God is Father

God Is Father

February 8, 2009

John 14:6-7; 20-21

In Experiencing God Day-by-Day, Henry Blackaby tells us that God speaks through his activity. He quotes Habakkuk 1:5, which says,

Look at the nations and observe —

be utterly astounded!

For something is taking place in your days

that you will not believe

when you hear about it.

Christians habitually seek God's voice through prayer, through His word, or through His messengers. Yet sometimes we fail to hear God speak through His activity, even though He is working all around us. Unbelievers see God's activity without understanding what they see. God encourages His people to watch for His activity so they will know how they should respond and adjust their lives.

The disciples discovered much about God's power by witnessing Jesus calming a raging storm with a command. Seeing Jesus dine with the notorious sinner, Zacchaeus, taught them a poignant message about God's love for sinners. Watching Jesus hang upon the cross communicated a compelling message of what God was willing to do to free people from sin. Discovering the empty tomb revealed an astounding truth of God's victory over death. To those with spiritual discernment, God's activity is a significant revelation about His heart and His will.

If you are sensitive to what God is doing around you, He will clearly speak to you through His activity. You will know that God is at work, because what you see will astound you, and human power and wisdom will not explain it. If things happen that are direct answers to your prayers, God is speaking to you. When you experience events that surpass your understanding and ability, it may be that God is communicating a critical message to you.

If you want to hear God's voice, look around you to see what He is doing. When you are watching for God at work, what you see will reveal His character, and you will have a fresh understanding of how to respond to Him.

This morning, we will once again examine the character of God with an emphasis on the Fatherhood of God. The issue of the Bible’s language about God is not about gender. It’s about the authority of Jesus Christ and the Bible. Please turn to John, chapter 14 and we’ll read verses 6, 7, 20, 21. Jesus said to him, "I am the way, and the truth, and the life. No one comes to the Father except through me.
If you had known me, you would have known my Father also. From now on you do know him and have seen him."

In that day you will know that I am in my Father, and you in me, and I in you.
Whoever has my commandments and keeps them, he it is who loves me. And he who loves me will be loved by my Father, and I will love him and manifest myself to him."

I want to begin by reading you a new hymn about God just to stimulate your thinking. I don’t know the tune, but the text is as follows:

“Who is she, neither male nor female, maker of all things, only glimpsed or hinted, source of life and gender. She is god, mother, sister, lover. In her love we wake, move and grow, are daunted, triumph and surrender.”

Or this recent production of a Jewish feminist doxology to God: “Blessed is she who in the beginning gave birth. Blessed is she whose womb covers the earth.”

These are two admittedly dramatic and extreme examples of a project that’s going on in academic and religious circles not only to make language about people inclusive but language about God inclusive as well.

There are less shocking versions of this project. In some circles, there is the desire to at least speak of God as both mother and father, or to avoid the use of personal pronouns like “he” and “him” when speaking of God—use only the proper noun “God” — or, perhaps, to spend more time preaching and teaching on the feminine side of God or the feminine images of God.

Why is this going on? I don’t know all the reasons, but I want to spin out at least one legitimate reason: Very simply, women have been given a raw deal through a good portion of the history of Western civilization. That may be a valid motivation for the desire to somehow correct this injustice.

But as you probably guessed by the title of my talk, I think this is a giant step in the wrong direction to correct the problem.

And I do believe there is a problem.

Now why should you care about this? Ideas have consequences. I want to give you three images of what I’m talking about.

First, ideas have trajectories to them. It’s a bit like the moonshot. When the rocket is aimed at the moon some 200,000 miles away, it has to be precise. What may be just a millimeter off within the first mile or so of the earth’s atmosphere will be a huge miss when out toward the moon. Ideas have this same quality about them. They have their trajectories.

Second, there is a place in Switzerland where you can stand that, when covered with snow, looks rather unremarkable. Except when the snow melts, the snow will go down one side of the mountain into the Rhone River and on the other side of the mountain down into the Rhine River. That uneventful-looking spot determines what will one day be the Mediterranean sea or the cold waters of the Atlantic ocean.

There are some issues that are unquestionably watershed kinds of ideas. While that may not appear to be at stake here, when this idea of inclusive language runs its course, one ends up in radically different places, depending on where you come down on the idea.

Third, there is a dimension of theology that Dr. J.I. Packer calls “sewage treatment.” The work of theology requires that theologians must make sure the water we’re drinking is free of pollutants.

