God, The
Father
…and the
Role Model for us all.
Prologue
Before the birth of Jesus
of Nazareth, God was YHWH, Jehovah, the
Great I Am, the Lord God of Israel, to be feared and respected and (to a significantly lesser extent) loved
by the Hebrew Nation and those who chose to join the Jews (under rather stringent entry conditions) in their worship (Ruth of the eponymous book comes most
immediately to mind).
It was Jesus who first
taught us that He was and is so much more than that. Of course Jesus, the
literal Son of God, cried out on many occasions to “Abba, Father”, most notably
in times of distress such as in the Garden of Gethsemane, when He asked the Father
to “take this cup away from Me” (Mark
14:36) so He (Christ) didn’t have to go through the torture He knew was in
store for Him in the next twenty-four hours, and on the cross itself, where His
final Earthly words were “Father! Into
your hands I commit My spirit!” (Luke 23:46).
But in the Sermon on the
Mount, Christ introduces the concept of God as Father to His followers;
specifically, Matthew 6:9-13 teaches them and us the mis-named “Lord’s
Prayer” (in reality, it is to be our
prayer – He even tells us so – whereas the most famous Lord’s
prayer comes in the Upper Room at the end of the Passover, or “Last”, Supper in
John 17), where He places at the very beginning the two most
important words of not just the prayer itself but of our relationship with our
Lord in Heaven:
“Our Father in Heaven, hallowed be Thy Name….”
God is not our Master or Slave-driver or Genie
or any other such thing, though there may be times when He seems to fill each
of those roles and any of a thousand others. Christ told us point blank Who God is.
God is Our Father.
†
The ultimate
desire of any true and devout Christian is to understand God’s Will as much as
our mortal minds can comprehend it. In
particular, we most fervently desire what His Will is for our lives –
both how we are to live our day-to-day existences and what He has planned for
us in the days and years to come, however more there may be. While the latter
varies completely on an individual basis, we can learn the former through a
thorough examination of His Word, contained completely in the sixty-six books
of the Old and New Testaments.
My goal for this collection of short
Biblical studies is to show that the vast majority of that examination
becomes much easier through the filter provided by Jesus Christ in the Sermon
on the Mount, and in the title of this book:
GOD is just like ANY OTHER DAD, except, of
course, He’s GOD…which means He’s perfect, and we can only aspire
towards His perfection.
I hope that each of the short Scriptural studies demonstrates
how this one lens can help us better understand not only how God
operates, but how He intends for us to live our lives, and how to deal
with not only our children but the rest of the world around us.
Each
chapter and story can be read and studied separately, if you choose, but
they’re assembled in an important order: first and foremost, the primary tenets
of Christianity are examined from The Father’s point of view, and then (with a couple of demonstrative short
stories and essays interspersed) the chapters are generally arranged in
Biblical order, addressing discrete verses and events from Scripture and what
we can learn from viewing them as our Father teaching us how to parent, among many, many other things.
†
So, to begin our quest for His
Fatherly Truth, let’s ask a fundamental underlying question:
Why
would God WANT to act as Father to beings He Created?
He
could very easily have simply been “Almighty God” – been the being that those false idols of the Old Testament were
portrayed to be, maybe adding a touch of Zeus for good measure: Aloof, presiding from on high; a God simply
to be cowered before. You know, the way little boys treat the anthills?
Alternatively, He might
have treated us like a science
experiment: start the planet spinning,
and sit back and see what happens. There’s a large school of thought which
thinks that’s exactly what He did, which anyone who has the Holy Spirit within
them (including me) could refute from
personal experience.
But who
knows? Who besides God can say with certainty that this world, the
one which He gave to Adam, was His first effort? Maybe He tried it this way first, and either it
failed or displeased Him or – well, who
knows? But we can say for sure that despite the evidence of the agnostic,
the a-theist, and the anti-theist, the Lord God of Israel has NOT
been the type to ever be aloof: He
lives, He speaks to us, He guides us, He expresses His love for us in hundreds
of ways every day. No, that’s not the God we have in this world.
He
could very easily have been the God of
Insecurity and decided the only way to garner the unceasing praise of His
Creation was to forbid us free will – create humans as His worshiping
drones. You know, like North Korea tries
to be? But one look around your neighborhood, let alone your city, state,
country or world, will tell you that wasn’t the choice made (at least this time around; see
previous paragraph).
So, the
level of interaction between God and Man would have to be somewhere
around what it is now – any more than this, and God’s existence would be
undeniable; any less, and we’d have one of the situations dissected above.
But, why be a parent? Well, review the other
options He could have chosen: Indifference? (Basically,
that’s the science experiment.) Selective forced worship? (Not significantly different from the God of
Insecurity.) Teacher? (He did that in
Exodus once, and then in Israel for three years, two thousand years ago. Then
He handed the job over to us – His disciples. What is He doing during the other
however-many-years?) UFO-like appearances in corn fields and toast? (If He has, His PR guys are doing a
terrible job. Nobody seriously thinks those are His.)
Look at what Jesus says about His
Father in the aforementioned
Sermon on the Mount, where He first publicly pronounces this relationship for
us – He rewards us for doing what He tells us is right (in the Beatitudes, Mt 5:3-12); He tells us that by loving
our enemies we “may be sons of (our) Father Who is in heaven” (Mt 5:45); He tells us to try to imitate
Him (Mt 5:48); He tells us not
to boast, be hypocritical, or unforgiving, and by not
doing these things, “your Father who sees in secret will reward you” (Mt 6:18); He tells us to trust in God, to rely on Him rather than
being anxious about our material future (Mt
6:34).
