Verse of the day · October 15
What does it mean for prayer to be set forth as incense in Psalm 141:2?
Banished from the altar, he offered the two things still on him.
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Let my prayer be set forth before thee as incense; and the lifting up of my hands as the evening sacrifice.
Psalm 141:2
The tabernacle had two altars and they did different work. Out in the open stood the one the animals were killed on. Inside, in front of the veil, stood a gold one, and incense was burned there — twice a day, morning and evening. The smoke poured off it while the people outside were at prayer, and their praying was understood to be going up along with it.
The man praying here is David. He had been banished from God's court and could not attend the sacrifice or the incense. He was far from the tabernacle, hunted by men who meant to take his life, with no way to worship in the manner the law laid down; what he was asking God for included food and safety for himself and for his men.
Incense was not simply lit and left. The spice was beaten and pounded before it was used, and prayer that God accepts comes out of a heart broken the same way. Then it was kindled, with fire fetched from the altar outside. Then it was devoutly presented. The offering of incense had rules of its own to be observed, and an offering that broke them was rejected. So asking to be treated as incense is not asking for an easier standard: not every prayer is certain of being accepted. But the thing that settles it is not in the worshipper. Pure, holy, fervent prayer is made acceptable by being brought by Christ as High Priest, because through him every sacrifice is acceptable to God. Prayer has a sweet smell to God, the way incense does; and incense has no smell without fire under it, and neither has prayer, without the fire of holy love and fervour.
And yet none of that shuts out a poor prayer. A prayer can be painful and feeble, worth calling nothing better than a cry — and it is a cry to the Lord, and that is what ennobles it. There is a voice to the great Father in every cry and groan and tear of his children, and he can understand what they mean when they are quite unable to put it into words.
Set forth carries more than it sounds like. The Hebrew word means to fit, to establish, to make firm, and he is asking for a prayer that is not feeble, not fading, not easily scattered, but firm and secure. A prayer on its way up can be beaten back, the way smoke is, by earthly imaginings that cut across it; it thins out by degrees and comes to nothing. Hence the request that this one be established — that it neither evaporate of itself nor get blown about. Prayer is not easy work requiring no thought: it has to be set forth, and set forth before the Lord, which means praying with a sense that he is present and a reverence for his name.
The evening offering takes more untangling, because two things went up at that hour together. The word the psalm uses is minchah, which is generally taken for the unbloody offering, the one brought out of gratitude: bread made of fine flour, with oil and frankincense on it. On that reading he may not be pointing at a killed sacrifice at all. But the flour offering went up beside the lamb that was killed every evening, so either way, the killing outside was going on at the same moment. One reason given for the evening rather than the morning is that the evening offering was the last sacrifice of the day, with none after it, and was reckoned the most acceptable — and that hour was the hour for prayer. And one suggested reason points forward: perhaps the evening offering was the nobler of the two. It was read as a figure of the offering Christ made on the cross, which was also made in the evening.
Then the hands. Lifting them up was a prayer gesture, and a very ancient one, among Jews and Gentiles alike, and the phrase is put for praying itself. The raised hand means the raised heart, and for a man who could not lift a sacrifice it went up in a sacrifice's place. It carries a condition of its own: raised hands are acceptable when the heart goes up with them, and when the prayer is made in the name and faith of Christ. Bent knees and lifted hands are the marks of prayer that is in earnest and expecting something.
He wants his own humble cries and prayers regarded as much as the appointed morning and evening sacrifices of the holy place. Notice what he asks for. Whatever form the prayer took, his one desire was that it be accepted. And it is by no means too bold, because in God's own reckoning what is spiritual stands higher than what is ceremonial, and what a man says with his lips is a truer sacrifice than the calves in his stall. A prayer prayed in faith may be expected to please God better than an ox or a bullock does.
None of which makes prayer into the thing a sacrifice was. Prayer is a sacrifice of a different kind — the offering up of the soul and its best affections. The sacrifice that atoned was Christ's offering up of himself. He put an end to the law's outward, bodily rites and set up spiritual offerings in their place — prayer among them — the kind that acknowledge God rather than atone for anything. The offering is laid on Christ, who is the altar that makes any gift holy, and it is brought by him as High Priest. What makes it acceptable is his blood, his righteousness, and his speaking to God on the man's behalf.
Which is what had always been true of the incense. It never stood on its own. It was of no use until fire was put under it, and that fire had to come off the altar outside. Without live coals carried in from the place where the killing was done, the incense could not be kindled. And once a year, on the day of atonement, when the high priest carried blood into the innermost room, he was forbidden on pain of death to go in without a censer smoking in his hand — so even at the highest point of the year's service, not even he came near without that smoke over him, and that smoke needed those coals.
Put as he might have put it himself: this address of mine has to go without all the solemn preparation your tabernacle service calls for — the cloud of incense and perfume, the offering of fine flour. What he has instead is a heart and two hands, lifted up in this sad hour of his distress, asking for a deliverance and a safe way out for himself and the men with him.
So a man kept from the altar asked to be measured by what went on at it. That is not the softer arrangement it sounds like. Some of it is asked of the worshipper: the broken and contrite heart, the devout presenting, the heart lifted up with the hands. And the very next thing he asks for in the psalm is help with himself: "Set a watch, O LORD, before my mouth; keep the door of my lips." No watchfulness or resolution of his own was enough to govern his tongue, much less his heart, without the special grace of God — so he asks for that grace as well. But the fire was what everything else waited on. The beaten spice sat on that gold altar and smelled of nothing until the coals were carried across to it, and the coals were not made there; they were fetched from the sacred fire already burning on the other altar. The heat a praying man needs is real, and he does not strike it himself. It is fire from above, the Spirit of God, and he has it from Christ, who is the altar. So he offered the two things still on him, from a long way off, out of a bad hour, with nothing in his hands but his hands — and the thing that made them count he had from Christ too.
Drawn from Matthew Henry, John Gill, Adam Clarke, Albert Barnes and Charles Spurgeon. How these teachings are made