Editor's note: This is a reprint of a previous column.
"And my soul hungered; and I kneeled down before my Maker, and I cried unto Him in mighty prayer and supplication for mine own soul ... " (Enos 1:4)
"Supplication" is defined as a humble or earnest petition or
entreaty, a humble prayer addressed to God that often specifically
petitions for a special blessing.
The root of supplication comes from "to be flat," or pliant. It also
has the sense of supple or foldable. In a literal sense, to supplicate
means to be on folded knees. Another sense of the word is to beg humbly.
The word supplication, as used in the Old Testament, is a
translation of a number of words, which mean to bend or to stoop; to
beg for favor, grace or pity; to entreat; or to search for the answer
to a hard question, proverb or riddle. The Greek word in the New
Testament is essentially the same with the additional sense of
beseeching or begging as binding oneself.
Very often in scripture and in more modern usage, supplication is
used in conjunction with prayer, as in prayer and supplication. The
question is whether this is simply repetition for effect or redundancy,
or if there really are separate meanings for prayer and supplication.
In fact, sometimes prayer and supplication are used as repetition for
emphasis. For example, Psalms 6:9 reads: "The Lord hath heard my
supplication; the Lord will receive my prayer." However, there are a
number of cases where supplication is used as a special application of
prayer.
Prayer encompasses all forms of how we approach our Heavenly Father.
Prayer, while it can be supplication, simply means to ask or to
entreat, whereas the sense of supplication is of a more intense nature.
So, in general, we would not speak of supplication before our meals or
in invocations or benedictions at church meetings.What Enos did was
clearly more than his typical prayers. Another example is Melchizedek,
who "offered up prayers and supplications with strong (mighty and
powerful) crying and tears unto Him that was able to save him from
death" (Hebrews 5:7).
Another good example of this intensity is the Prophet Joseph Smith,
who tells us that "After I had retired to my bed for the night, I
betook myself to prayer and supplication to Almighty God for
forgiveness of all my sins and follies, and also for a manifestation to
me that I might know of my state and standing before Him."
When the word supplication is used in the scriptures, in this deeper
sense, it is most often in the case of special, almost unique pleadings
and cries of the heart for very particular blessings and manifestations
and, thus, a much more intense form of prayer.