Now Paul put it this way to Timothy. He urged him to guard “the good deposit of the faith” (1 Tim 6:20) Clearly, in Paul’s mind, there was something that had been delivered to the Christian community. It was a deposit, and it was to be guarded.

There are trajectories; there are watersheds; there’s the stuff we feed on as Christians that is to nourish us and give us strength and wisdom. Ideas have consequences.

The second reason we ought to care about this subject is that the trajectories involved are of maximum consequence. They have to do with two things, revelation and the nature of God.

One of the things at the heart of what we believe as Christians is that we could know nothing about God unless God definitively showed himself to us in human flesh in his Son Jesus Christ. We are a revealed faith. Our faith is based on a conviction that God himself said something about himself that we could not know on our own.

Is the Bible a record of humankind’s evolving consciousness about God, or is the Bible God’s Word and words to us about God? You can see that’s a watershed question, isn’t it? One ends up in radically different places depending on how one answers that question. As with all questions, there are nuances to it, but I hope it’s clear what’s at stake here. This trajectory has to do with the kind of God we worship; we become what we worship.

Quite simply, God is revealed by both Jesus Christ and by the whole of Scripture, both Old and New Testaments, in exclusively masculine language. There are principally six metaphors for God used in the Bible. God is king. God is father in some generic, paternal sense. God is judge. God is husband. God is master. And finally and definitively, God is the God and father of our Lord Jesus Christ.

Jesus speaks of God in intimate, family terms, not in raw, authoritarian paternity. These are the pegs on which one hangs practically every line of Scripture regarding God in the Old and New Testaments. God calls us to His family to be His children (Jn1:12). Our Father who art in heaven, hallowed be thy name!

Now the primary objection to this is that language about God is the product of a culture that was patriarchal, that is, a culture that’s male centered, male dominated. So one would, of course, expect the Bible to speak of God in masculine terms because the Bible was produced by a culture that was masculine-centered. I have three responses to that.

The first is critical. Jesus is the Word of God incarnate. He is God in human flesh revealed to us in space and time. That’s the very core of the gospel we believe. If he is who he says he is and who the Christian church has confessed that he is, then what he says about God is for us the first and last word to be spoken about God. And what did Jesus say about God? Jesus says, “God is Father.” Please turn to John chapter and we’ll read verses 6 & 7: Jesus said to him, "I am the way, and the truth, and the life. No one comes to the Father except through me.
If you had known me, you would have known my Father also. From now on you do know him and have seen him." And verses 20 & 21: In that day you will know that I am in my Father, and you in me, and I in you.
Whoever has my commandments and keeps them, he it is who loves me. And he who loves me will be loved by my Father, and I will love him and manifest myself to him."

It’s important to point out that many, not all, radical feminists deny this central truth about Jesus Christ. Frankly, it seems to me to be the logic of a position that would say our Lord’s words about God are not sufficient to describe who God is.

Jesus put it this way in John 14:7: “If you had known me, you would have known my Father also. From now on you do know him and have seen him."

My second response to this objection is that patriarchalism does not account for Jesus’ use of the word “father.” It simply doesn’t. Jesus’ use of the word “father” for God was unprecedented and virtually without parallel in both the Old Testament and in his culture. God as paternity, yes, but God as Abba, no.

It’s fascinating to read the preaching of the early church fathers and evangelists who took the message of the gospel to the pagan world. Every time one of them comes to the idea of father, they have to stop and explain what they mean to a patriarchal society. His word for father was, in fact, a scandal to Jewish notions of transcendence.

By the time of Jesus, no Jew would speak the name of God. They would speak indirectly about God. God was too high. He was too lifted up. He was too holy even to be called by name. You couldn’t speak about him. Scribes would change their robes and quills whenever they came across God’s name in the text they were translating. God’s name was ultra-holy! Jesus walked into this patriarchal culture and said, “He’s Abba.” He’s my Daddy!

A third response to this view that the Bible is the product of a patriarchal culture assumes something about the Bible that the vast mainstream of Christianity has rejected for two thousand years. It assumes that the Bible is a record of an evolving human consciousness about God, human words about God rather than God’s words about God.

If one gets upset at someone like myself saying “I’m going to stand with the Bible,” just take into account what G. K. Chesterton called the “great democracy of the dead.”

