Coromandel Baptist Church
Sunday 10 January 2010 John 1:1-18; Acts 17:16-31
The God and Father of Us All
This Sunday we begin a new series, which will occupy our attention for the first part of this calendar year, on the Sundays that I will be preaching at Coromandel Baptist. The overall series title is Knowing God as Father, and this week we begin to explore what this means and why it is important.
The readings before us this week highlight two complementary truths in the Bible, around which much of the exposition of the theme will revolve. On the one hand we can assert (as in Paul’s speech in Acts 17), that all men and women live and move and have their being in God, whose offspring we are. God our Father has created and sustains all things. All the descendants of Adam are his children (cf. Luke 3:38…‘the son of Adam, the son of God’), and he providentially cares for them even though many do not love him (e.g. Matt. 5:44-46). But on the other hand, it is plain that not all men and women are ‘sons of God’, which status is a gift of God’s grace, entered through faith union with Jesus, the Son (e.g. John 1:12-13 cf. Gal. 4:1-7). On the one hand the knowledge of God as Father is the knowledge of who he is, in himself, eternally. On the other hand we can only enter into that knowledge by the gracious gift of adoption.
That we can (and indeed, must) know God as Father is a function of his creating us in his image as his children. We are structured to know him as our Father. This is not the status of the spiritual elite, but the creational and ‘normative’ state for us to enjoy and in which to be fully settled. But if we press further back, before the creation of men and women, we find that Fatherhood is ontological. This word (from the Greek participle ontos, ‘being’) tells us that Fatherhood belongs to the very being of God himself. God the Father is eternally Father. He has, from eternity, been the Father of the eternal Son, and the one from whom the Spirit flows. The Father is the first person of the Trinity (not in chronology, but in action and function), and so Fatherhood does not begin with creation. Rather, the creation of men and women in his image as his children is an expression of his eternal Fatherhood.
When we hear the word ‘father’ we are immediately filled with memories, perceptions and impressions of our own earthly fathers. These may have been good, bad, or indifferent to us, and we cannot but think of God our Father as tinged by these expressions of fatherhood that we have experienced. We develop an image, a complex of ideas and emotional responses, associated with the word ‘father’. This image of fatherhood is not truly God as he is, but our projection onto the eternal of the temporal (and deficient) fatherhood we have known. There is only one ontological Father, and all other fatherhood (being universally the fatherhood of fallen men) is provisional and deficient. All the deficiencies or our experience of earthly fathers, and even more all our deficient reactions to them, have deeply marred our understanding of God as Father. The only way that these false impressions and images of the Father can be removed is by the full revelation of his true nature, which comes to us in and through Jesus.
We know that in Jesus the Messiah, we see God as he really is (e.g. John 1:14, 18 cf. Col. 1:15; Heb. 1:1-4). This, however, is plainly the revelation of the Father. Jesus, the Eternal Son become the Son of Man, is the revelation not of ‘God’ in a metaphysical or philosophical sense, but of the Father (e.g. John 6:46 cf. 14:9; 17:26). To know the Son is to know the Father who sent him, and to receive the Son is to receive the Father who sent him (e.g. Matt. 10:40; John 12:44; 13:20). The Son, as the living image of the Father, not only reveals the Father to us (as though he were giving a demonstration of the Father for us to admire, or even aspire to), but by his person and work brings us into direct relationship to the Father, by which we come personally to know him as our Abba.
To know God as Abba, settles us in relation to God, the creation and all other human relationships. It is the primary relationship for which we have been created, and from which all our human relationships are created to flow. God the Father is love, and from within the joy of knowing his love, we flow in the love that he sheds abroad by the Spirit. The life of the family of the Father is sustained by his own Son, through his own Spirit.
This situation, however, is not the prevailing one in the world since the entrance of human sin. Because sin and guilt have blinded the eyes of humanity—and since humanity in its rebellion stands under the holy judgement of the holy Father—it is impossible for us to know the Father as he really is without the gracious gift of his redemption. Left to ourselves we seek out and construct a ‘surrogate’ fatherhood in our worship and idolatry (e.g. Jer. 2:27 cf. Rom. 1:18-32). This does not and cannot satisfy (since it is not the foundational relationship for which we are created) and demeans both God and humanity. Paul addresses these matters in his speech to the Council of the Areopagus in Acts 17. He proclaims there the name of their ‘unknown God’, whom he clearly identifies as the God of (what we know call) the Old Testament, i.e. the God of Israel who has revealed himself to be the one true God and who has made himself known to the world in the person and work of his Son. Through him, the Father calls all peoples everywhere to turn from the weak, false, idolatrous fatherhood that we have constructed and come, through Christ, to know the Father truly and thus be free. In coming to know him, we come to know ourselves as we have been created to be.
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