloud:
The gold had been weighed object by object, and in the weighing it turned out to be His already. This king gives nothing away. He gives back.
Elsewhere in the Old Testament that address does occur, but always in the midst of distress — Isaiah calls it upward out of a heap of ruins. Here it stands at the front, as the first word, before anything is asked. And it is the same prayer that says: Yours is the kingdom. The two ends of the prayer the children will later learn already lie together here — in one breath, from one man, who calls his own days a shadow.
IV. On Another's Throne
A few verses on, the boy sits on the throne, while his father is still alive and looking on. And then the chronicler writes a sentence found nowhere else in the Bible:
Not on the throne of his father. Not on the throne of Israel. On the throne of YHWH.
It is no slip of the pen. David had already said it himself that day, in the speech before the prayer: God has chosen Solomon "to sit on the throne of the kingdom of YHWH over Israel". Twice the same expression, in one chapter, about the same boy. This throne stands in Jerusalem and it belongs to Someone else.
That makes the doxology no pious understatement. Thine is the kingdom is what the land registry says.
And it is older than David. When Jacob, dying, blessed his sons, Judah received a lion and a scepter — and with that scepter a small word that changes everything about it: *"the scepter shall not depart from Judah [...] until Shiloh comes."* A scepter with an end date is a borrowed scepter. Judah holds it; he does not own it.
So it runs on through the centuries. God seeks out for Himself a man after his heart, and He finds him behind the sheep. That man wants to build a house for God, and God turns it around: I will build you a house. Three generations later a great-grandson of David stands on a mountain shouting at an army, and he calls what he stands for by its name: "the kingdom of YHWH, in the hand of the sons of David." In the hand. Not in possession.
Everything is on loan. And the Old Testament also says for how long.
For that expression, "the throne of YHWH", occurs twice in the Hebrew Bible — and the first of the two is this one, with Solomon on it. The second time no one sits on it:
No king on that throne any more, because the city is the throne. And no ark any more, says the verse before it, because no one will ask for it again. That is the point toward which the whole movement runs: what was lent goes back to the owner, and the nations come along.
ExcursusWhere It Is Heading
The prophets all point the same way, and they do it with images that complete one another. The mountain of the house of YHWH is set at the top and the nations stream to it, for out of Zion goes forth the law — Isaiah and Micah say it in almost the same words. The earth becomes full of the knowledge of YHWH as the water covers the sea floor. YHWH becomes King over all the earth; on that day YHWH will be one and his Name one. Whoever of the nations is left goes up year after year to bow down before the King and to keep the Feast of Tabernacles. And Ezekiel hears it firsthand: "the place of my throne and the place of the soles of my feet, where I will dwell among the children of Israel for ever." (Isa 2:2-3 · Mic 4:1-2 · Isa 11:9 · Hab 2:14 · Zech 14:9 · 14:16 · Ezek 43:7.)
I have written this line out elsewhere and do not build it up again here: the traffic of the nations to Zion is in Micah — A Window on the End and in The Mystery of the Kingdom, and the annual procession of Zechariah 14 in Revelation Unsealed. For this chapter one thing matters: as long as that day has not come, every kingship on earth is borrowed — David's included. (The references DOCUMENTED; I have weighed the line before, and here it is only pointed out.)
And then the lion. Judah received one from his dying father, and the image stays with Judah. But at the end of the line it is not Judah who roars. Two prophets have word for word the same line — "YHWH will roar from Zion and utter his voice from Jerusalem" — and there it is the Owner in person who makes the sound on his own mountain.
Hosea adds what that roaring brings about, and it is not what you would think:
The lion roars, and children come running.
V. In the Mouth of Children
Centuries later a Man on a mountain teaches a handful of people to pray. He gives them seven petitions to take with them, from the Name to the deliverance. And then the prayer closes, and it does not close with a petition:
Every member of that line already stood in the old king's prayer: the kingdom, the power, the glory; "everything in heaven and on earth"; and the "from everlasting to everlasting" of the opening.
The doxology already sings through Scripture, and David gathers it into one line. Here that line is placed in the mouth of children. Whoever prays it prays after a king who gives his crown back.
Years later, in Jerusalem. Peter and John come back from the SanhedrinSanhedrinThe supreme Jewish council of 70 elders during the Second Temple period, convening in Jerusalem and exercising religious and judicial authority over the nation. Mentioned throughout. with a ban in their pocket: no more speaking and no more teaching in the name of Jesus. They go to their own people and report everything the chief priests and the elders have said. And when the room has heard it, it lifts up its voice to God with one accord:
What the room prays next is a psalm, and it says aloud whose words they are: "You said through the mouth of David, your servant: why did the nations rage and the peoples devise what is empty? The kings of the earth took their stand and the rulers conspired, against the Lord and against his Anointed."
The king who gave his crown back has lain with his fathers for centuries — and his lines now carry a room full of threatened people.
What that room asks is not that the threat should stop, but that it may itself go on: "grant your bondservants to speak your word with all boldness."
