This morning, I’d like us to take a look at prayer in the context of the Old Testament and see if there is indeed a difference between prayer in the Old Testament and prayer in the New Testament.

In order for us to do this, however, we must go back to the beginning. In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God (John 1:1). From the time when God created the world and Man, not only did He walk with man, but He spoke with man face-to-face. Communicating and interacting with His creation face-to-face was the reason God created man.

Now, the Bible doesn’t literally tell us this, but with a good reading of Genesis 2, how can we possibly surmise any other argument? It’s very important that we begin with this assumption because I am going to tell you this morning, God did not intend for man to communicate with Him through prayer. 

But then again, God did not intend for His creation to rebel against Him. Let’s take a closer look at chapter two of Genesis and find the verse where God tells Adam, Eve, their children, or anyone else to “pray” if we want to talk to Him, or hear from Him.

So, if we were to stop here at chapter two, and turn to the New Testament, we would have to agree that something went wrong between the time God created Adam and Jesus’s entrance onto the world stage. There definitely is a difference between that act of prayer in the Old Testament and that in the New Testament. 

Let me just say again that I believe that God did not intend for prayer to be our primary way of communicating with Him. With an overall reading of the Bible, I don’t see that God created the world and mankind to live separate from Him and converse through “prayer.”

God created the world. He created the Garden of Eden. Then He created man and placed him in the garden. But what does that mean to us? What does that have to do with prayer?

Well, in order to more fully grasp the concept of prayer and its differences between the Testaments, we must look at the bigger picture. While we can draw many conclusions from the Bible on many topics, we also understand that no book of the Bible stands alone. 

Before we can really get into a discussion on the differences of prayer between the Old and New Testaments, we have to look at the whole story. We need a broader view of God’s plan of redemption in Christ Jesus. 

So, let’s ask ourselves, did God create the world, a garden, and humans so that we could pray to Him? I posit that the quick answer is “No.”  

Of course, I must be careful here because our discussion can end up going in a myriad of directions. So, even as I mention or talk about a number of different things here, I do so only as laying a foundation for our overall picture. Why did God create the world? He created the world so that He could live among us.

A quick search on the internet tells us that the word “kingdom” is referred to over 350 times in the Bible. If we narrow our search to “kingdom of God,” we get about 65 instances. Again, before we can talk about the differences between OT prayer and NT prayer, we have to come to terms with why Jesus entered the scene—the pages of history.

The Bible tells us that Jesus came into the world to “usher in the kingdom of God.” While this is a very good understanding of Jesus’ work and the whole of the New Testament, we might be missing a very important truth.

© 2025 Clayton Moore|mooreofclayton