‘Behold, the Lamb of God’s
ide o amnos tou
theou
College Study
19th teaching
1.7.2013
The Persons of the Trinity:
“God the Father”
Well, here we are back again in a New Year.
This year, among all the many resolutions that you and I may have already
undertaken, let us resolve to know God and to love God more this year than we
did last year.
This past Sunday, I was talking with
one of the ushers at church after he asked me about our study. I told him about
what we had learned last year, and he made an interesting statement that I
think is very true. He said something along these lines: “That’s great that
you’re giving these young people ammunition. They’re the front lines.”
You and I are the front line of the
spiritual war, folks. We’re the demographic most targeted by companies, we’re
the groups most involved in learning, and we’re some of the most socially
active members in our society. You and I meet people all the time who don’t
know what to make of God or the Bible or this whole church-thing. We’re on the
front lines. Not to say no one else is, but that’s not important right now at
this study. We’re not someone else. We’re who we are.
And God has so placed us in our communities
to have an effect upon them. So let’s pack a punch. Let’s get some ammunition
for the battle. We’re on the front lines. We’ve got a lot of material. Memorize
it. Memorize the Word. Learn to defend God and proclaim truth. We’re on the
front lines.
Our topic again is Theology Proper,
knowing God. Our last look at Theology Proper was a study of the Tri-unity of
God. I had mentioned that we were going to take a closer look at each
individual Person of the Holy Trinity. We’re going to begin that three-part
series tonight.
The title of tonight’s study is: ‘The
Persons of the Trinity: God the Father’.
Tonight we’re going to learn about the
‘first Person of the Trinity’. We’re going to cover four points tonight:
1.
The Father’s characteristics
2.
The Father in the Old Testament
3.
The Father in the New Testament
4.
God our Father
1. The Father’s characteristics
In the book the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, there’s a fictional
philosopher by the name of Oolon Colluphid, who wrote a trilogy of fictional
books entitled Where God Went Wrong, Some More of God’s Greatest Mistakes and
Who Is This God Person Anyway?
While the subject of human depravity
is for another day, tonight we’re going to address the question: just who is
God anyway?
We’ll do that by shortly summarizing a
few things we know about this Person called God the Father. These things
differentiate Him from the other two Persons of the Trinity.
Let’s notice that God the Father is
three things: the Source, the Sender and the Planner.
a.
God the Father is the Source. I Corinthians 8:6, “…yet for us there is one God, the Father, of
whom are all things…” While the Bible identifies all things as being
created by Christ, it also says that
all things are of the Father, or from the Father. Therefore, while Jesus was
the means through which the world was made, the Father was the source from
which the world was made.
b.
God the Father is the Sender. John 3:16, “For God so loved the world that He gave His only begotten Son, that
whoever believe in Him should not perish but have eternal life.” Jesus was sent, but the Father did the
sending. The Father loved the world so that He sent the Son.
c.
God the Father is the Planner. John 3:17, “For God did not send His Son into the world to condemn the world, but
that the world through Him might be saved.” The Father sent the Son so that
the world might be saved. The Father’s plan was in sending the Son to save.
That’s why Isaiah 53:10 says “It pleased the LORD to bruise Him.” It
pleased the Father to send His Son to the cross, because by His stripes we are
healed.
So the Father is the Source, the
Sender and the Planner. This differentiates Him from the other members of the
Trinity.
2. The Father in the Old Testament
The earliest mention of God as Father,
as far as I could find, is in Deuteronomy
32:6. It says “Do you thus deal with
the LORD, O foolish and unwise people? Is He not your Father, who bought you?
Has He not made you and established you?”
Speaking to Israel, Moses illustrates
God as a father-figure, who made them as a nation and who created them as
individual human beings.
Malachi
2:10 says “Have we not all one
Father? Has not one God created us?” Isaiah
64:8, “But now, O LORD, You are our
Father; we are the clay, and You our potter; and all we are the work of Your
hand.” Again, the idea that God is the Father of humanity because He is the
Creator. We are the works of His hand.
