Genesis 4:26

THE FIRST TRUE WORSHIPPERS

‘Then began men to call upon the name of the Lord.’

Genesis 4:26

Prayer is speaking to God—on any subject, with any object, in any place, and in any way.

I. Prayer so regarded is an instinct.—It seems to be natural to man to look upwards and address himself to his God. Even in the depth of lost knowledge and depraved feeling, the instinct of prayer will assert itself. A nation going to war with another nation will call upon its God for success and victory; and an individual man, from the bedside of a dying wife or child, will invoke the aid of one supposed to be mighty, to stay the course of a disease which the earthly physician has pronounced incurable and mortal. Just as the instinct of nature brings the child in distress or hunger to a father’s knee or to a mother’s bosom, even so does created man turn in great misery to a faithful Creator, and throw himself upon His compassion and invoke His aid.

II. But prayer is a mystery too.—The mysteriousness of prayer is an argument for its reasonableness. It is not a thing which common men would have thought of or gone after for themselves. The idea of holding a communication with a distant, an unseen, a spiritual being, is an idea too sublime, too ethereal for any but poets or philosophers to have dreamed of, had it not been made instinctive by the original Designer of our spiritual frame.

III. Prayer is also a revelation.—Many things waited for the coming of Christ to reveal them, but prayer waited not. Piety without knowledge there might be; piety without prayer could not be. And so Christ had no need to teach as a novelty the duty or the privilege of prayer. He was able to assume that all pious men, however ignorant, prayed; and to say therefore only this,—‘When ye pray, say after this manner.’

Dean Vaughan.

Illustration

‘Unfallen man held communion with his Maker of a more direct and confidential character than a being spoilt and deformed by sin is at present capable of. But some communication and intercourse with God remained or was reinstituted after the first transgression. Even Cain, much more Abel, addresses and is answered by the Lord his God. There seems to have been after them some revival in the form of ritual and sacrifice of an open quest and search for God by His sinful children.’