ExpertOne Room, and the Word That Is Not Spoken
ὁμοθυμαδόν, "with one accord", occurs 12 times in the New Testament: 11 times in Luke's Acts, and once in Paul (Rom 15:6). It is the word with which Luke sketches a group doing one thing at the same time.
And the address of that prayer is not that of the Our Father. It says Δέσποτα — Master, the man who has the house in his hands. δεσπότης occurs 10 times in the New Testament, and eight times it concerns human masters or Christ. As an address to God it occurs twice: Luke 2:29 and Acts 4:24. The two who address God this way are an old man with a child in his arms, and a room full of threatened disciples.
In those seven verses the word "Father" does not occur, and neither does "kingdom". What of this prayer is there: heaven and earth (4:24), the Name (4:30) and the counsel of God — βουλή, not θέλημα, but the same matter (4:28). And what they ask for is not bread, not forgiveness and not deliverance from the evil one, but boldness to keep speaking (4:29).
That is the honest part of this page. The first church to pray aloud together does not use the prayer of its Lord as a set form at the moment it matters most. It chooses other words — and it chooses the words of David.
Acts 4:25b-26 is Psalm 2:1-2, and it is the Greek psalm word for word: zero differences. (The counts CALCULATED over the Textus Receptus, 140,987 words, and the comparison with the Septuagint word for word; that this would be the only written-out communal prayer text of the New Testament has not been checked exhaustively and is therefore not claimed.)
ExpertOn the Question Whether These Words Are There
This book reads the Textus Receptus, and the closing line is there; the grounds for that choice of text are in the apparatus, §3 — together with what has and has not been checked by calculation. Luke does not have it: in his gospel the prayer ends with "deliver us from the evil one", and that is a given within every manuscript family, regardless of which one is followed. Whoever reads the Alexandrian manuscripts also brackets the line in Matthew; the majority of textual critics regard it as a later, liturgical addition. That is the state of scholarship, and it may simply be stated here.
What the prayer asks does not change because of it. The doxology says nothing that Scripture does not say elsewhere — Paul closes his last letter with "the Lord will deliver me from every evil work [...] to Him be the glory for ever and ever, amen": the seventh petition and the doxology in one verse (2 Tim 4:18; also Rom 11:36) — and it says it with the words of David. (That the Textus Receptus has the line and Luke does not is CALCULATED on the text itself; about when it entered Matthew nothing has been measured here.)
HeartFor Those Who Read This in Those Days
Days are coming when these three words will not be without consequence. Kingdom, power and glory will then be claimed by those to whom they do not belong, and whoever lays them aloud before the Father contradicts a power. Daniel saw that situation from the inside. To Nebuchadnezzar, he says to his face, the God of heaven has given "the kingdom, the power, the strength and the honor" — four words, and the verb with them: given, so not possessed (Dan 2:37). Once more in that book there is such a handing out, and then there are three: "dominion and honor and kingship", to the Son of Man — with the clause that was missing for Nebuchadnezzar, that his dominion does not pass away (7:14).
For such days the doxology is not decoration but an address. Whoever says it says — quietly if need be — with Whom everything is kept in safekeeping. It was first prayed by a man who had already handed over his own crown; so there is no empire to defend with it. But you can stand with it — on your feet, as he did. (Daniel's words DOCUMENTED — four in 2:37, three in 7:14, with "kingdom" and "honor" in both; Daniel 7:14 is weighed in chapter 4.)
VI. The Word That Answers
One word of the closing line is then left, and that word too the old king already knows.
Years earlier, on the day he brought the ark into the city, a song of praise rang out, and at its close it says: and all the people said: amen. That is how this word lives in Israel: at the end, and in many mouths.
The oldest memory of it is not a gentle one — six tribes on one mountain, six on the other, and 12 times a curse that the whole people answers with amen. Centuries later, when Ezra opens the scroll and the people hear the law again, the answer is a double amen, with raised hands. The first four collections of the book of Psalms each close with it, and nowhere else in the book of Psalms does it occur.
And when David has his boy anointed, the man who receives the order answers with that same single word: amen.
It never stands at the front. It announces nothing; it answers. Whoever says amen has listened first. It is the word of the people, and the word of the child.
And then there is One for Whom the amen always goes first. "Amen, I say to you" — that is how He opens, time and again, in all four gospels. He confirms his own words before anyone else can, because his word needs no one's consent. In the whole of the gospel there is one amen that closes something without closing a book — and it stands at the end of this prayer.
Here He turns the word around. The seal He always sets in advance under his own speaking, He places here at the end, where Israel always had it: with the one who answers. With that it is no longer the seal under his words. It is the answer under ours. The closing line gives everything back to the Father; the closing word the Son gives to us.
Excursus12 Times Amen on Ebal
Deuteronomy 27. Six tribes are given their place on Gerizim, for the blessing; six on Ebal, for the curse. The Levites call out with a loud voice, and 12 times "cursed" rings out — and 12 times it says: "and all the people shall say: amen." All 12 amens of Deuteronomy are in this one chapter. The first thing Israel as a people answers with that word is not a blessing but a curse — and they pronounce it over themselves.