While they may disagree on just how the Bible exercises its authority, two thousand years of dead Christians from every tradition in historic Christianity—Greek Orthodox, Roman Catholic, Protestant—have insisted that the Bible is not a record of humankind’s evolving consciousness about God. Rather, it is God’s words about himself spoken to people and through people. That alone, it seems to me, ought to settle the issue for us.

What is at stake is whether the Bible comes from God or from humankind. Do we stand on the rock of God’s Word to us about God or on the shifting sands of what different peoples and cultures have thought to be true about God? Isaiah 66:2 says this about his word: “But this is the one to whom I will look, to the humble and contrite in spirit who trembles at my word.”

To call God Father, to speak of God in masculine terms does not mean that God is a male. Mary Daily says, “Since God is male, the male is God.”

No. Here people get confused. They assume a male must be a sexual being. God is spirit.

The God of the Bible has no sexuality. God is completely “Other” than his creation. That’s what is meant by his holiness. He’s set apart. God says to the prophet Isaiah, “To whom then will you liken God or what likeness compare with him?” (Is 40:18). Well, the question assumes the answer. God can’t be compared to anything. He’s “Other.” Beyond comparison!

The reason God is spoken of in masculine terms is not to speak of his sexuality but to preserve the distinction between God and his creation. Therefore, we will worship him, not his creation.

That the Bible speaks of God in masculine terms does not mean that God has no feminine qualities. There are some broad kinds of feminine comparisons. But four times in all of Scripture, God compares Himself to a woman. All of them in Isaiah: 42:14; 45:10; 49:15; 66:13. Here, God is compared to a mother. He’s never in all Scripture called “mother” or addressed as mother. While there are some feminine similes used of God in the Bible, it’s critical that we keep in mind the difference between a simile and a metaphor.

A simile compares one aspect of something to another; God, says the Bible, will cry out like a woman. A metaphor compares the whole of one thing to another; Jesus is the good shepherd, not like a good shepherd. God is Father. So, yes, God has feminine qualities, as do all of us. But to say God has feminine qualities is not license to say he’s Mother.

Third, that the Bible speaks of God in masculine terms does not mean that women have no place in ministry. The Bible’s masculine language about God has been used to exclude women from the ordained ministry and other forms of service in a church. This is wrong.

It’s wrong because it’s a heresy to make God in our image. Those who deduce from the Bible’s masculine language about God that males are more like God than women are idolatrous in their thinking. If you insist upon excluding women from ministry, you have to make your case on some other basis than God’s fatherhood.

The Bible lumps men with women equally before God like all of its paired images of our relationship to God. God is the husband. The Church, the Christian community, both male and female, are the bride. In this sense, we’re all feminine before God. God is the king; all of us, male and female, are his subjects. God is the father; all of us, male and female, are his children.

The Bible’s exclusively masculine language about God was unique in the ancient world, and it still is. God will not let himself be lower than his creation.

Let me explain. The gods of the nations around Israel were replete with masculine and feminine deities. There were Asherah and Anak and Nut and Isis, Teomat, and the Queen of Heaven, Ademitur, and Artemis. They were everywhere. It’s significant that these cultures with both female and male gods were grossly more patriarchal than Israel’s ever was.

These nature religions featured male and female deities having sexual intercourse and giving birth to the creation, to the crops and even to children. The Old Testament record can be read as a war with those religions that surrounded Israel. Canaanites worshiped Baal. The Mesopotamians worshiped the stars. Both had male and female deities, and both understood their gods in explicitly sexual terms.

But the Bible’s masculine imagery regarding God has to do with a distinction between God and his creation. Consider the masculine imagery: As father, God is separate and distinct from his creation. He relates to the world—caring for it, ordering it, sustaining it—through his Word and his Spirit. But he is in no way to be identified with it. He is in every way holy and distinct from his creation. That’s the impact of the imagery, isn’t it? Romans 1:18-25 very clearly relates the false thinking of Paul’s day on this very subject of God the Creator. Turn to it now and follow along as I read Romans 1, beginning at verse 18 But God shows his anger from heaven against all sinful, wicked people who push the truth away from themselves.
For the truth about God is known to them instinctively. God has put this knowledge in their hearts.
From the time the world was created, people have seen the earth and sky and all that God made. They can clearly see his invisible qualities—his eternal power and divine nature. So they have no excuse whatsoever for not knowing God.
Yes, they knew God, but they wouldn't worship him as God or even give him thanks. And they began to think up foolish ideas of what God was like. The result was that their minds became dark and confused.
Claiming to be wise, they became utter fools instead.
And instead of worshiping the glorious, ever-living God, they worshiped idols made to look like mere people, or birds and animals and snakes.
So God let them go ahead and do whatever shameful things their hearts desired. As a result, they did vile and degrading things with each other's bodies.
Instead of believing what they knew was the truth about God, they deliberately chose to believe lies. So they worshiped the things God made but not the Creator himself, who is to be praised forever. Amen. Listen to verse twenty one again: Yes, they knew God, but they wouldn't worship him as God or even give him thanks. And they began to think up foolish ideas of what God was like. The result was that their minds became dark and confused. Does that not sound like today? “Foolish ideas of what God is like.” The King James Version says they “became futile in their thoughts and their foolish hearts were darkened.”

