Prayer: Focus on Forgiveness. 1 Kings
In this prayer there is
one word that shows up several times and tells us what the key request is. This
is an intercessory prayer but it is primarily a prayer for God’s forgiveness of
1 Kings 8:25 NASB “Now therefore, O LORD, the God
of Israel, keep with Your servant David my father that which You have promised
him, saying, ‘You shall not lack a man to sit on the throne of Israel, if only
your sons take heed to their way to walk before Me as you have walked.’
Solomon relates his prayer
to specific promises God made to David. He is saying: Just as you fulfilled the
promise that the temple would be built, so I am going to pray that you will
fulfil these other promises that you made in the Old Testament. That is his
rationale, the basis for how he is arguing (in a legal sense) why God should
answer his prayer. So he is moving from fulfilled promise to future fulfilment of
the promises.
1 Kings 8:28 NASB
“Yet have regard to the prayer of Your servant and to
his supplication, O LORD my God, to listen to the cry and to the prayer which
Your servant prays before You today.” We see here an introduction of several
words that are used throughout this chapter for prayer. There are two chapters
on the Old Testament which utilise a couple of these words for prayer more than
any other single context: 1st Kings 8 and 2 Chronicles 6. These are
the two passages that use these words over and over again for prayer. It is the
same event, the same prayer. The word “regard” in the English translation sounds
like a request but it is linked to the verb “listen” and what we have in the
Hebrew is a request to turn to listen. He is calling upon God is if He were to
turn His face, to turn around and listen. So it is an anthropomorphic expression.
It is an imperative of request but is not dictating to God. This first word
that is translated “prayer” is the Hebrew tephillah. It is found 76 times
in the Old Testament and is the most common word for prayer, the noun form. The
cognate verb is used about 84 times to describe the action of praying. It has
the idea of expressing a plea. It is word that has strong emotional overtones
to it. This noun is used six times in our passage in 1 Kings 8:28, 29. 38. 45.
49. 54, as well as in 2 Chronicles chapter six, so it tells us that this is a
key word. The four words used for prayer in this section are not just used synonymously, they express different ideas in prayer. So
Solomon’s plea is ultimately a plea for God’s grace to
The word supplication is
the Hebrew word techinnah.
The centre of that word is hin and this comes from the Hebrew verb for to be gracious
and related to the cognate noun which means grace. So the idea of supplication
is that it is an appeal to the grace of God to act in a certain way. A
supplication is an appeal to God to be gracious and answer a request to those
who are undeserving. The word for “cry” is used only one time in the context.
It is the Hebrew word rinnah
and it indicates a shout of joy or a moan of agony, the context says something
about it. It is a cry to God and so this prayer here is characterised as a
plea, as an appeal to God’s grace, and as someone crying out for God to act in
a certain way. It is used this way in several passages related to prayer, e.g.
Jeremiah 7:16.
So we have here the idea that
prayer is a plea, that is an appeal to God’s grace, and that it is located
within the context of an appeal to the Supreme Court of Heaven because His
justice has been satisfied. When we think about forgiveness, what is the
characteristic of God that is at stake here? It is His righteousness.
1 Kings 8:29 NASB
“that Your eyes may be open toward this house night
and day, toward the place of which You have said, ‘My name shall be there,’ to
listen to the prayer which Your servant shall pray toward this place.
1 Kings 8:30 NASB
“Listen to the supplication of Your servant and of Your people Israel, when
they pray toward this place; hear in heaven Your dwelling place; hear and
forgive.” The idea of hearing/listening has the idea of responding positively
to the request. What this whole prayer has been driving to is this final
request to God to forgive. The purpose for his entire prayer is that God would
listen to the prayer and just as He promised in Leviticus 26, Deuteronomy 29
& 30, that when the people are scattered out of the land and when they turn
to God, that God would listen to their prayer and return them to the land. He
is claiming a promise. We usually don’t think of a promise that way because the
promise is that if you disobey me I’m going to take you out of the land, and
when you are out of the land and you return to me I will bring you back into
the land. So there is a promise of restoration of the people to the land and
this is what Solomon is focusing on. He is not focusing on what is happening
right now in 960 BC. He knows that as a nation they are going to fail and
receive discipline which drives them out of the land, and he prays that the
Lord oil restore them. Solomon’s focus is on God’s ultimate restoration of the
people when His presence will be permanently with
We see a similar type of prayer
in Micah 7:18 NASB “Who is a God like You, who pardons iniquity And passes over the rebellious act of the remnant of His
possession? He does not retain His anger forever,
Because He delights in unchanging love. [19] He will again have compassion on
us; He will tread our iniquities under foot. Yes, You
will cast all their sins Into the depths of the sea.” God is going to forgive
all of their national sins—their idolatry, their rejection of the Messiah. In
His grace He will completely forgive and forget all of their past sins and
failures. He will restore the nation to the land just as he has promised.