Psalm
68:5 says “A father of the
fatherless, a defender of widows, is God in His holy habitation.” Again in
the psalms, Psalm 103:13, we read: “As a father pities his children, so the LORD
pities those who fear him. v.14, For
He knows our frame; He remembers that we are dust.” God is compared to a
father not just creatively, but also emotionally. We’re told even in the Old
Testament that God like a father defends and pities.
Of the 644 times that the Old
Testament uses the word father, only
a handful of those references actually refer to God as father. Yet clearly, the
concept of God as Father is there, even in the Old Testament.
During the latter part of Israel’s Old
Testament history, there was much idolatry and turning away from God to seek
foreign gods. Yet God desired Israel to return to Him.
God calls out to Israel in Jeremiah 3:14, “Return, O backsliding children…” Later in Jeremiah 31, God refers to a future time of spiritual reawakening
for the people of Israel. He says in 31:7-9:
“Sing with gladness for Jacob, and shout
among the chief of the nations; proclaim, give praise, and say, O LORD, save
Your people, the remnant of Israel! Behold, I will bring them from the north
country, and gather them from the ends of the earth, among them the blind and
the lame, the woman with child, and the one who labors with child, together; a
great throng shall return there. They shall come with weeping, and with
supplications I will lead them. I will cause them to walk by the rivers of
waters, in a straight way in which they shall not stumble; for I am a Father to
Israel, and Ephraim is My firstborn.”
So, clearly the idea of God the Father
is in the Old Testament, creatively, emotionally and nationally. God is a
Father in that He created mankind, that He loves mankind and that He had a
relationship with Israel.
However, throughout the Old Testament,
we never really see any of the saints praying to God as their father. And we
get the idea in the prophets, that though God was reaching out to Israel as a
loving father, they would not return to Him.
It’s not until the coming of Christ
that the concept of God as a father really takes root with believers.
3. The Father in the New Testament
While the subject of God the Father is
clear but rare in the Old Testament, it truly takes hold in the New Testament.
Words describing God as the Father are all over the New Testament. And here,
they take on new meaning.
In the Old Testament, God was a
general Father of mankind creatively, and emotionally a Father because He
defended and pitied His children, and nationally a Father because He chose
Israel as His people.
But in the New Testament, because of
the substitutionary sacrifice of the Son of God, we have unparalleled access to
God as our Father and a new, closer and more intimate relationship with God as
our Father such as no one in the Old Testament ever dreamed of… as Jesus
Himself identified in His statement in John
20:17, “I ascend unto my Father, and
your Father; and to my God, and your God.” After Jesus paid for our sins
and rose from the dead, His actions made peace between God and we sinful
creatures, thereby allowing us to have a relationship with Him as our Father. II Corinthians 5:18, “Now all things are of God, who has
reconciled us to Himself through Jesus Christ…”
This is really a privilege, but one
which we often take for granted. Do you realize that no other religion on earth
promotes this kind of familiarity with God, in comparing Him to a Father. Only
true Christianity dares put its believers so close beside their God as to
compare them to father and child.
Islam rejects the idea of God as
father. Judaism, as we’ve already seen in the Old Testament, had little
practical regard to accept God as father. Nothing in Shintoism or Buddhism or
Hinduism or all the other –isms in the world compares God to a loving Father.
So don’t take it lightly. It cost
Christ immense suffering and even His very life to pave the way for you to come
to God as your Father.
Turn to Luke 11:1. Reading 11:1-4.
This is widely known as the Lord’s
Prayer, an example prayer which Jesus gave to His disciples when they asked Him how to pray. You noticed, no
doubt, that it begins by addressing the One to whom our prayers are directed:
Our Father.
This is the foundation of our
relationship with God. We do not approach Him as only our Lord, or as a distant
King or Ruler, or as a Tyrant or Dictator. We do not come to God with our cares
as if He were an uncaring Dignitary or Sovereign, or as if He were some Priest
or Pope we only know as a celebrity, of if He were even less than that, a Force
without feeling or emotion. No, we come to God primarily on the basis of His
being our Father. Our primary dealing with God is not set in religious
terminology. It’s based in terms of father and child.
In the same chapter in Luke, down in verses 11-13, Jesus elaborates on the
nature of God the Father. “If a son asks
for bread from any father among you, will he give him a stone? Or if he asks
for a fish, will he give him a serpent instead of a fish? Or if he asks for an
egg, will he offer him a scorpion?”
