OT Prayers Appealing to God’s Concern for His Own Glory

As I mentioned before, there are 77 tables in God’s Glory in Salvation through Judgment: A Biblical Theology, and I have permission from Crossway to make five of them available here for free. Each will be available for about 48 hours.

The one linked in this post (cataloging prayers in the Old Testament that appeal to God’s concern for his own glory) may be the most valuable one of the bunch, though the next one on Messianic Woes is really good, too. They all have value, but the previous one on Yahweh’s intent to make himself known only dealt with texts in Exodus (so it wouldn’t take you long to read through Exodus carefully and find the references for yourself), another one that’s forthcoming on the doxologies in the New Testament wouldn’t be that hard to compile for yourself, and the one I’ll post on the chiastic structure of Revelation partakes of the weakness common to every proposed chiastic structure of a longer passage or a whole book (they are impossible to prove definitively, and they will always be disputed).

I’ll tell you why I think the next one on the Messianic woes is valuable when I post it. Why do I think this one would be valuable for you to download? It saves you it a ton of work.

These prayers that appeal to God’s concern for his own glory show how the believing remnant in the old covenant responded to God’s pursuit of his own glory: they joined him in it. These OT saints adopted God’s priorities and based their prayers on what they understood to be of greatest concern to God himself–his reputation among the nations, the glory of his name, the revelation of the truth about who he is. Moses, Joshua, David, Solomon, Elijah, Hezekiah, Jeremiah, Asaph, Asa, and Jehoshaphat all petition God on the basis of his concern for his own glory.

Incidentally, there is a massively important point of application here: this is how we, too, should pray. The perspective of the biblical authors is not merely to be studied but adopted, embraced, and lived.

These prayers appealing to God’s concern for his glory are applied to a variety of situations and employ a variety of expressions, and they had to be located the old fashioned way, which is still the best way to examine a biblical theme: by reading slowly through the OT, marking them as they appeared, and then gathering them all into one place. So this chart saves you a ton of work, but actually doing this kind of work for yourself is the best way to study the Bible because it demands that you read attentively, remember what you’ve read, correlate new information with what you’ve already seen, and assimilate the results into a coherent whole.

So in this table I list every prayer in the Old Testament that appeals to God’s concern for his own glory; at least, I think I got them all! If you find one that I missed I’d love to know about it.

This table is going live on Tuesday, March 22, 2011, and the link will be removed at the end of the day on Thursday, March 24, 2011.

Here’s the link: Old Testament Prayers Appealing to God’s Concern for His Own Glory [link removed].