The Hebrew word for “forgive”
in verse 30 is salach,
and it is used 47 times in the Old Testament. It is a word that fits in a
specific category of actions that only God can perform, just like the Hebrew
word bara
which is used in Genesis 1:1 when God created the heavens and the earth. Human
beings are never the subject of bara. No human being can bara
anything, it is an action that is unique to God. The same thing is true of salach. It is a
verb that is used in the Old Testament with only God as the subject, so it is
not just talking about the kind of forgiveness that may exist between one human
and another, it is talking about that ultimate and total eternal forgiveness
that can only come from God. It has the idea of being forgiven, sometimes to
pardon, to spare. It is first used in Exodus 34:9 NASB “He said, ‘If
now I have found favor in Your sight, O Lord, I pray,
let the Lord go along in our midst, even though the people are so obstinate,
and pardon our iniquity and our sin, and take us as Your own possession’.” Another
example is in Numbers 14:19,20 NASB “Pardon, I pray, the iniquity of
this people according to the greatness of Your lovingkindness,
just as You also have forgiven this people, from Egypt even until now.”
Another
series of passages deal with the Levitical offerings. Leviticus chapters four and five both contain various
uses of this word salach
for forgiveness. They are related to the sin offering specifically in Leviticus
chapter four. Leviticus
The interesting thing is
that we have a tendency to think of atonement as related to salvation—phase one, justification salvation. But if we look at these
passages God is talking to them as believers. This is how they recover
fellowship. There idea here isn’t related to becoming saved related to the work
of Christ on the cross in solving the sin problem, it
is related to the ongoing application of that to post-salvation sin. In other
words, it is an Old Testament picture of what we do every time we confess our
sins when we come to God in prayer. Leviticus 4:2 NASB “Speak to the
sons of
Leviticus 4:13 NASB
“Now if the whole congregation of Israel commits error and the matter [sin] escapes
the notice of the assembly, and they commit any of the things which the LORD has
commanded not to be done, and they become guilty; [14] when the sin which they
have committed becomes known, then the assembly shall offer a bull of the herd
for a sin offering and bring it before the tent of meeting. [15] Then the
elders of the congregation shall lay their hands on the head of the bull before
the LORD, and the bull shall be slain before the LORD.” So the elders representing
the whole nation put their hands on the bull, indicating an
identification and a transfer of their sins to the bull, and then the
bull is slaughtered. [16] “Then the anointed priest is to bring some of the
blood of the bull to the tent of meeting; [17] and the priest shall dip his
finger in the blood and sprinkle {it} seven times before the LORD, in front
of the veil.” This is for the whole nation. He doesn’t do this seven times for
other things, just when it is this one particular type of sin. It is done in
front of the veil.” He doesn’t enter into the holy of holies, except on the day of atonement. [18] “He shall put some of the blood on
the horns of the altar which is before the LORD in the tent of meeting; and all the blood he shall
pour out at the base of the altar of burnt offering which is at the doorway of
the tent of meeting. [19] He shall remove all its fat from it and offer it up
in smoke on the altar.” Then when it is all done, we read in v. 20 “So the
priest shall make atonement for them, and they will be forgiven.”
The Hebrew word for
atonement is kaphar.
For a long time scholars thought that kaphar had the idea of covering and it was almost always
thought of as a picture of the atoning work of Christ, phase one justification,
the payment for sin. What is interesting is that in a number of passages in the
LXX
it is translated with the Greek word katharizo
[kaqarizw] which means to be cleansed, not covered. A lot of
recent scholarship based on recent discoveries of other MSS find
that kaphar
is more closely related to cleansing. In this passage, when the translators of
the LXX translated kaphar
into Greek they translated it hilaskomai
[i(laskomai] which is the word for mercy seat. And it is a word
for propitiation. So these ideas are all interconnected. What we see here is
the same imagery as we have when we confess our sins. The framework for
confession is that we are going back to the cross where God’s justice was satisfied,
and that is why in 1 John 1:7 it says the blood of Christ is continuously
cleansing us from all sin. It is not that we are continuously, experientially
cleansed but that the blood of Christ is sufficient to cover all sin, and
experientially we have to admit or acknowledge our sins for forgiveness to take
place in time.
So all the way through
Leviticus four and five there is example after example where there is a sacrifice,
the priest makes atonement, and it is connected to forgiveness. So the idea
here of atonement is closer to the idea of propitiation, and that relates to forgiveness
because the reason God can forgive us is because His justice and righteousness
are satisfied. Cf. Numbers