When I was very young, my parents
would take me to an area of Oahu called Pearl City. I thought it was the most
beautiful place on earth, because it had a gigantic Toys R Us. If it happened
to be my birthday, my dad said I could go in Toys R Us and pick anything I
wanted for my birthday present. Imagine the possibilities! Imagine that I could
pick anything I wanted.
It was 1993. I was eight years old.
And I walk in to Toys R Us and head straight for the electronics section, and
there they had, in bright blue colors, a display for the newly released Mega
Man 4. Oh how my little-kid-brain reeled with the thought of adventuring as
Mega Man, shooting out those little projectiles and beating the bad guys on the
tv back home.
So imagine my horror if I had told my dear father I wanted
Mega Man 4… only to have him hand me a rock. No, dad, I wanted Mega Man 4. I
didn’t want a rock. You said I could have whatever I wished. It’s my birthday.
I don’t want a rock, or a snake, or a scorpion.
Now of course, my dad didn’t give me
anything like that. He bought me the game and I drooled over the game-manual
all the way home. Yet Jesus says “If you
then, being evil, know how to give good gifts to your children, how much more
will your heavenly Father give the Holy Spirit to those who ask Him!”
Sometimes we get the wrong idea about
God. Either we think he’ll get us anything we want, like some kind of cosmic
butler at our beckon call, whether its toys or money or success or relationships
or anything else our flesh is set on. Or we get the opposite idea, that God is
so concerned with our character and holiness that He will deprive us of
everything so that we can be holy.
That’s not the picture here. Those are
extremes, but the concept of God as our heavenly Father is right down the
middle: concerned with our character and with our happiness, as a truly good
father is.
4. God our Father
This point is all about applying this
doctrine. What to do with the concept
of God as our Father?
It’s best summed up in the story of
the Prodigal Son, which I’m sure you’re familiar with. It’s in Luke 15.
In a nutshell, the son asks for his
inheritance from his father and then goes off and blows it all on partying,
ends up in the dump eating pig slop, returns to his father and is welcomed back
not as a servant but still as a son.
That’s how the father-son relationship
works. How different that story would have been had the father not been a
father at all, but just a king or a ruler or a master or a lord. God our Father
is Lord of all, King of all and Master over Creation, but He is still our
Father.
And as He said unto Israel so many
generations ago: “Return to me, O
backsliding children!”… You can be sure that you can return to God even
should you feel distant from Him, as distant from Him as the Prodigal Son was
from his own father. And yet because God is our Father, you can be sure that He
will meet you, run out to you, embrace you, welcome you, pity you and love you,
because that is what a true father does.
You see how un-religious all this talk
sounds? We don’t relate to go on the basis of religion. God doesn’t ask us to gain His favor through ritual or
ceremony or attending church or reading the Bible or loving others or
sacrificing or charity… you already have
God’s favor because He is your Father.
It’s not on the basis of religion that
we relate to God but on the basis of relationship. So let’s be done with
religion. We’ve had enough religion in our lives, trying to garner God’s love
or blessings. You already have them.
What kind of relationship would I have
with my own father if I only related with him at father-son events, if I had
only ever seen him when he took me to a baseball game or to the circus or when
he bought me a toy or two? What kind of relationship would I have with my own
father if I only called him to see if he loved me, or if I did things so that
he could give me cash or buy me a car? I’d have a dull, lifeless cold
relationship with my dad.
But that’s not how it works. I call my
dad knowing he already loves me as his son. I talk to my dad knowing he cares.
When he gives me a present for Christmas, I don’t ask ‘what do you expect of me
this time?’ I know he gave it because he’s my pop.
How backwards we often get this with
our heavenly Father. He isn’t expecting performance, us trying to earn His
attention and favor like He’s some heavenly Boss in His office up there. No,
He’s our Father. You already have His ear, His attention, His favor, His love,
His blessing and no amount of religiosity will muddle or change that, just as
nothing I do can change the fact that my dad is my dad.
You want to have a living relationship
with God. Come to Him as your Father.
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