That fascinates me in connection with the sequence of things in the Gospels and Acts. Jesus is baptized by John and immediately anointed by the Spirit. But while many others are baptized, both by John and by Jesus’ disciples, no one else gets anointed.

Jesus becomes the sin offering on the cross and completes His role of ascension offering when He ascends to heaven. It is only then, after the completion of the sin and ascension offerings, that He pours out the Spirit and the “sons” are anointed.

I suggest a moratorium on new Christmas hymns, until we all learn the Magnificat and the Benedictus and the Nunc Dimittis so much by heart that they seep out our fingers at the keyboard, until we instinctively sing of Jesus’ birth like Mary, like Zecharias, like Simeon.

Another gem from Leithart.

But as well as what is quite explicit, there are also other undertones and overtones from the David story.

For overtones, we can simply note that just as God passed over the “obvious” choices among Jesse’s sons in favour of the shepherd boy, so too God passes over the “obvious” choices regarding whom will receive the proclamation of the birth of the Messiah, and sends His army to make the royal announcement to… a bunch of shepherds.

Undertones: In Matthew 2, we find Herod making the mothers of Bethlehem childless; in the few verses immediately preceding the record of David’s anointing, we find Samuel hacking Agag of Amalek to pieces with the words, “As your sword has made women childless, so shall your mother be childless among women” (1 Sam 15.33). The connection gives us a pretty good idea what is going to happen to Herod very shortly, and so we are not surprised to learn of his death not far down the road.

The first thing that needs to be said is that I’m not going “Word of Faith.” That was a group that claimed that whenever you claimed something in real faith, it happened. I was raised indie Pentecostal, and even I was never that extreme.

But there is nonetheless a real sense in which God never says “No” to the prayer of faith.

The basis of this claim lies in Luke 11.13, part of a passage I have been reflecting on again as I was due to preach on it today.

We’re reading along in this little story about the man asking his friend for bread at midnight and getting further details about the one asking receiving (now there’s a clue that I’m not out to lunch in my title, by the way), and so on….

And all of a sudden we get blindsided.

You evil people know how to give good gifts to your children – how much more will My heavenly Father give the Holy Spirit to those who ask Him?

Now wait one cotton-pickin’ minute.

We were talking about the Holy Spirit? Weren’t we talking about bread?

And it’s a mistake to backtrack now and take all the preceding discussion to be metaphorical. Yes, I know that this little passage opens up with a sort of parable. But it’s part of a larger passage in which we are indeed told to pray for “our daily bread.”

There are a couple of layers to what Jesus is doing here.

First of all, in the first part of the chapter, He teaches His disciples the content of prayer, but in vv 5-13, the focus has moved on more to the how - the manner. And we can certainly see from Romans 8 that it is the Spirit that teaches us how to pray, and indeed, intercedes on our behalf, because our praying is in fact inadequate. And so even in our prayer for bread, the Father sends the Spirit so we can pray rightly.

But there is even more here than that, and as noted, we saw a hint already: those who ask receive, those who seek find, those who knock have the door opened to them.

And we say, “Really?” Because it often seems it isn’t so.

For my Facebook status, I put up the title of this post as a thought, and my friend Brian said: But God said “No” to Jesus Himself in Gethsemane.

And that is a good starting point for our reflection.

We could say that Jesus is unique. For, as the traditional Reformed communion liturgy says, Jesus was abandoned so that we may never be. In that sense, Jesus’ prayer could not be answered in order that ours always will be.

But there is even more in Jesus’ case. For God did answer Jesus in Gethsemane in the terms Jesus frames things Himself here in Luke 11.13.

The point is that when we pray, whatever we pray for – yes, when we pray for our daily bread – we are in fact at bottom praying for the Holy Spirit. The plea for bread is part of the plea of the coming kingdom (cf vv 2-4), and the Spirit is the earnest (down payment) of that inheritance. Even when He declines to fulfill many of the specifics of our prayers, God never simply answers with “No.” That would be a contradiction to Jesus’ promise that those who ask will (not may) receive.

Even as God answered Jesus’ prayer in Gethsemane via equipping by the Spirit through an angel, God always answers our prayers of faith. Even when we do not see the specific thing we requested, we do receive – again – the Spirit.

And that, I think, is a very great encouragement. If we focus on the specific request we have made, we will start to feel that often God really doesn’t answer our prayers, after all – or at least, not reliably. But when we see the way Jesus has developed the nature of prayer in Luke 11, we are encouraged to pray, because we know that it is never wasted, never unanswered, that the one basic good will always be given to us.

And thus, God never says “No” to the prayer of faith.

On a forum recently, another Christian suggested that, in line with Jesus’ example, Christians ought to forgive the person who committed the killings at Virginia Tech, and pray that he could enter the kingdom of heaven.

FWIW, here’s my response….

I’d say that’s a somewhat simplistic application, for numerous reasons:

1) Jesus’ prayer (and Stephen’s later, in imitation) had to do with people who were sinning against Himself, not others. It is not my place to forgive somebody who harms you; that would be presumptuous on my part.

2) Jesus’ own prayer is not a plea that those who killed Him enter the kingdom of heaven.

3) It should be noted that the situation with Jesus Himself is considerably more complex than is often recognized. The Greek term translated “forgive” there literally has the idea of “leave alone” and is employed elsewhere in the Gospels in Jesus’ parable about the barren fig tree (Luke 13.6-9). The owner says “Look, for three years I have come seeking fruit on this fig tree and find none. Cut it down; why does it use up the ground?” (The cutting-down theme is an extension of John the Baptist’s earlier warning that the ax was already laid at the root of the trees, and those not bearing good fruit would be cut down and thrown into the fire; see e.g. Lk 3.9.) But the vinedresser begs the owner to “forgive” (leave alone, 13.8 ) the tree this year also, and he will dig around it, fertilize it etc; after that, if it doesn’t bear fruit, the owner can then cut it down (13.9). The forgiveness of the tree is not a dismissal of responsibility, but a temporary (but valuable!) reprieve.

The point with Jesus’ prayer of forgiveness is that, by rights, judgment should have descended immediately upon those who rejected and killed Him (and in particular, the official leadership of Jerusalem), but He grants them space for repentance. That space is a generation; Jesus Himself warns that Jerusalem will be destroyed because she did not recognize her visitation by her Messiah and Lord (Luke 19.43-44). (The city was destroyed by the Romans in A.D. 70.)

On a more general level, Jesus’ example is emphatically not one of dismissal of justice for the sake of universal forgiveness for all. By that standard, every evil man and Satan himself would all be ultimately forgiven. But the Bible doesn’t teach that; to the contrary, it warns that all will stand before God and receive recompense for what they have done in the body.

A complete biblical position therefore involves not just Jesus’ words on the cross (which are indeed very significant and important); it places those words in context, and also recognizes their harmony with other biblical passages (such as Rom 13, which says that the ruling authorities “bear the sword” for the purpose of executing justice).