What is important for us is that we must go before God in prayer in our public worship in our private worship with a real sense of dependence upon the Lord for everything. The Apostle makes clear that he is using a symbol when he calls them ‘holy hands’. Were the hands to be washed and cleansed, or do we see immediately that this is a figure? It simply means that your deeds have got to be holy. You don't pray without confessing your sin. ‘If I regard iniquity in my heart, the Lord will not hear me’ (Psalm 66:18). If I am daydreaming with myself at centre stage, I won't be heard. We all slip and slide, but we won’t be heard if we do not come with repentant hearts and a pledge to do better.
Holy hands are outstretched in dependence upon God figuratively speaking, but they are the same hands which in the ancient culture you did your daily work with. The hands stand for deeds, and the lifting up of holy hands simply indicates coming before God in a spirit of complete dependence upon him and with righteous lives. How can you come before God to pray for the salvation of other people, when you yourself are living an unsanctified and an indifferent life? You would be a hypocrite.
How can you pray for lost souls from full hearts if what is really engaging your mind is squabbling and anger and competitiveness? We are coming together as the people of God, and there is carnal disputing on our minds, and yet we go through the motion of praying for the lost, but it's an act of hypocrisy. Neither must there be squabbling between us and the people we are praying for. How can you squabble with the people you work with, or with the members of your family, and resent what they do, and then close your eyes and piously pray for them? How can I honour the New Testament command to pray for leaders, when am anti-government, and get very worked up about these things, and maybe even refer to them in discussion as detestable people?
In many Christian gatherings there is much lifting up of hands, and it has become the way to worship and the way to pray, and hands are either lifted or stretched out or motioned about with. All sorts of things are done with the hands, and it's become essential to prayer that there are bodily expressions, and a great attention is paid to this. Why do some not believe this is required by Scripture, or that it is right to engage in these things? What should we be doing? Does it not say here lifting up holy hands? We remind ourselves that this is the only place in the New Testament where there is any reference to the lifting up of hands in prayer. Let us be careful about this. There is another lifting up of hands at the end of Luke's Gospel where the Lord Jesus lifts up his hands in order to bless his disciples. That, of course, is quite different. But this is the only place where the church is commanded to lift hands, and we never base what we do upon a superficial reading of one text only. Our forebears for generations have always taken the view that the Apostle Paul is speaking here in a figurative way and that this is a picture, that it is equivalent to lifting up your heart in prayer (Lamentation 3:41). Were they right? People say that there is much lifting up of hands in prayer in the Old Testament, and then they run away with the idea that, if lifting up of hands is going on all the time in the Old Testament, then in the New Testament they just carried on doing it automatically. But is it true that the people of God lifted up their hands in prayer habitually, regularly, constantly in the Old Testament? And the plain fact is it isn't true. We mustn't be swayed by Charismatic interpretation. There are many genuine Christians who are Charismatics and many mean well, but this hit and run exegesis is very dangerous. This seizing on a little bit of a text and running away with the idea that it is to be literally applied without any serious Bible study is not how we should proceed.
There are ten passages in the Old Testament which refer to some involvement of the hands in prayer. Some of them refer to spreading out of the hands, and some to lifting up of the hands. Several of them are quite clearly figurative, because they involve lifting up the hands and the heart together. The literal lifting up of hands in prayer in those few references in the Old Testament is something which is done either by the leader of a congregation, or by the priests at the time of sacrifice. There is no evidence that it was something that was done by the private individual or the lay believer. Moses, for instance, is praying before a vast concourse of anything up to two million people, his hands are raised up. Why is that? Because the people needed a clear signal when he was praying. There is no forest of hands going up like some kind of a pop concert; there is just Moses raising up his hands, and indicating their dependence upon God and that he is now in prayer on behalf of the vast multitude. The same is true of Solomon when he dedicates the temple, and again, there is a vast number of people. What could be more natural than that he lifts up his hands? In the days of the great Methodist awakening when George Whitfield was preaching on the Kennington Common, he lifted up his hands and he prayed and that was the signal that prayer was going on, and a hush must descend, and reverence must be shown. Are people going to suggest from that, that in the Methodist awakening everybody prayed with their hands raised? Of course not.
When David in the Psalms is away and isolated, and also when the people are in exile away from the temple and away from their sacrifices, they say, ‘Let my prayer be set forth before thee as incense; and the lifting up of my hands as the evening sacrifice’ (Psalm 141:2). That is symbolic language. They are not at the evening sacrifice; they are cut off from the temple, but as they go to their prayers, in their mind's eye they are joining the evening sacrifice and they are following the priest as he raises up his hands. There is no mention that they are literally doing that. They are identifying and joining with the spirit of the worship and its symbols from which they have been cut off. In fact the physical symbols of the Old Testament are de-emphasized in the New Testament. That is one of the great principles of the New Testament: that the physical symbols, the priesthood, the ritual, and what the priests did, is at an end. Now we are to worship in spirit and in truth, and we have an absolute minimum of symbols in our worship. We have baptism and we have the Lord's Supper, specifically ordained by the Lord, and we have no other physical symbols. That was universally understood by all Bible believing people for centuries. Now all that is thrown overboard, and the more you bring in the fleshly, the more you bring in the physical, and it moves from hands to dance, to who knows what? The more you bring this in, the more you minimize heart and spirit. But these are what are important, and that is why we stay with the tradition of our fathers in these matters.
Is posture important in prayer? There are a number of different postures described in the Bible. You find standing in prayer which is obviously a reverent thing to do. You have kneeling in prayer which is obviously a humble thing to do and you have prostration in prayer generally associated with great awe of God, and with praying for things of enormous necessity and significance. You do not have what we call the nonconformist crouch mentioned in prayer anywhere. We take up this posture in the pew which is a concession towards a kneel, but we are still firmly sitting. You don't actually have that in the Scripture anywhere. Does that mean it is unlawful? No, the postures for prayer, particularly in the Old Testament, are not given in an authoritative way anywhere. In fact they tend more to be referred to when they are unusual, and they vary considerably. Often in the Old Testament you have the kneeling but in other places the godly won't kneel, because the worshippers of Baal kneeled. So at the time of Gideon this was the way in which the Lord distinguished between the godly minority among the Jews and the rest. The Lord said to Gideon, leave well alone the people who kneel. The godly would not kneel because they were worried about being identified with Baal worshippers. So there is no norm; it is simply observed in the scripture that sometimes we stand and sometimes we kneel. The important thing is that in our hearts we have the reverence of a standing person; we have the humility of a kneeling person; we have the awe of a prostrated person.
Do we have a Scriptural precedent for shutting the eyes during prayer? No, you don’t find it in Scripture, but of course it is a wholly natural and pious and right thing to do: to focus your heart and your thoughts on the Lord and to shut out all other influences. And yet curiously you will not find it in the Scripture, yet it is extremely helpful in prayer.