But consider another feminine imagery of mother. As mother, God gives birth to creation and suckles it. In other words, creation issues out of the body of God. It participates in God’s being as God is in and through and under all things. All things, in fact, become God or at least divine. This is what the Bible calls “idolatry.” Genesis chapter one says God Spoke creation into being. To adulterate Scripture is a dangerous thing. Deuteronomy chapter four and verse two says “You shall not add to the Word … nor take anything from it” Revelation 22:18 repeats this admonition but adding a cryptic warning. Listen to it: I warn everyone who hears the words of the prophecy of this book: if anyone adds to them, God will add to him the plagues described in this book, and if anyone takes away from the words of the book of this prophecy, God will take away his share in the tree of life and in the holy city, which are described in this book. Sounds like a warning to me! Does it to you? Tampering with Scripture is a dangerous thing. If you believe Scripture is not definitive on what it says about God, then you have believed a lie! Remember what the serpent said to Eve in the garden: “Did God really say …? Yes! God really did say! And further more, God commanded we have no other gods before us. Let’s look at Exodus 20:3-6 together. "You shall have no other gods before me.
"You shall not make for yourself a carved image, or any likeness of anything that is in heaven above, or that is in the earth beneath, or that is in the water under the earth.
You shall not bow down to them or serve them, for I the Lord your God am a jealous God, visiting the iniquity of the fathers on the children to the third and the fourth generation of those who hate me,
but showing steadfast love to thousands of those who love me and keep my commandments. Do you not agree with me that changing our God’s name comes dangerously close to idolatry. God our Father, jealously guards His name.

I hasten to add that not every person anxious to use feminine language about God has idolatry in mind. But feminine language about God historically and logically opens the door for identification of God with his creation rather than God speaking the world into existence, as we’re told he did in 3\Genesis 1:3.

We’ll hear certain feminist readings of this text as God giving birth to the creation. Nothing could be more distant from the message of that text. The world did not proceed out of God’s being. It was spoken into existence out of nothing. The Father says that. Mother cannot.

In 1934, the Confessing Christian church in Germany spoke out against the rise of what was called “German Christianity,” inspired by Nazism. Hitler was anxious to enlist the aid of the churches. He appealed to certain churchmen, patriotic Germans, who were bishops and elders and pastors in a church, to work with him to better the lot of the German people. What began to emerge was the idea that it was the duty of the church to advance a political ideology. And much of the German church embraced this so-called “German Christianity.”

But a group of Confessing Christians in 1934 got together and authored what is known now as the Barman Declaration, and it argued with this premise. It said that the church and the gospel serves no one or nothing, that Christ is Lord over everything and the church must never allow itself to be enlisted in the service of any ideology, no matter how good it may seem. They put it this way: “We cannot put the word and the work of the Lord in the service of any arbitrarily chosen desires, purposes, and plans.”

We cannot put the word and work of the Lord in the service of any arbitrarily chosen desires, purposes, and plans by changing the language of Scripture about God, or by changing the meaning of the words of Jesus himself about Father God.

In the final analysis, the issue of the Bible’s language about God is not about gender. It’s about the authority of Jesus Christ and his Bible. Gender is merely another arena in which that battle has been fought throughout time. It’s not the first, and it won’t be the last. We do men and women no good when we make the God we serve and worship look like, what our ideology tells us he ought to look like.

The great Dutch thinker Abraham Kuiper put it this way: “Does God exist for our sakes or do we exist for his?” Kuiper said that’s a watershed question. If you say God exists for our sakes, you end up over here; if you say we exist for God’s sake, you end up over there. Kuiper believed, and I agree, that if we think God exists to serve our causes, our faith will be self-serving and ultimately idolatrous.