The twelfth reads: "cursed is he who does not confirm the words of this law by doing them" (27:26). That is the verse Paul quotes in Galatians 3:10 — three verses before he writes that Christ has redeemed us from the curse of the law: "He has become a curse for us" (3:13).
(The 12 occurrences CALCULATED: Deut 27:15-26, 12 out of 12. Paul's quotation follows the Septuagint, DOCUMENTED. That the Ebal amen finds its answer in Galatians 3:13 is CONSTRUED.)
DossierWhere Jesus Puts His Amen
In the four gospels ἀμήν occurs 106 times — John 51, Matthew 32, Mark 15, Luke 8. Of these, 101 open a saying: ἀμὴν λέγω ὑμῖν, "amen, I say to you". Five close something. Four of those five are the closing verses of the four gospels themselves: Matthew 28:20 · Mark 16:20 · Luke 24:53 · John 21:25. The fifth is Matthew 6:13.
The eternity formula of the closing line is also a solitary one in Matthew: εἰς τοὺς αἰῶνας occurs 28 times in the Textus Receptus, and in Matthew the formula occurs once — here.
(CALCULATED over the Textus Receptus, 140,987 words. The 106 amens were counted by machine by their position in the verse, not read syntactically one by one; the five closing amens were indeed checked one by one.)
ExpertThe Amen the Greeks Translated, and the Amen They Left Standing
אָמֵן occurs 30 times in the Masoretic text, spread over 24 verses. The Greek translators had a word of their own for it, and they used it: γένοιτο, "let it be" — for 19 verses, from the 12 curses on Ebal to the closing verses of the psalm collections. Only in the latest books did they leave the Hebrew word standing: Chronicles and Nehemiah have ἀμήν, untranslated — the amen at David's ark is one of them. Isaiah's "God of the amen" was paraphrased: "the true God".
The New Testament never translates it. ἀμήν occurs there 151 times, from the first gospel to the last verse of Revelation — or 152 for whoever counts both of the two shifting closing amens: Stephanus 1550 has the one in Ephesians 6:24, Scrivener 1894 the one in Romans 16:20, and each edition thus arrives at 151. And γένοιτο, the word with which the old translators had rendered the amen, occurs 17 times — 15 of them as μὴ γένοιτο, "by no means" — 14 in Paul and one in Luke (20:16) — and one in a question (Acts 5:24).
That leaves exactly one. Once γένοιτο stands in the New Testament as an affirmation:
> "See, the maidservant of the Lord; let it be to me according to your word." (Luke 1:38)
The word with which the Septuagint had translated the amen of the law and the psalms sounds once more in the New Testament in assent. It is a girl in Nazareth who says it.
(CALCULATED: 30 tokens in the Masoretic text; the Greek distribution counted on the text itself, with accent normalization, because the Greek lemmas in the working corpus are unreliable; the 17 New Testament occurrences of γένοιτο checked one by one. That Mary's γένοιτο is in fact an amen is CONSTRUED.)
VII. The Amen
In Isaiah God bears a Name that consists of this one word: "the God of the amen" — twice in one verse, as if once were not enough. And at the end of Scripture the last word of the prayer itself turns out to have become a Name. To the church in Laodicea the exalted Christ introduces Himself like this:
For this prayer what is written is enough: at the close the child says a word that turns out to be a Name. In Him is the yes, Paul writes, and in Him the amen. Whoever prays the prayer through to the very last word ends where it began — with Someone.
Of the old king the book reports one more thing: he died at a good old age. His days had been a shadow, as he himself said — and at the end of that shadow stood a son, a house that was to come, and a prayer that lasts longer than the house.
So ends the prayer that began with "Our Father". The child has asked everything there is to ask — a Name, a kingdom, a will, bread, forgiveness, keeping, deliverance — and then says, with the words of a king who had already handed over his crown: and it is already Yours. That is no anticlimax. That is rest. Nothing has to be held on to any more; all that is left is to answer.
And the child answers.
Amen.
HeartThe Last Word
Seven times you have asked for something, if you have prayed this prayer — for the Name, for the kingdom, for the will, for bread, for forgiveness, for keeping, for deliverance. That is a lot, and all of it was allowed; the Father had it all said for you to repeat. But the last line asks nothing more. It states: the kingdom you asked for is already His, and the power too, and the glory too. All this time you have been asking Someone in whose house it already lay.
David knew how that feels. He had weighed his gold, object by object, and when he gave it, he said: everything is from You, and from your hand we have given it to You. In this house giving is giving back, and it makes no one poor. Whoever lays down with this Father everything he could not carry anyway — a crown, a life's work, a hope — is left with the Father Himself.
And then one word remains. The Son always confirmed his own words Himself — amen, I say to you — because his word needs no one's signature. But under this prayer He left one place open, at the end: the place of the one who has listened and agrees. That place is for you. To answer as a child answers that is done asking and stays where it is: with its Father.
In the house of this Father the child gets the last word.