Vain Repetitions

The key problem Christ had with repetition is not so much repetition itself (as with the unjust judge), but with the vain (empty) repetition that a heathen believes will force a god to listen to him (or her.)

If we look at the ancient Hebrew word for “God,” ( “el”) will we discover that at its root it simply means “strength.” This is a word from the fallen-ness of fallen men. To an ancient heathen, a “god” was anything that was stronger then himself which had to be appeased or manipulated in some way to either get some good or avoid some harm. This is a very external way of dealing with the Most High, to say the very least.

As we have seen, it is like the difference between a man and his job. “Joe the baker” is a man. But being a “baker” is what he does. “Joe” is who he is. The heathens surrounding the nation of Israel, knew that Israel worshipped “YHWH, the God.” “God” was what He “did.” But YHWH (“the self-existent One”) was who He was, is, and ever would be. That is how He offered Himself to the children of Israel as the supreme object of worship. “Just another ‘god’ or ‘strength’ was how the heathens choose to treat Him.

This, essentially, is what was at stake in the battle between Moses and Pharaoh. What Pharaoh actually said to Moses was “YHWH? Never heard of ‘im! Get back to work!” And the battle was joined.

When the prophet Jonah was among heathens in a shipwreck at sea:

Jonah 1:5-6

5 ... the mariners were afraid, and cried every man unto his god, and cast forth the wares that were in the ship into the sea, to lighten it of them. But Jonah was gone down into the sides of the ship; and he lay, and was fast asleep.

6 So the shipmaster came to him, and said unto him, What meanest thou, O sleeper? arise, call upon thy God, if so be that God will think upon us, that we perish not.

(KJV)

The idea here was “the more, the merrier.” If there’s problem with a “strength,” then lets get as many people as possible to beat on the “strength” with beggings and thereby change its mind.

Is there a personal, internal, spiritual relationship implied in this idea? No, there isn’t. This is the essential idea behind an idol. It is an emptiness, a “vanity,” where there should be a relationship to the source of all reality. In the Hebrew scriptures, an idol is sometimes called a “vanity” so as not to even write the word “idol.”

In Kurt Koch’s Christian Counseling and Occultism, we find that many of the spells found in the 6th and 7th Book of Moses start with the phrase “in the name of the Father, and the Son, and the Holy Ghost.” This led one magician to tell Koch that the external beatings he made on “God” in the form of his “spellings” were the same thing that Koch did in prayer because “we both use the three highest names.”

Now, here, we are in a position to understand something that makes all the difference between heaven and hell. Yes, in prayer Christians ask things of the Father, in the name of the Son, by the Holy Spirit who is in them by faith. But this is by Christ’s permission, and it implies a personal, internal, spiritual relationship:

John 14:12-17

12 Verily, verily, I say unto you, He that believeth on me, the works that I do shall he do also; and greater works than these shall he do; because I go unto my Father.

13 And whatsoever ye shall ask in my name, that will I do, that the Father may be glorified in the Son.

14 If ye shall ask any thing in my name, I will do it.

15 If ye love me, keep my commandments.

16 And I will pray the Father, and he shall give you another Comforter, that he may abide with you for ever;

17 Even the Spirit of truth; whom the world cannot receive, because it seeth him not, neither knoweth him: but ye know him; for he dwelleth with you, and shall be in you.

(KJV)

In this relationship, a Christian prays in order to be made an active executioner of the divine will through the indwelling of the Holy Spirit of God. Remember, in concrete prayer, we start by saying “Show me what to prayer for and what to stop praying for.”

When a practitioner of magick casts his spell “in the name of the Father, and the Son, and the Holy Spirit,” he or she has just reversed this order of servitude and attempted to make the Godhead the executioner of his or her own will. And so instead of the phrase “the Father, and the Son, and the Holy Spirit” having any real meaning to the magician, it has instead becomes an empty phrase or “vanity,” that the Godhead will not have anything to do with.

Since nothing immediately comes of that “request,” the magician is obliged to repeat it again and again. (Spell books often instruct the magician to say a spell a number of times). With the desertion of the true God from the proceedings, the coast is then clear for an evil spirit, (as with King Ahab’s misadventure) to come into the proceedings and attempt some fulfillment of the magician’s request.

The evil spirits do this because the magician is already clearly bent on misusing God’s name, and the misusing of God’s name is one way of casting a bad light on Him. Casting a bad light on God is the task which Satan, the fallen Light Bearer, has set for himself and his like-minded evil spirits. It is in this manner that the line between prayer and witchcraft is crossed.

What has been called “white magic” is every bit as wicked and spiritually deadly as what has been called “black magic,” because both involve the superordination of one’s own unregenerate nature over a vanity that purports to be the Godhead or have the Godhead’s powers but who is really about the task of making God look bad. Make no mistake. It is when one’s own will is superordinate over God’s will that prayer turns into witchcraft. And this so regardless of what one chooses to call it.

[ Note well that is this exactly the line that Baalam son of Beor crossed. (Numbers 22-25, 31:8) He had had supernatural dealings with YHWH. But he had chosen to treat the one true God as just another one of the “strengths” he dealt with as a witch doctor. And that was the end of him.]

A further problem with repetition arose later from another source. The Disciples Prayer later came to be called the “Our Father,” (or from the Latin, the “Pater Noster”) and the saying of it came to be considered a unit of “good work” or a “good deed.”

Right there you can see the problem with that, given what I’ve already said about concrete prayer. A prayer is a begging. And yes, you can beg for something more than once. But a begging is first and foremost a communication of a concrete request for something. And you are meant to expect a concrete answer to a given concrete request.

The problem that developed was the idea that if one good work was a good thing, many more of them must be even better. The idea then arose that reciting the Pater Noster a number of times increased the number of “good works” one had done. Once this idea gained ground, the idea of the Pater Noster being a communication lost ground. And a likewise thing happened for other written and traditional prayers.

This kind of thing usually happens when the meaning of the apostle Paul’s question to the Galatians is lost sight of. In Galatians 3:3, Paul asked his wayward spiritual infants: “Are ye so foolish? having begun in the Spirit, are ye now made perfect by the flesh?” Paul’s question was a reminder to the Galatians that all progress in the Christian life comes from Christ’s dwelling in the heart of a Christian through the indwelling of the Holy Spirit of God. When this truth is lost, human beings tend to drop into thinking that external observances condition and progress the Christian life. A false idea then develops that Christianity is a kind of game of generating enough “good works’ that they wipe out all one’s “bad works.”

[I have a criticism of this idea in Metaphor 17 of Twenty Seven Metaphors to a Grasp of Happiness. http://twentysevenmetaphors-graspofhappiness.blogspot.com/2005/01/metaphor-17-microscopic-new-leaf.html]

In historical fact, the reciting of the Paster Noster a number of times became a penance to be performed after sins were confessed. And this moved the Pater Noster further away from being a communication. Before long, repetition of the Paster Noster (or other kinds of “prayers” like it) started to look and feel more like a sort of Christian “white magic” for progress in what was no longer the kind of Christianity Christ and His apostles would have recognized. In a practical every day way, the idea that these kinds of prayers were real communications was lost.

So all this is what Christ meant when he spoke of “vain repetitions.” It was not the repetitions so much as the vanity of them when they are vain and had no intent of having communication or fellowship with God. “Be not ye therefore like unto them: for your Father knoweth what things ye have need of, before ye ask him.”