But if we say, “God is primary and we exist for his sake to serve him and to glorify him as he has shown himself to be,” our faith will be strong and virile. Let’s check out Isaiah 43:10 together: "You are my witnesses," declares the Lord, "and my servant whom I have chosen, that you may know and believe me and understand that I am he. Before me no god was formed, nor shall there be any after me. God wants us to know Him and understand Him for who He is. Notice, I did not say: God wants us to know Her and understand Her for who She is! Doesn’t that sound so wrong? It should; it is wrong! I haven’t even begun to exhaust the Scriptures referring to God as Father. There are 178 reference in the New Testament, 115 in John alone, and another 80 in the Old Testament. There are no Scripture references to mother god!

Can we change the Bible’s language about God simply because we don’t like it? Well, Paul Minier says when we change what the Bible does say to what we think it should say, it becomes a dummy for our own thought. No dummy exercises authority over the ventriloquist.

The Word of God is something to submit to, not to revise. To do this kind of revising is to be not unlike the false prophets mentioned in the book of Jeremiah whom God said, “steal from one another words supposedly from me.”(23:30). This is a sobering thought.

For God says to these prophets, “Is not my word like a fire and like a hammer that breaks a rock in pieces?” (Jer 23:29) These are serious matters which we must speak of with the utmost sobriety and humility even as we feel the passion rise in us about them.

The Word of God is alive and active, says the Bible, sharper than any two-edged sword (Heb 4:12). It pierces through the heart of things. And it lays bare everyone of us as we stand before the one to whom we must give an account. “Whoever accepts me and my words,” says Jesus, “accepts the one who sent me.”(Lk9:48)

May God give us grace to trust this Lord and to let him be Lord over our language, our worship, and our attitudes toward one another. And may he forgive us the ways we have sometimes said the right thing but done the wrong thing. Let’s close with some words of wisdom from A.W. Tozer. He begins by quoting Psalm 5:3 My voice shall you hear in the morning, 0 Lord in the morn­ing will I direct my prayer to You, and will look up.

Retire from the world each day to some private spot, even if it be only the bedroom (for a while I retreated to the furnace room for want of a better place). Stay in the secret place till the sur­rounding noises begin to fade out of your heart and a sense of God's presence envelops you. Deliberately tune out the unpleas­ant sounds and come out of your closet determined not to hear them. Listen for the inward Voice till you learn to recognize it. Stop trying to compete with others. Give yourself to God, and then be what and who you are without regard to what others think. Reduce your interests to a few. Don't try to know what will be of no service to you. Avoid the digest type of mind — short bits of un­related facts, cute stories and bright sayings. Learn to pray in­wardly every moment. After a while you can do this even while you work. Practice candor, childlike honesty, humility. Pray for a single eye. Read less, but read more of what is important to your inner life. Call home your roving thoughts. Gaze on Christ with the eyes of your soul. Practice spiritual concentration.

I’d like to close by offering some words of  encouragement  to you. Please turn to Romans. Chapter eight, verse 28 and follow as I read it: And we know that for those who love God all things work together for good, for those who are called according to his purpose. I know that many people, including some of you, have had these quoted to you as a means of comforting or consoling you, but have found that they made things worse rather than better. Why is that? For most, it’s because we can’t see any good coming out of the loss or suffering of a loved one. I ask you now to consider these words of Joseph Stowell, former president of Moody Bible Institute. God defines good for us in Romans 8:29 – listen to what this verse says: For those whom he foreknew he also predestined to be conformed to the image of his Son, in order that he might be the firstborn among many brothers. This text says that this process is for those who have been called according to God’s purpose. What is God’s purpose? According to verse 29, it is to conform us to the image of His Son, and that is good. Anything that will bring us to a more accurate reflection of the quality of Christ in and through our lives is good. Whatever it takes, pain or pleasure, is good if it conforms us to His likeness. That’s God’s goal in the process of pain. He takes all that He permits and makes it a part of the process to bring us to reflect the image of Christ. What a wonderful way to turn tragedy into triumph!

Let’s pray. Lord, direct me today to those things that would most enhance my walk with You, and enable me to serve You better. Give me wisdom, Lord, to see You for whom you are. Strengthen my resolve to remain true to your Word.  Amen.