“And I will deliver you out of the hand of the wicked, and I will redeem you from the palm of the evil ones.” Jeremiah 15:21

Deliver Us From Evil

Wicked – Jesus knew his Bible.  He knew this passage in Jeremiah.  Perhaps he had this passage in mind when he taught his disciples to pray, “Deliver us from evil”.  When we repeat that phrase in the Lord’s Prayer, we don’t have the same picture of evil that is found in the word used in Jeremiah.  But we should.  If we only knew the full range of this word, ra, we could grasp the power in Jesus’ simple phrase.

Ra is an umbrella word.  It covers a lot of ground.  It’s like the word “love” in English.  Hebrew has three words for love.  Greek has four.  But English covers all the nuances with a single word.  That’s too bad because there is a world of difference between “I love baseball” and “I love you.”  But the funny thing is that English has lots of words for evil acts and evil people while Hebrew has basically one word, ra.  The meaning of ra must be found in the context.  This single word covers at least ten different categories of evil.  That should raise a question:  why does the Hebrew language see all of these categories under the banner of one word when it has at least three different words to cover the categories of love?

Perhaps the answer is found in the basic worldview of the Hebrews.  They saw the world divided into two entirely opposed camps:  what was holy and what was not holy.  Everything that was not holy was associated with some form of evil.  So, the word ra covers moral and ethical sins, unwise actions, ungrateful people, undesirable attitudes, bad circumstances, harmful events, threatening situations and downcast faces.  Ra is what God is not, in all of its expressions.

When Jesus prayed, “Deliver us from evil” he undoubtedly used the concept of ra.  He had a lot more in mind than escape from Satan.  When you pray, “Deliver us from evil”; do you have umbrella ra in mind?  Are you looking for God to rescue you from actions, thoughts, words, circumstances, attitudes and even facial expressions?  Are you pleading for transport to holiness?