Doesn’t all of that sound
more like a daddy than, say,
an employer or an aloof Zeus-type idol?
Jesus gives us the point-blank closer to the argument during
the same Sermon on the Mount, recorded in Matthew 6:7-11
7 “Ask, and it
will be given to you; seek, and you will find; knock, and it will be opened to
you. 8 For everyone who asks receives, and the one who seeks
finds, and to the one who knocks it will be opened. 9 Or which one of you, if his son asks him for bread,
will give him a stone? 10 Or if he asks for a fish, will give him a serpent? 11 If you then, who are evil, know how to give good gifts
to your children, how much more will your
Father who is in heaven give good things to those who ask him!”
In this passage, Jesus is literally saying that
whatever WE would do as a father, GOD
would do the same only more so, since He is God and therefore perfect.
God considers Himself our Father.
Whether you allow Him to be is the only question that remains, and
that’s for you and Him to discuss on your own.
Once we
accept that being a ‘father’ was the only productive role for God to utilize,
let’s look at what He wants our role as His children to be, and in
particular what He wants us to learn from this realization of His true
role in our lives:
First, it
is most important to remember that He
made us in His own image, and that He
allows us the experience of being parents in order to simulate to love He feels
for us, His children.
In
Genesis 1:27-28, we read, "So
God created man in His own image, in the image of God He created him; male and
female He created them. And God blessed them. And God said to them, 'Be
fruitful and multiply and fill the earth'."
Deuteronomy
8:5 reads, “Know then in your heart that, as a man
disciplines his son, the Lord your God disciplines you.” Moses was very
clear on our intended relationship with the Lord:
In every sense of the word, He intended for
us to be His children.
And He
intended for us to learn from Him exactly as children learn from their father.
So, how do children learn from their father? They watch, and imitate.
We are to learn how to parent by
watching our Father who art in Heaven.
But there’s
more to learn from His parenting than just how we are to parent. When
you look back at your earthly parents now, as a grown adult, you have a
different perspective on them as people –
what their motives were, what their intentions were, and why they made the
choices they made.
We are
constantly reminded, of course, that God is as far above us as we are the
microbes – Isaiah 55:8 tells us, “For
My thoughts are not your thoughts, neither are your ways My ways, declares the
Lord.” However, that doesn’t mean that we can’t get at least a glimpse
of what His thought processes must have been throughout history, in some of the
major moments as recorded in Scripture.
We can learn about who our Lord
is by watching how He parents us.
Now, as
parents ourselves, we know what we expect from our children, and how we treat them – bribe them – punish them
– coerce them – encourage them to do and become what and who we want them to do and
become. And using that knowledge as our baseline, why can’t we examine how and
when God has treated / bribed / punished
/ coerced / encouraged us over the centuries to learn what He has expected
of us, and moreover what behaviors we as His children should be striving
for?
Certainly
God has told us, time and time again, what He demands of us as our Father. But as with us, His actions speak louder than His
words.
As an
example, Leviticus and Deuteronomy are equally clear on these two points: that marriage
is to between one man and one woman; and that adultery
is not acceptable. Yet
throughout the Old Testament, many good men – great men, even, like David and
Solomon – were the husbands of entire harems without significant consequence; even
Hebrew kings were expected to marry
multiple wives (even foreign wives!)
as part of their political duties. In Second Samuel 3:2-5, we see that
while reigning in Hebron (before moving
his capital to Jerusalem), King David had six children in his seven years
there… by six different wives. And yet, with all of these women
betrothed to him, it was his adulterous desire for Bathsheba that caused
David’s ethical and spiritual derailment, and his descent to ordering what
amounted to outright murder to cover
his sin. God does not treat every sin equally, despite our conviction
that He sees sin as a black and white issue. He has demonstrated through His
actions that adultery is more heinous than bigamy in His eyes.
We can learn not only what our Lord
expects of us, but what His priorities are within those
expectations.
I hope that
this book will both enlighten and entertain you, as we explore what God as
Father has to say to us as His children. My goal is to make every opinion (for that’s all my conclusions can ever be,
whether I like it or not: my human, flawed opinion) as Biblically-accurate and
Scripturally-based as I can. For consistency, I will be using the English
Standard Version (ESV) of the Holy Bible, mostly because it’s my personal
version of choice; on occasion, I’ll utilize the Holman Christian Standard
(HCSB), my other “go to” version, when it seems to be significantly clearer. All
quotations have their annotations underlined, so you can compare it to the version
of your choice if you wish; rarely
will the translation you choose to use be relevant, so don’t feel tied to my
choice of version.
The
chapters each address one aspect of God’s Fatherhood, sequentially as it
appears in the Bible, and how it connects to us as children, as parents, and as
Christians:
Why
are we saved by faith alone?
Why
did God create us in the first place?
How
did He deal with the disobedience of the First Couple?
How
did God handle the circumstances created by the Exodus?
How
did God deal with the man who lies?
How
does He deal with bullies picking on His children?
Why
are we to be like children?
What
should we expect from our children in terms of respect?
What
about dealing with repeated disobedience?
What
should we expect when we stray from Him?
Where
is the balance point between love and fear?
How
far would you go for your child?
How
should a husband and wife work together?
When
should you give up on your child?
My hidden
goal (in all my writing) is to
encourage the reader to do his own
analysis of this or other similar topics, so that he can use that researching
time to draw closer to his Holy Father in the process. That’s the purpose of
life for every Christian on earth – to
know God, and in doing so to become more like God the Son in preparation
for eternity. May my writing bring you
even slightly closer to that goal.
-gps
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