Arguably, the church in the global South, because it has never suffered the fact-faith divide of the post-Enlightenment West, is able to help the global church understand the theological and practical force of Jesus’ words where he taught us to pray, ‘lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from the evil one.’ Christians in the global South know intimately the workings of the spirits and deities because so many have recently emerged from a world where those spirits held them in bondage. Precisely because it is the Spirit of God that frees them from that bondage, they know firsthand the power of what Jesus taught us to pray in this prayer.
While most of the western church prays, ‘deliver us from evil’, the better translation of what Jesus taught us to pray is ‘deliver us from the evil one’. Which we chose depends on a fine grammatical point: is tou ponerou to be read as a neuter or masculine form of the genitive? If neuter, then it means ‘evil’, but if masculine, then it is best translated ‘evil one’. The most natural reading here is the masculine, for two reasons.
First, in the New Testament, ho poneros is regularly used to name Satan (Matthew 5:37, 6:13, 13:19, 38, John 17:15, Ephesians 6:16, 2 Thessalonians 3:3, 1 John 2:13-14, 3:12, 5:18-19). Satan is the evil one and he, along with his minions, is one constant source of temptation in the lives of believers.
Second, when we look at the structure of this petition, as Matthew records it for us, we see immediately that it reflects Hebrew parallelism. We might diagram the parallelism this way:
Lead us not into temptation
but deliver us from the evil one.
The verbs, prepositions, and nouns all line up. By recognizing this structure, we see that temptation is the work of the evil one. Of course, not all temptation is his work; but here, Jesus is alerting us to those particular temptations that Satan introduces into our lives (… did God really say?). In effect, Jesus is teaching us to pray, “Father, direct our steps away from that world of temptation in which the evil one loves to operate, and instead, bring your power to bear and deliver us from him who has only our destruction in mind.”
Evangelicalism in the global South, because it has not lost the biblical understanding of the powerful spiritual forces at work in our world and sees reality as necessarily a product of material and spiritual cause and effect – both of which must be accounted for if we are to rightly understand the world we live in, is able to teach the global church something of the urgency and practical power in what Jesus is teaching us to pray here.