The Texts
"The Lord will keep you from all evil; he will keep your life. The Lord will keep your going out and your coming in from this time forth and forevermore."
"The Lord is faithful. He will establish you and guard you against the evil one."
Psalm 121 is one of the Songs of Ascents, a pilgrim's psalm for the journey up to Jerusalem. Its opening question, "I lift up my eyes to the hills. From where does my help come?" is answered immediately and definitively: my help comes from the Lord, who made heaven and earth. What follows is one of the most sustained descriptions of divine keeping in the Psalter: the Lord will not let your foot be moved; He who keeps you will not slumber; the Lord is your keeper; He will keep you from all evil; He will keep your going out and your coming in from this time forth and forevermore. The word keep appears six times. The psalm is not a list of divine attributes; it is a declaration about a specific, active, continuous activity that God performs over the specific, ordinary rhythms of the household's daily life. Second Thessalonians 3:3 is the New Testament form of the same declaration: the Lord is faithful; He will establish you and guard you against the Evil One.
The Evil One: What the Greek Says
Luther opens his treatment of the Seventh Petition by directing the reader to the Greek text. The petition does not read deliver us from evil in a generic sense; it reads deliver us from the Evil One, the Malicious One. Luther teaches that Christ is speaking directly of the devil, gathering everything into one heap so that the entire substance of our prayer is finally directed against our chief arch-enemy. The petition is not an abstract request for better circumstances; it is a prayer directed at a specific personal adversary who is the source and coordinator of every harm that threatens the household.
Luther says the Seventh Petition identifies a specific personal adversary and directs the entire substance of prayer against him. Second Thessalonians 3:3 names the Evil One explicitly. How does identifying the source of household afflictions, broken relationships, financial catastrophe, illness, mental anguish, as the active work of a specific spiritual enemy change the way a family prays about those afflictions, compared to treating them as random misfortunes or consequences of natural processes?
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A Summary of All Petitions
Luther's structural claim about the Seventh Petition is that it is a summary of the six petitions that precede it. The devil's program is to hinder everything the Lord's Prayer asks for: God's name and honor, His kingdom, His will, our daily bread, the forgiveness of sins, and a quiet conscience. The final petition therefore asks to be rid of the one whose interference makes all the earlier petitions necessary. Dear Father, Luther paraphrases it, pray help that we be rid of all these calamities.
Luther says the Seventh Petition gathers and concludes all six preceding petitions, praying against the one whose interference makes every other petition necessary. How does understanding the petition as a summary rather than an addition change the way a household uses it, and what does it mean for the structure of the Lord's Prayer as a whole that it ends not with a doxology about God's power but with a prayer for personal deliverance from a specific enemy?
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The Keeping and the Blessed End
Luther's pastoral instruction about the Seventh Petition is built on a stark assessment of the household's vulnerability. The devil prowls around us relentlessly; unless God actively preserved us we would not be safe even for a single hour. God specifically commands us to pray for all these things affecting our bodily interests so that we learn to seek and expect help from nowhere else but His fatherly hand. The petition is not the expression of a vague hope that things will improve; it is the cry of a household that has understood that it is surrounded, and that the only one who can hold the surrounding force at bay is the Lord who made heaven and earth and who does not slumber.
Luther says the Seventh Petition looks ultimately toward a blessed hour of departure, the final going out of Psalm 121, when God keeps His people through death to Himself. How does holding both the daily keeping and the final keeping in the same petition change the way a family prays when one of its members is dying, and what does the petition require to be said at a deathbed that Luther's pastoral inventory of earthly deliverance alone cannot say?