Your kingdom come, Your will be done, On earth as it is in heaven (2)

Now, although I trust it has been answered in part by the first of these posts, we come to the second part of this verse from Matthew 6:10: Your will be done, on earth as it is in heaven.

Again, God is the subject of the clause; again, the verb is a tense that speaks to no frame of reference in a particular time, but to the reference of all of time. It is a passive voice, but unlike when this voice is applied to His creatures, we may see this as referring to the fact that God’s decretive will has gone forth from Him actively, from before the ages began, and there is no longer need for Him to actively will to have that done which He once for all decreed: it is happening, it will happen, as the Imperial decree set forth from the beginning (Isaiah 55:10-11; 1 Chronicles 29:11).

It is not that God’s will is not being done, but that, in a timeless (eternal, infinite) sense, it has been done, and we are seeing the results of our sovereign God worked out over the span of time and history. This is the sense in which we see this Imperial statement as it relates to God.

Now, we must consider how this relates to those things of God that were to unfold – and some of which have unfolded – by His decretive will, as given to we who are His creatures – in prescriptive manner; especially as this is to the disciples of our Lord Jesus Christ, to those things which have to do with the present occupation of this earth by His spiritual kingdom in His body, the church. This is the sense of on earth as it is in heaven, which carries both an immediate sense of doing that which is of the kingdom of God’s beloved Son, and the future sense in which we pray Come soon, Lord Jesus!

Here, the analogy of faith fully comes into play, as we consider godly men of old, the types and shadows of that which our Lord is the substance of, and the entirety of revelation in Scripture pertaining to God’s will being actively pursued by those He has shown His grace in Christ Jesus our Lord too. If we were to consider this verse in a vacuum, simply grammatically, we would be lost as to its import for us, but even in the immediate context, that is not possible, for though it speaks of that kingdom already present which is God’s, and that will of God which has been done, with the results we see in Scripture and the world around us, we are given the area where this is done – on earth – and how it is to be done – as it is in heaven.

To skip past the manner in which our Lord obeyed this commandment would not be to miss the boat; it would be to fail to board it in the first place. He delights to do His Father’s will (Psalm 40:6-8), to do that laid out by the Father from all eternity is that which the Son does (John 5:17); in fact, He depends upon that which is of the Father’s will to do the work He was sent for (John 5:30), and it is the Father’s will which gives Him His sustenance (John 4:34), that He could complete His work during His first advent, continue His work in His mediation for those He came to save, and come again to finally establish that which was intended from the beginning.

In other words, to do that will of the Father which has been established from before the ages began is the entirety of the pleasure, nourishment and life of our Lord as the Messiah, and the reason of infinite, eternal relationship of God the Son within the Triune God, as it will be always (1 Corinthians 15:27-28).

This gives us the context within which we, who are His by His pleasure and grace, are to seek to do His will now, being in this world as our Lord was (John 15:14; 1 Peter 3:13-18; 1 John 3:13).

We will consider further the last part of this verse – God’s will being done on earth as it is in heaven by those who are His – in another post.