With Christ in the school of prayer, by Andrew Murray, excerpt 119

This post continues a series of excerpts from With Christ in the School of Prayer, by Andrew Murray. I thank the Christian Classics Ethereal Library for making this public domain work available. To see their post of the book, go here. The previous post in this series is here. As usual in this blog, long quotations are in this color. In this excerpt, Murray continues a discussion about prayer and the Trinity. His book is based on Mark 11:22-24. 

‘Whose is this image?’
Or, Prayer in Harmony with the Destiny of Man.
‘He saith unto them, Whose is this image and superscription?—Matt. xxi. 20.
‘And God said, Let us make man in our image, after our likeness.’—Gen. i. 26.
‘WHOSE is this image?’ It was by this question that Jesus foiled His enemies, when they thought to take Him, and settled the matter of duty in regard to the tribute. The question and the principle it involves are of universal application. Nowhere more truly than in man himself. The image he bears decides his destiny. Bearing God’s image, he belongs to God: prayer to God is what he was created for. Prayer is part of the wondrous likeness he bears to His Divine original; of the deep mystery of the fellowship of love in which the Three-One has His blessedness, prayer is the earthly image and likeness.
The more we meditate on what prayer is, and the wonderful power with God which it has, the more we feel constrained to ask who and what man is, that such a place in God’s counsels should have been allotted to him. Sin has so degraded him, that from what he is now we can form no conception of what he was meant to be. We must turn back to God’s own record of man’s creation to discover there what God’s purpose was, and what the capacities with which man was endowed for the fulfilment of that purpose.
Man’s destiny appears clearly from God’s language at creation. It was to fill, to subdue, to have dominion over the earth and all in it. All the three expressions show us that man was meant, as God’s representative, to hold rule here on earth. As God’s viceroy he was to fill God’s place: himself subject to God, he was to keep all else in subjection to Him. It was the will of God that all that was to be done on earth should be done through him: the history of the earth was to be entirely in his hands.