How Is God Our Father?

The full biblical revelation of God is that He is eternally the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit, One and indivisible. The Father is the Father of the Son. His name is the Father. Only God can name Himself. The name the Father denotes that He generates the Son eternally in the unity of the indivisible Trinity. Father is His personal (hypostatic) name. It tells us that He does not name Himself by any element in the creation He has made. This is who He is.

The name is not a metaphor. Neither is it something we should conceptualize on the basis of what human fathers are like. It is the revealed name, given by God, for the trinitarian hypostasis (person) who begets the Son and spirates (or proceeds) the Holy Spirit. We are to view elements of creation in terms of God’s revelation, not vice-versa. Paul’s remark about “the Father, from whom every family in heaven and on earth is named” (Eph. 3:14–15) rules out thinking from created realities and applying them to God.

Although God brought all other entities into existence, it can be said only in a very loose way that He is the Father of all. He is Father of all only insofar as He is the Creator. The Bible indicates that it is an amazing reality that He is Father: “See what kind of love the Father has given us, that we should be called the children of God” (1 John 3:1). This is entirely out of our hands, a sovereign bestowal of kindness and grace. It is patterned in some way on the relations between the Father and the Son.

We bear the family likeness because we are united to Christ, who is the eternal Son of the Father. This is evident insofar as Jesus was rejected by His contemporaries; they did not recognize Him for who He is. Similarly, the world does not realize who we are precisely because it did not realize who He was (1 John 3:1).

As the eternal Son, now enfleshed, Jesus’ customary way to refer to God was as His Father. It was highly unusual—some think it unprecedented—for an individual to call God “Father.” Due to sin, people typically see God as far off. Jesus encouraged us to pray, “Our Father,” since, as His disciples, we are united to Him, the Son, by the Spirit, and so come to bear the family likeness as His children.

Following from this, the Father—together with the Son—has poured out the Holy Spirit so that we cry, “Father!” (Rom. 8:15–16, Gal. 4:4–6). The expression “Abba! Father!” reads as Abba (Aramaic), Patēr (Greek). Both words mean the same thing: “Father.” Some preachers claim that Abba means “Daddy,” but this is not the case; it is an instance where a cute comment gets taken up and repeated ad nauseam.1 Rather, the term means that whoever we are, Jew or Greek, whatever language we speak, we have the identical relation to God through Christ, are now His children, and have access to the Father. Moreover, the relation to the Father that we have been given is identical to that which the Son has in eternity; His by nature, ours by sheer grace.

In short, we have been made the adopted children of God in Jesus Christ. He is the natural Son, the eternal Son; we were not sons but we have been made so by grace.2 Christ always was and is the Son; we were strangers and aliens but now we have been brought near.

We should banish from our minds, as far as we can, all personal experiences of our own human fathers. For some, these memories may be painful; for all of us they are misleading, for we all fall short. The one model—and the model for human fatherhood—is that of the Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, as recorded in metaphorical language:

Yet it was I who taught Ephraim to walk;

I took them up by their arms,

but they did not know that I healed them.

I led them with cords of kindness,

with the bands of love,

and I became to them as one who eases the yoke on their jaws,

and I bent down to them and fed them. (Hos. 11:3–4)

The image of the returning prodigal in Jesus’ parable springs to mind in which “while he was still a long way off, his father saw him and felt compassion, and ran and embraced him and kissed him” (Luke 15:20).

So, whoever we are, in Christ we have “access in one Spirit to the Father” (Eph. 2:18). Let us draw near, confessing our sins, in the sure and certain knowledge that He will receive us and lavish His kindness on us for the whole of eternity. The Father’s love will then be universally evident for, since we are His children now, when Christ returns in His unfettered glory, we shall see Him as He is and be like Him, to the glory of the Father (1 John 3:2).

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Ligonier Ministries