The head of the Roman Catholic Church is talking about changing one of the best-known and most widely recited passages of scripture.
The Lord’s Prayer is recited by millions of Catholics and Protestants every day across the globe. But the pope is open to changing the Lord’s Prayer. The line he has a problem with is: “And lead us not into temptation” – and he suggests, for the sake of theological clarity, that a better translation might be something along the lines of: “Do not let us fall into temptation.”
“This is not a good translation,” the pontiff said. “It is not he that pushes me into temptation and then sees how I fall. A father does not do this. A father quickly helps those who are provoked into Satan’s temptation.” Francis indicated this, or a similar translation, should be implemented worldwide.
“What the pope has done here is very, very dangerous and is really quite breathtaking in its hubris,” says Dr. Richard Land, the president of the Southern Evangelical Seminary.
“I looked it up,” Land continues, “and what is translated is what is actually said by Jesus in the New Testament: ‘Do not lead us into temptation but deliver us from evil.’”
James 1:13 teaches that God is not the author of temptation. “I understand the Pope’s concern, [but] I just am horrified by his solution,” Land offers. “You interpret the Bible with the Bible.”
The prayer asks “the Lord to protect us… so that we don’t come into the path of temptation; and if we do, to deliver us from the wiles and the treachery of the evil one.”
“When you start thinking that you can change the very words that Jesus spoke to his disciples, then what can’t you change?” he asks. “This strikes at the bedrock of the Christian faith.”
The popes remarks should not be a surprise for the Christian who thinks that the Catholic Church can change the word of God at will. After all, they claim authority over the Bible because they changed the Sabbath to Sunday, which most Christians now observe. If the pope can the change the Sabbath, which is in the Ten Commandments, what is to stop him from changing anything he wants.
“And he shall speak great words against the most High, and shall wear out the saints of the most High, and think to change times and laws: and they shall be given into his hand until a time and times and the dividing of time.” Daniel 7:25.