The Father

When Jesus taught people to pray, he began with two simple words: Our Father. That was not the way most people spoke to God before Jesus came. He revealed God not primarily as a distant ruler or an unreachable judge, but as a Father: the one who made everything, who loves his children, and who can be known personally.

The Old Testament already hints at this. Moses reminded Israel that God was the Father who had made them, who had bought them, and who had established them as a people (Deuteronomy 32:6). The prophet Isaiah, in a moment of national grief, cried out to God as Father, the one who had known Israel from ancient days even when their earthly fathers did not recognize them anymore (Isaiah 63:16). The relationship was there before Jesus came, but it grew immeasurably clearer through him.

Jesus called God his Father constantly, and he claimed a closeness with the Father that no one else claimed. He told his disciples that whoever had seen him had seen the Father, because he and the Father were one in such a deep way that his own words and works were really the Father's works done through him (John 14:9-10). To know Jesus was to know the Father, because Jesus was showing the world exactly what the Father is like.

Jesus taught his followers to bring their needs to the Father with confidence, the way a child brings a request to a good parent. He said that if human parents, who are imperfect, know how to give good gifts to their children, how much more will the Father in heaven give good things to those who ask him (Matthew 7:11). This was not a picture of a distant deity keeping score. It was the picture of a Father who wants to be asked.

The clearest window into this relationship comes at the end of Jesus' life, in his prayer just before the cross. He spoke to the Father with complete trust, even while facing suffering, asking that the Father's will be done and that his own followers would be kept safe and made one (John 17). His whole life led up to and flowed out of this relationship with the Father.

This Fatherhood is not only Jesus' own. Paul writes that believers receive the Spirit of adoption, and through that Spirit they are able to cry out to God as Father, using the same intimate word Jesus himself used (Romans 8:15; Galatians 4:6). Being adopted as a child of God is not a formality. It comes with the same closeness Jesus had, made possible only because of what he accomplished.

John marvels at this gift, saying that people should stop and consider what kind of love the Father has given, that sinful people would be called his children (1 John 3:1). That is the heart of the whole subject. The Father is not a title borrowed from human family structures and pasted onto God. He is the true and original Father, and every earthly father, however good, is only a shadow of him.

To know God as Father is to know him the way Jesus knew him: with trust, with closeness, and with the confidence of a child who has been welcomed home.