What Is God's Name? (Part 4)

We've been talking here about God's name as Father (we'll look at God's other names later).  We said that we can let God, as a perfect Father, define
for us what fatherhood should be.  And since none of our physical dads measured up to God's perfect standard, let's recognize that they did "they best they knew how" (Heb. 12:10) and learn to forgive them for being human, however long that takes us.  That way we stop missing out.  Make sense?

Jesus said in Mat. 23:9 "you have one Father, and he is in heaven," and he was specifically taking all our patriarchal ideas of fatherhood and booting them out of the discussion, to focus on who God really is.  In Mat. 11:27, Jesus insists that one of his jobs is to tell us about the Father:  "no one truly knows the Father except the Son and those to whom the Son chooses to reveal him."  So in Jesus we have 'inside information' on God the Father!  And we'll see that our human negative concepts of fatherhood as a closed patriarchal system, or an abusive, angry authority figure, just don't hold up to Biblical scrutiny.

So, is God a Father in the same way as a physical father?  No, it's not the same idea, and we don't think of him creating children like the Greek and Roman gods did.  But to help us understand him a little, God has "commandeered human language and named himself as Father" according to James B. Torrance.  This was a major topic in the church, in the 300's AD.  We began to realize we should be very careful when using words to describe God, since human language is so limited! 

But when we think "theocentrically"  -- by attempting to understand God from his own words -- we see a different picture. God the Father is not simply called "a father" at random.  Jesus calls God his Father about 60 times in the Gospels (half of those in John).  He's "our Father" twice in Isaiah; and eight times in Paul's epistles plus once in 1 Peter, he is called "the Father of our Lord Jesus Christ."   He's the Father in relationship, because he's the Father of the Son.  This is not the result of a male-dominated set of Biblical writers, but from his own words.

We'll close with this one thought:  God the Father is love (1 John 4:8) and it's clear from Jesus' own words that he loves you and me: "May they experience such perfect unity that the world will know that you sent me and that you love them as much as you love me" (John 17:23).  Maybe your own dad knew how to love you well, but your heavenly Father loves infinitely more.  Will you let him love you?