Hank's Bible Study Resources

We left a question hanging three posts ago and it is time to pay it off.

Jesus said your Father already knows what you need before you ask Him. If that is true, and it is, then what exactly is the point of asking? Worse, what is the point of asking twice? If the first request landed on a Father who already had the information, the second one starts to look like nagging.

And yet the same Jesus who said God already knows told two stories about people who would not stop knocking. Both stories are strange. Both of them, on the surface, make God sound like an obstacle you have to wear down.

They do not mean that. But you have to read them the way a first-century listener would.

The Man Who Would Not Get Up

Luke puts this story immediately after the model prayer, which is not an accident. The disciples asked how to pray, Jesus gave them the shape, and then He told them this.

A traveler arrives at your house at midnight. In that culture you are obligated to feed him, and you have nothing in the house. So you go bang on a neighbor’s door. Understand the house you are banging on. One room, dirt floor, the whole family asleep on mats, probably the animals inside for the night. There is no way to answer that door quietly. Getting up wakes everybody.

I say to you, though he will not rise and give to him because he is his friend, yet because of his persistence he will rise and give him as many as he needs.

Luke 11:8 NKJV

Persistence here is anaideia (ἀναίδεια), Strong’s G335, and it appears exactly once in the New Testament. It is built from the negative prefix and aidōs, the word for shame or a sense of propriety. So the flat meaning is shamelessness. The KJV went with importunity. Modern versions mostly go with persistence.

Here is where it gets interesting, and I am going to be straight with you that this one is genuinely contested. Whose shamelessness is Jesus talking about? The Greek allows either man.

The traditional reading puts it on the man at the door. He has no shame. He keeps knocking past the point where a polite man would have gone home, and he gets what he came for.

The other reading, which has gained ground among scholars who work in Middle Eastern honor culture, puts it on the sleeper. In a village that small, a man who refused hospitality at midnight would be shamed by the whole community before noon. He gets up to avoid the shame of being that neighbor.

I lean toward the first, but notice something. The lesson lands either way, because the parable is not a comparison. It is a contrast, and Jesus builds these constantly. If a reluctant neighbor with a house full of sleeping children will finally get up, how much more will a Father who was awake the whole time and wanted to give it to you?

The Judge Who Got a Black Eye

Luke 18 runs the same play with worse characters. Luke even tells us the point before he tells the story, which he almost never does.

Then He spoke a parable to them, that men always ought to pray and not lose heart.

Luke 18:1 NKJV

A judge who fears neither God nor man. A widow, which in that world means no husband, no income, no standing, and no leverage of any kind. She has nothing to offer him and nothing to threaten him with. All she has is the ability to come back.

So she comes back. And the judge caves, and the reason he gives is one of the funniest lines in the Gospels once you see the Greek under it.

Yet because this widow troubles me I will avenge her, lest by her continual coming she weary me.

Luke 18:5 NKJV

Weary me is hôpiázō (ὑπωπιάζω), G5299, and it is a boxing term. It means to strike under the eye. To give somebody a black eye. Paul uses the same word in 1 Corinthians 9:27 about disciplining his own body, and there it clearly carries the sense of a beating.

A corrupt judge with the power of Rome behind him is worried that a widow is going to give him a black eye. That is the picture Jesus painted, and it would have gotten a laugh.

Then comes the contrast again. If an unjust judge who does not care about her at all will finally rule in her favor, what will a righteous Judge do for children He loves?

Keep On Asking

The famous verse in Matthew 7 hides its most important feature in the grammar.

Ask, and it will be given to you; seek, and you will find; knock, and it will be opened to you.

Matthew 7:7 NKJV

All three verbs are present imperatives, which in Greek carry ongoing action. This is not ask once. It is ask and keep asking. And notice the three verbs escalate. Asking is words. Seeking puts your feet in it. Knocking means you have found the door and you are not leaving the porch.

So Why Ask at All

Here is the answer to the question we started with.

Asking was never about informing God. He is not waiting on your data. Asking is what a relationship sounds like from the side that has needs. My grandchildren tell me things I already know. That is not a defect in the conversation. That is the conversation.

And persistence is not you wearing God down. It is God working on you in the waiting, and it is also something else, something most teaching on this subject leaves out entirely.

Sometimes the delay is not on His end at all.

Do not fear, Daniel, for from the first day that you set your heart to understand, and to humble yourself before your God, your words were heard; and I have come because of your words. But the prince of the kingdom of Persia withstood me twenty-one days.

Daniel 10:12-13 NKJV

Twenty-one days of nothing. Daniel had every reason to conclude that heaven was not listening or that his prayer had been refused. Both conclusions would have been wrong. The answer was dispatched on day one and ran into resistance on the way down.

I wrote about that passage at length in The Prince of Persia Kept an Angel Waiting, and I bring it up here because it changes what silence means. Silence is data about your circumstances. It is not data about the Father’s disposition toward you.

So keep knocking. Not because He is reluctant, but because on day nineteen you have no way of knowing what day it is.

Going Deeper

Read Luke 11:5-13 and Luke 18:1-8 back to back this week and mark every place Jesus is arguing from lesser to greater. Rabbis called that move light and heavy, and once you see it you will find it all over His teaching.

Next in the series, we stop being polite. The prayers in the Bible that got angry, and why the church quit reading them out loud.