Who Is The Father?

What Comes To Your Mind When You Think About the Father?

This was a question asked by A.W. Tozer in his book The Knowledge of the Holy

Love

We know Scripture says, God is love, this includes the Father.

Holy

We know God is holy, which also includes the Father

Long-suffering

We should consider this with our lives every day, how patient our Godhead is in our current state.

Wrath

We often think of holiness and wrath as being together, because we are not holy outside of Christ.

Judgement

He does judge for sin. He is not “torn” over judging sinners.

What is the problem we have as redeemed sinners?

We think God is distant. This causes us to run from Him, to not trust Him implicitly, and run to Him.

We are told Jesus is Gently and Lowly but should we think the Father is opposite? And are we to think that the Spirit is just a force?

Scripture says that the Fall alienated us from God but Jesus tore down that wall of alienation that existed between both man and God.

Ephesians 2:14–19 ESV

For he himself is our peace, who has made us both one and has broken down in his flesh the dividing wall of hostility by abolishing the law of commandments expressed in ordinances, that he might create in himself one new man in place of the two, so making peace, and might reconcile us both to God in one body through the cross, thereby killing the hostility. And he came and preached peace to you who were far off and peace to those who were near. For through him we both have access in one Spirit to the Father. So then you are no longer strangers and aliens, but you are fellow citizens with the saints and members of the household of God,

Many Christians believe the Father is less inclined to forgive than the Son - He is an angry Father, one who must be pacified in His wrath. Roman Catholicism teaches this from the perspective that the Father and Son are both harsh and mad, but it is Mary who is the one that shows the compassion.

We struggle to understand propitiation

You might ask, didn’t Jesus’ sacrifice appease the Father’s wrath? Absolutely, but this does not mean that the Father was not disposed to such a result.

Ortlund states,

The key is to understand that at the level of legal acquittal, the Father’s wrath had to be assuaged in order for sinners to be brought back into his favor, but at the level of his own internal desire and affection, he was as eager as the Son for this atonement to take place.

We err when we draw conclusions about who the Father is subjectively based on what needed to happen objectively.

The Puritans would often speak of the Father, Son, and Spirit agreeing in eternity past, all of them together, to redeem a sinful people.

Theologians call this the pactum salutis, the “covenant of redemption,” (this is the other Covenant Pastor Boeshaar and I couldn’t remember on Sunday); this refers to what the triune God agreed upon before the creation of the world.

The Father did not need more persuading than the Son. On the contrary, his ordaining of the way of redemption reflects the same heart of love that the Son’s accomplishing of redemption does.

These are the battles of the Corinthians - in Paul’s first letter he takes them to task and “skins them alive” for their tolerating of sin. These believers were feeling the effects of that scathing letter.

As Paul is writing this third letter to the Corinthians (we only have two of them preserved) Paul is thinking about God, particularly the Father, and he begins this epistle differently than most of his epistles.

This is why I started my message with question, What Comes to mind when you think about the Father? I can tell you what came to Paul’s mind, he penned it in what we have in 2 Cor 1:3.

2 Corinthians 1:3 ESV

Blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, the Father of mercies and God of all comfort,

2 Cor. 1:3 calls the Father

God

This is a testament to the doctrine of the Trinity, which testified that our Godhead/God is three persons, but one in essence and will.

Father of our Lord Jesus

This shows the relationship of the Second person of the Trinity.

Did the Father “birth” the Son? Those who are lacking knowledge or embracing error would espouse such. This shows a relationship versus an act of creation.

Matthew Henry says, God is the Father of Christ’s divine nature by eternal generation, of his human nature by miraculous conception in the womb of the virgin, and of Christ as God-man, and our Redeemer, by covenant-relation, and in and through him as Mediator our God and our Father.

The Father of mercies

One of the Early Church Fathers sheds this light on this phrase,

Paul always speaks in this way, indicating the personhood of the Father and the Son, even though they are of one substance. Now he is giving much relief to people who had been grieved by his rebuke, for when they hear that God is not just the Father of creation but the Father of mercies as well, they will have hope and be assured that they have been rebuked so that they may find the mercy of God, once they have mended their ways. Through repentance they were being born again and made anew, which was not just a pardon but a restoration of their previous state of existence. He puts “mercies” in the plural because of their many sins, his aim being to console those who have been grieved on account of their faults.

