What Does It Mean to Have God as Our Father?
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Have you ever found yourself continuing to encounter the same idea in one form or another? Lately I have been reading and thinking about two related thoughts—the fatherhood of God and the love of the Father for his children. Psalm 103:13 states, “As a father shows compassion to his children, so the LORD shows compassion to those who fear him.” We have God as our Father, and our Father compassionately loves us.
First, let’s consider the wonder of having God as our Father.
Here are two passages in Galatians where we read about the truth of God as our Father:
For in Christ Jesus you are all sons of God, through faith. (Gal. 3:26)
But when the fullness of time had come, God sent forth his Son, born of woman, born under the law, to redeem those who were under the law, so that we might receive adoption as sons. And because you are sons, God has sent the Spirit of his Son into our hearts, crying, “Abba! Father!” So you are no longer a slave, but a son, and if a son, then an heir through God. (Gal. 4:4-7)
J.I. Packer captures these truths from Galatians in his classic Knowing God:
You sum up the whole of New Testament teaching in a single phrase, if you speak of it as a revelation of the Fatherhood of the holy Creator. In the same way, you sum up the whole of New Testament religion if you describe it as the knowledge of God as one’s holy Father. If you want to judge how well a person understands Christianity, find out how much he makes of the thought of being God’s child, and having God as his Father. If this is not the thought that prompts and controls his worship and prayers and his whole outlook on life, it means that he does not understand Christianity very well at all. For everything that Christ taught, everything that makes the New Testament new, and better than the Old, everything that is distinctively Christian as opposed to merely Jewish, is summed up in the knowledge of the Fatherhood of God. (Packer, Knowing God, p. 201)
Second, our Father loves us.
I encountered this truth not only from Psalm 103, but also from my study of Psalm 136, which repeats 26 times, “for his steadfast love endures forever.” Eighteenth-century theologian Jonathan Edwards writes:
His essence being love, he is as it were an infinite ocean of love without shores and bottom, yea, and without a surface. Those that God is pleased to make the objects of his love, let them be who they will, or what they will—never so mean, never so great sinners—they are the objects of a love that is infinitely full and sufficient. (Edwards, Sermon on Romans 2:10, December, 1740)
I want to pause and ask one question: When was the last time you thought of the Father’s love for you as his child? I mean, really thought about it to the point that you have reveled in the truth and truly embraced all this means. Take the time to be left amazed at a love that is great, bottomless, infinite, steadfast, and true for his children—a love that cannot be used up, cannot be extinguished, and cannot come to an end.
How much are you making of being God’s child and having God as your Father?
Recently I was in a meeting in which I heard a prayer that made me pause. A person was praying to the Father and said, “You love us because of your Son.” While the prayer was well-meaning, taken at face value, it says something about the Father that simply is not true. Sinclair Ferguson writes of this in The Whole Christ:
[There] is a phenomenon we have met before in these pages: the difficulty some Christians have in believing that they are freely justified by the Father, who in love sent his Son for them. They may have been nurtured in a womb of preaching that has portrayed Christ as one who by his sacrifice persuades a wrathful Father to pardon us, in view of what he (Christ) has done. When grace no longer reaches back into the fountainhead, then deep and suspicious thoughts of God the Father develop, and assurance is not possible” (pp. 199-200)
God (the Father) “so loved the world that he gave his only Son” (John 3:16).
The prayer I heard implies the Father only loves us because of the Son. This could not be further from the truth; remember, God (the Father) “so loved the world that he gave his only Son” (John 3:16). John expresses amazement at this in 1 John 3:1:
See what kind of love the Father has given to us, that we should be called children of God; and so we are. The reason why the world does not know us is that it did not know him.
This is also the truth of Ephesians 1:5 that the Father, “in love predestined us for adoption to himself as sons through Jesus Christ.” Ferguson goes on to quote John Owen who beautifully writes about the tenderness of God to his children:
Few can carry up their hearts and minds to this height by faith, as to rest their souls in the love of the Father; they live below it, in the troublesome region of hopes and fears, storms and clouds. All here is serene and quiet. But how to attain to this pitch they know not. This is the will of God, that he may always be eyed as benign, kind, tender, loving, and unchangeable therein; and that peculiarly as the Father, as the great fountain and spring of all gracious communications and fruits of love. This is that which Christ came to reveal.[1]
Jesus reveals the love of the Father; he does not create or enable the Father’s love.
God the Father is absolutely, completely, and totally to us what he reveals himself to be to us in Christ. What I want for you is to realize the profound love of the Father for you. May we believe the truth of John 17:23, that “the Father loves you even as He loves His Son” and that the security and comfort of this love provides us all we need for each moment of all of our days.
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Notes:
[1] John Owen, The Works of John Owen, 24 vols., ed. W. H. Goold (Edinburgh: Johnstone & Hunter, 1850-1855), 2.23