If you remember the first word of the Ten Commandments was ‘Anochi’, which meant: your authority is multiplying inside the hedge of praise and submission. The first word of the Ten Commandments was Grace. The first word of the Ten Commandments was: this is my idea to increase you, to make you bigger.
He says: if you want to live a big successful life, you've got to organise your life, to where: God is with you all the time; that you don't worship a God that's: with you one minute, and not with you the next. That's going to lead to all kinds of problems, so we can't do that.
We also can't make God manageable; we have to examine our ideas around God.
Perception is everything. The Hebrew word for iniquity is the word Avon (A-V-N).The Hebrew language was originally pictures, not letters, so every Hebrew letter is a picture; so every Hebrew word is a comic strip. Avon was: ‘an eye’, ‘a hook’, and ‘fish-multiplying’. So a Hebrew person read the word ‘iniquity’ as: “whatever your eye hooks to, multiplies”.
Here's the principle of the second commandment: however you conceptualise, God gets huge - and you actually begin to buy into this lie that says: you're right, and everybody else is wrong – as if you, a 4-D person, has figured this infinitely-dimensional God out; and we can't do that. We can't live like that!
So my first question is: where is God? In white European cultures, innately we believe that: God is in heaven. We believe that God is in heaven, because we come from Europe; there's a really big powerful church in Europe, with big buildings named after apostles, who they said (they've done a lot of good things in the world - I'm not damning them) - in their idea of God, God was: ‘way up there’; and we're: ‘way down here’. You need to have somebody go between you and God - Gods are far off.
They even influenced the translation of the Lord's Prayer. When Jesus was talking about how to relate with God, He said: ...and when you pray, do not keep on babbling (like the Pentecostals do), for they think they'll be heard because of their many words. Do not be like them, nor in your prayers make it about your needs - for don't you know, your Father in heaven knows what you need, even before you ask.
Jesus says: if you want to have the best relationship with God, don't make your prayer life about words, and about needs. Well, umm hello!
Let me ask you this question: if you took all the words, and you took all the needs out of your prayer life, what would be left?
Jesus says: if you want the best life with God, don't make your prayer life about words, and about needs. But when you pray, say this: “My Father, who is in heaven” - horrible translation. The word there is ‘Ouranos’, which is plural. The problem with translating it 'heaven' is that: 1) it doesn't fit; 2) if our Father is in heaven, where's heaven? Is it somewhere in New Zealand? Is it in Longreach, Australia? Is it in Utah somewhere? Like where's heaven?
So Jesus would have been saying: My Father, who is in a place, which I have no idea how to get to? No, come on!
If you're going to translate it ‘heaven’, you have to at least translate it ‘heavens’, because it's plural; but in 90 per cent of Hellenistic literature, the word Ouranos is translated 'air that we breathe'.
So Jesus was saying: my Father (who is as close to me as the air that I'm breathing) - hallowed be thy name. The word ‘hallowed’ just means: to ‘render’, ‘acknowledge’, or ‘become aware of’.
As a strict Jew, this is how you would read it: “the supply of everything I need - which is as close to me as the air that I'm breathing - I stop and become aware of that”.
The Hebrew people called it ‘God-awareness’; that we walk in an awareness of God all the time - and that is prayer.
It actually fits the first mention of the word prayer in the Bible, in Genesis 4, last verse - “Finally, the sons of Enosh called upon the name of the Lord”.
The word ‘called’ there, is three letters in Hebrew - three heads. The first letter is the picture of: ‘front of the head’; the second letter is the picture of: ‘back of the head’; and the third picture is: an ‘ox head going into a yoke’.