The Lord’s prayer “deliver us from evil” began to be quite arbitrarily translated by Tertullian as “deliver us from the evil one”, as if referring to a personal Satan. But the Greek text certainly doesn’t require this translation. In Greek, the phrase “from evil” can be understood as either neuter (“the [abstract] evil”) or masculine, “the evil one”, personifying the evil. God does lead men and women to the time of evil/testing—Abraham commanded to offer Isaac, and the testing of Israel by God in the desert are obvious examples. It’s observable that the Lord Jesus Himself prayed most parts of His model prayer in His own life situations. “Your will be done… Deliver us from evil” (Matthew 6:13; Luke 11:4) were repeated by Him in Gethsemane, when He asked for God’s will to be done and not His, and yet He prayed that the disciples would be delivered from evil (John 17:15, [AV, Young’s]). Paul’s letters are full of allusion to the Gospel records, and those allusions enable us to correctly interpret the passages alluded to. He uses the same Greek words for “deliver” and “evil” when he expresses his confidence that “the Lord shall deliver me from every evil work, and will preserve me unto his heavenly kingdom” (2 Timothy 4:18). Paul likewise had his inspired mind on this phrase of the Lord’s prayer when he commented that the Lord Jesus died in order “that he might deliver us from this present evil world, according to the will of God” (Galatians 1:4; 2 Thessalonians 3:3). Clearly enough, Paul didn’t understand “the evil” to be a personal Satan, but rather the “evil” of this world and those who seek to persecute believers. Perhaps the Lord Jesus Himself based this part of His prayer on Old Testament passages like 1 Chronicles 4:10; Psalms 25:22; 26:11; 31:8; 34:22; 69:18; 78:35,42; 140:1 and Proverbs 2:12; 6:24, which ask for ‘deliverance’ from evil people, sin, distress, tribulation etc. here on earth. Not one of those passages speaks of deliverance from a personal, superhuman Satan. Esther’s prayer in Esther 4:19 LXX is very similar—“Deliver us from the hand of the evildoer”, but that ‘evildoer’ was Haman, not any personal, superhuman Satan. Even if we insist upon reading ‘the evil one’, “the evil one” in the Old Testament was always “the evil man in Israel” (Deuteronomy 17:12; 19:19; 22:21-24 cp. 1 Corinthians 5:13)—never a superhuman being. And there may be another allusion by the Lord to Genesis 48:16, where God is called the One “who has redeemed me from all evil”. As the Old Testament ‘word made flesh’, the thinking of the Lord Jesus was constantly reflective of Old Testament passages; but in every case here, the passages He alluded to were not concerning a superhuman Devil figure. God ‘delivers from’ “every trouble” (Psalms 54:7), persecutors and enemies (Psalms 142:6; 69:14)—but as Ernst Lohmeyer notes, “There is no instance of the [orthodox understanding of the] devil being called ‘the evil one’ in the Old Testament or in the Jewish writings”5.
It’s also been observed that every aspect of the Lord’s prayer can be interpreted with reference to the future coming of the Kingdom of God on earth. Prayer for deliverance from evil, the time of testing (Grk.), would then tally well with the Lord’s exhortation to pray that we may be delivered from the final time of evil coming on the earth (Luke 21:36). Another insight into this petition is that God does in fact lead men in a downward spiral as well as in an upward spiral of relationship with Him—Pharaoh would be the classic example. “Why do you make us err from your ways?” was the lament of Israel to their God in Isaiah 63:17. It is perhaps this situation more than any which we should fear—being hardened in sin, drawing ever closer to the waterfall of destruction, until we come to the point that the forces behind us are now too strong to resist… Saul lying face down in the dirt of ancient Palestine the night before his death would be the classic visual image of it. And the Lord would be urging us to pray earnestly that we are not led in that downward spiral6. His conversation in Gethsemane, both with the disciples and with His Father, had many points of contact with the text of the Lord’s Prayer. “Watch and pray that you enter not into temptation” (Matthew 26:41) would perhaps be His equivalent of “lead us not into temptation but deliver us from evil”.
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Author: Duncan Heaster
Keywords: Satanology, Satan, devil, evil one, deliver us from evil, deliver us from the evil one, Tertullian
Bible reference(s): Matthew 6:13, Luke 11:4
Source: “The Real Devil A Biblical Exploration.”
Page indexed by: inWORD Bible Software.