2 Corinthians 2. Praise to the God of Comfort (1:3–7)

Paul is encouraged by the Corinthians’ genuine repentance after receiving the “severe letter” (7:5–12), but all is still not well. Interlopers continue to lurk in the wings, endangering Paul’s relationship with the church

Calvin states this:

The God of all comfort

Are you struck by how differently Paul thinks of the Father than you and I think about the Father?

I confess, I am, the effects of the Fall remain heavy on me.

We desperately need to remove the lingering effects of the Fall and see our Father as He really is!

He isn’t my grumpy Father who was harsh and gruff; harsh in discipline and having little love or compassion.

He isn’t even me, a Father who can be fickle and overcome by events to appear less loving than I want to be.

He is the Father of Mercies and the God of all comfort! (let those words sink into your soul)

Father of Mercies

The word “mercies” (oikteirmon) occurs only five times in the New Testament. One of these is James 5:11,

James 5:11 ESV

Behold, we consider those blessed who remained steadfast. You have heard of the steadfastness of Job, and you have seen the purpose of the Lord, how the Lord is compassionate and merciful.

In James 5:11 that word for merciful is similar to ours in 2 Cor. 1:3 but there is a prefix that means much; Louw and Nida explain it as ”pertaining to great affection and compassion—‘very compassionate, with much affection.’ They render James 5:11 as ‘for the Lord is full of mercy and very compassionate.’

Ortland states in his book, Gentle and Lowly,

To speak of God the Father as “the Father of mercies” is to say that he is the one who multiplies compassionate mercies to his needful, wayward, messy, fallen, wandering people.

Thomas Goodwin, speaking of this passage makes this observation:

His love is not a forced love, which he strives only to bear toward us, because his Father hath commanded him to marry us; but it is his nature, his disposition. . . . This disposition is free and natural to him; he should not be God’s Son else, nor take after his heavenly Father, unto whom it is natural to show mercy, but not so to punish, which is his strange work, but mercy pleases him; he is “the Father of mercies,” he begets them naturally.

When we study the Trinity and we affirm the statement, God is one, we are saying that the Father, Son and Holy Spirit are one in purpose, one in will, and one in desire. There is not a schizophrenia in the Godhead!

Ortlund says,

A correct understanding of the triune God is not that of a Father whose central disposition is judgment and a Son whose central disposition is love. The heart of both is one and the same; this is, after all, one God, not two.

Goodwin states this:

God has a multitude of all kinds of mercies. As our hearts and the devil are the father of variety of sins, so God is the father of variety of mercies. There is no sin or misery but God has a mercy for it. He has a multitude of mercies of every kind. As there are variety of miseries which the creature is subject unto, so he has in himself a shop, a treasury of all sorts of mercies, divided into several promises in the Scripture, which are but as so many boxes of this treasure, the caskets of variety of mercies. If your heart be hard, his mercies are tender. If your heart be dead, he has mercy to liven it. If you be sick, he has mercy to heal you. If you be sinful, he has mercies to sanctify and cleanse you. As large and as various as are our wants, so large and various are his mercies. So we may come boldly to find grace and mercy to help us in time of need, a mercy for every need. All the mercies that are in his own heart he has transplanted into several beds in the garden of the promises, where they grow, and he has abundance of variety of them, suited to all the variety of the diseases of the soul.

Who is the Father? What is He Like?

Jesus said those who had seen Him saw the Father - as gentle, kind, compassionate is Christ the Father is too!

Hebrews 1:3 says the Son is the exact imprint of the Father.

2 Cor. 4:4,6 says Jesus is the visible manifestation of the invisible God.

How should this change my life?

What should be take away from this message?

I should consider the Father’s heart for me

As you consider the Father’s heart for you, remember that he is the Father of mercies.

He is not cautious in his tenderness toward you.

He multiplies mercies matched to your every need, and there is nothing he would rather do.

John Flavel said,

“Remember, that this God in whose hand are all creatures, is your Father, and is much more tender of you than you are, or can be, of yourself.”

Your gentlest treatment of yourself is less gentle than the way your heavenly Father handles you. His tenderness toward you outstrips what you are even capable of toward yourself.

I should be drawn to God

Remember when you were a child (for some, like me, that is a long time ago) but when you hurt yourself you went to your mother or father for comfort. What you wanted was your compassionate parent to kiss it and make it better.

How much more is our Father compassionate and kind toward us - stop holding on to your hurts, and your heartbreaks, take it to the Father in prayer!

We have a kind, compassionate and uber-merciful Father who welcomes our coming to Him.