Common Assumptions

When he prayed to Him, He was moved by his entreaty and heard his supplication, and brought him again to Jerusalem  2 Chronicles 33:13

Prayed – Do you live in the prayer air of the Hebrew worldview?  Yesterday we learned that prayer saturates the common life world of Hebrew thought.  It is part of waking, eating, working, resting and love-making.  It is woven into birth, growth, health, sickness and death.  There is no life without prayer.

When Manasseh is humbled by the Lord and taken captive, he prays.  This is the verb palal.  It is the most common Hebrew verb for praying, used 84 times in the Old Testament.  If you’re interested in the scholar’s assessment, you will find no consensus about its etymological root or the fact that it is usually found in just one of the Hebrew verb tenses.  Palal retains a mystery all its own. 

In most of its occurrences, it describes intercessory prayer.  That is exactly what Manasseh is doing.  He’s in big trouble, so he is interceding on his own behalf for the favor of God.  The same word is used in Hannah’s prayer for a child (1 Samuel 1:10) and in Elisha’s prayer for a dead boy (2 Kings 4:33).  Palal is the verb of pleading before God. 

The Old Testament teaches that there are true and false prayers.  It is possible to plead your case in such a way that your prayer is a lie.  The prophet Isaiah paints a very scary picture of God’s anger over false prayer.  “Even though you multiply prayers, I will not listen” (Isaiah 1:15).  For the Hebrew, that thought is devastating.  It is the equivalent of suffocation. 

What makes true prayer?  Jeremiah tells us plainly.  Just after the often quoted verse about God’s good plans for us comes the requirement for real conversation (Jeremiah 29:12-13).  If you want to talk with God, arrive with your whole being in an attitude of humility and submission, nothing withheld, ready to obey.  Invoking the Lord’s benevolence with any other attitude is like trying to breathe in a vacuum. 

Prayer, that child-like expectant sharing of all that I am with my Lord, is the simplest act of men and women.  It is filled with emotions, generated by reason, upheld by hope, crowned with praise and saturated with humility.  It is the daily bread of life.  And we cannot live without it.