MEDITATIONS ON GOD’S RELATIONSHIP WITH MAN
#4 Father/Son
May 11, 2011
“Let your light so shine before men, that they may see your good works and glorify your Father in heaven” Matt 5:16
I have chosen Matthew 5:16 as our text because it is the first mention of God as our Father in the New Testament. Jesus brought a new message to God’s people – that of God as “our Father.”
Throughout the Old Testament God was seen more as a Judge than a Father. He was the Lawgiver, and exercised severe judgment on unrepentant lawbreakers. In Matthew alone, Jesus spoke of God as “your Father” 18 times, as “My Father” 16 times, and “our Father” once. Obviously, that Jesus wanted to bring the concept of God as the Heavenly Father, was an important foundation of His message under the New Covenant.
This is a concept that Paul appeared to revel in, for his epistles began with the greeting
“Grace to you and peace from God our Father and the Lord Jesus Christ.”
Obviously, before we can have sons we must have a father, and fathers come in all shapes and sizes with as many varying personalities; good fathers and bad fathers, some are loved and some hated, some we love to go home and visit while others are left behind as their children mature into adulthood, and leave home at the earliest possible moment with no intention of ever returning. I thank God constantly for my father and mother who were of the good kind, and whom I loved dearly.
I remember with joy the words of my father when he said to me, “I am very proud of you.” I therefore have an advantage, I believe, over those who have never enjoyed a close relationship with their father, for I can readily understand some of the qualities of a good father in my heavenly Father. Not that my heavenly Father reflects the attributes of my earthly father, but vice versa; he was a born again believer. When God says, ‘I love you with an everlasting love,’ I have some basis upon which to understand what He means.
On the other hand, those whose relationship with their earthly father is strained or almost non-existent, take great comfort in the fact that their heavenly Father provides with abundance those elements of a good father that is/was missing from their earthly relationship. So, the Fatherhood of God to His children is, or should be, a matter of great significance to them.
Unfortunately, this filial relationship between God and His children is often relegated to the repetition of the so called Lord’s Prayer on Sunday mornings. The issue is not so much that their relationship with their earthly father was bad, but that their understanding of their heavenly Father is lacking.
Generally speaking, our experience with our heavenly Father is willfully lacking. Yes, Jesus is the one who introduces us to His Father, and He constantly points us toward Him. Jesus is the Son of God, the Son of the Father, The only way of really getting to know a person is not only to read about them or read their autobiography, but to spend time with them.
Just before going to bed one evening in late October 1999, a verse of Scripture came into my mind. Looking back, I thought that the Scripture seemed strange. It was Isaiah 6:1: “In the year that King Uzziah died, I saw the Lord … “ I read no further. I could not. I started to cry. My body shook as my crying turned to sobbing. “Oh, God, this is what I need. This is what I have to have in my life. I need to see You.”
Obviously, I knew I could never actually see God in this lifetime and, as time passed, the real meaning of my prayer became a reality; my heart was crying out with the same desire as Paul when he said, “That I may know Him” (Philippians 3:10) only for me it was more specifically God the Father.
This may sound sacrilegious to some, but try to understand from where I was coming. Throughout my Christian walk from age 14 to 27, all of my studies and preaching had to do with Jesus Christ, the Father’s Beloved Son, much to the exclusion of the Father Himself. I prayed to Jesus, sang about Jesus, studied about Jesus, and preached about Jesus, yet it was against the Father that I was angry and blamed Him for everything that had gone drastically wrong. I was not upset with Jesus because as I often sang as a child, “Jesus loves me, this I know, for the Bible tells me so. Little ones to Him belong, they are weak but He is strong.” After all, the Father was the Father, so He got all the blame.
God used these words from Isaiah 6:1 like a sledge hammer. I saw myself as a large stone—hard, stubborn and unbreakable, but after three days and nights of hammering on the stone, I lay crushed before the powerful hand of God. Yes, He could have accomplished His plan for me in one moment; I believe now that He swung His hammer on me for three days so I would never again forget His mighty work in my heart.
“Is not My word like a fire?" says the LORD, "and like a hammer that breaks the rock in pieces?” Jeremiah 23:29.
As sons and daughters of our heavenly Father, the Holy Spirit within us instills the desire to get to know Him better; to understand His principles, His attributes, and purpose. There is no limit to the desire of God’s children, for with each insight the desire is strengthened and the child’s capacity is deepened. God’s revelation of Himself can be likened to a slide show where He does not move on to the next picture until we grasp a level of understanding of the current one.
Puritan quote:
“If God be my Father, He loves me. And oh. How He loves me . . . When He is a Father, He is the best of fathers’ C.H. Spurgeon (1834 – 1892).
