What Is God's Name? (Part 5)

Have you ever understood the Bible's names for God, about how and why God is called Father, Son and Holy Spirit?  Have you ever wondered -- or doubted -- whether we can trust
those names?  And by "trust" I mean two things:  the Bible being accurate in its teaching, and trusting God intimately as we come to know him more every day.  I've been trying to understand that myself, and am attempting to explain it briefly here.

So far we've talked mostly about the name Father, and why the Bible describes him that way.  Let's examine, briefly, whether that name includes gender, or male sexuality. We've already said that Jesus called God his Father many times in the Gospels; that God is called the Father of our Lord; and that Jesus said he came to reveal the Father (John 14:9, Matt. 11:27).  In Matt. 23:9 Jesus says to us not to call a human person Father, but why would he say that?  To stop us from projecting human ideas onto God, and polluting our view of him, from two sources:  from elevating a human person too much, and from our notion of fatherhood, however good or bad.  (We've talked already of the difficulty some have of not being able to think of God as Father, because of problems with human fathers.  This is what Jesus rules out here.)

Some say that the name or title "Father" is a way to make male humans more important, and that men wrote the Bible to oppress women.  So then, is the Bible's description of God any different than other religions of the time when it was written?  Here's an extremely brief sketch.  Actually, the writers of the Bible could see many examples in the pagan world around them, of  mythological deities described as being male or female, like humans, and because of their greater powers they misused their male or female qualities worse than the humans did.  Some societies had female gods to worship, but history shows that didn't make the status of women any better.  Because of the broken relations between the sexes in the world around them, people predictably worshiped the mythological gods in broken ways:  there was temple prostitution and all kinds of other horrible activity, in the name of their gods, whether male or female.  The Bible was specifically, carefully, written to exclude all those ideas in referring to the true God.

So what do we come back to?  The God of the Bible, who is described as infinitely loving, giving and concerned for us; who has given himself, in the person of Jesus, to rescue us; and unlike the pagan gods of mythology, doesn't have the weaknesses we do.  We can trust God as Father, so long as we think of him in the way he describes himself and not in other ways.  We'll look at some other ways language is used to describe God -- including some feminine characteristics!-- next time.