The Father
Readings: Isaiah 64. 1-9, 1 Corinthians 8. 1-6, John 14. 8-11
For this series all the readings are provided as a resource, not all are necessarily referenced.
What does it mean that God is Father? What does it means about him, and what does it mean for us?
We’re at the start of our series on the Nicene Creed. And the first section is remarkably short. ‘We believe in one God, the Father, the Almighty, maker of heaven and earth, of all that is, seen and unseen’.
It begins with a declaration which would have been rather radical in the ancient world: we believe in one God. Speaking in the ancient world which had myriad gods and goddesses and demigods and powers and so on, that was radical. It was generally accepted that you could have your own gods provided you also paid your dues to the other gods too. But such a statement is also increasingly radical now. To say we believe in one God is to, in a simple sentence, sweep every other god to one side and to say ‘no, not them’.
It’s what’s going on in that passage from Paul’s first letter to the Corinthians. It might have seemed an odd choice as you were listening, him talking about food sacrificed to idols, in other words other gods. But I picked it because of Paul’s logic here, you can eat food sacrificed to other gods, because as far as Paul, and indeed Christians, were concerned they didn’t exist. We believe in one God, those other ones are just wood and iron and clay. To be a Christian is to be exclusive, there is only one God. And once you become exclusive, once you start saying there is only one God, what you believe about that God really starts to matter. If there are endless gods and goddesses and demigods and lesser deities, it doesn’t matter so much if things get a bit muddled, but once there’s one, it matters.
1700 years ago Bishops from across the world met together in Nicea, summoned by the Emperor, to deal with a crisis in the church. There was a rift in the church, created by some, first among them a priest called Arius, who taught that there was a time when God the Son, was not. We’ll come onto God the Son in the coming weeks. But I raise it now because it’s important context. What Christians believe, matters. And at the core of what someone has to believe to call themselves a Christian have been for 1700 years, and still are, the Nicene and Apostle’s Creeds. Now the Christian faith is certainly more than a doctrine to be believed but, as American pastor Kevin DeYoung points out, ‘we must never think it is something other than a doctrine to be believed’. Calling ourselves Christians is to have our entire worldview shaped by these words. It’s not just a relationship with God and ignore all the theology stuff, because the second I ask you, which God do you have a relationship with, whether you realise it or not, you’ll start doing theology.
What Christians believe matters because as Christians we believe truth matters. If we believe in one God, what we say about him, what he is like, what his attributes and personality are like matter, because you can’t just go and pick another god from the pantheon. The reality of the Christ event and what it means for our understanding of God, and the world and who we are, it matters whether it’s true, and it matters because it’s true.
We believe in one God. So what is this God like? Well, what Arius and his followers had done was to start with their reason, they’d sat down, thought about what God is like, and then worked from there. And there are many in our world who do the same, ‘if there is a God, what would that God be like’, and perhaps they’ll start throwing around words like uncreated and omnipotent (all-powerful) and omniscient (all-knowing) and so on. Perhaps you’re tempted to do the same. But for Christians we don’t start with a blank canvas and start thinking about God, we open the Scriptures for God to reveal himself to us there. Because we don’t need to try to work out who God is from scratch, he’s revealed himself to us in the books we call the Bible, and chiefly in his Son. As Jesus says in our Gospel reading today; whoever has seen me has seen the Father. So we open the Scriptures, we look in here and what do we find about the first person of the Trinity, he is Father. That’s how the creed opens – we believe in one God, the Father… Not the uncreated, or all-powerful, or the all-knowing, the Father.
The first person of the Trinity has revealed himself as Father. So how is he a Father? Well you may jump to he’s our Father, but that’s not the fundamental way he’s a Father. You may say he’s a Father because he is creator, and that’s certainly true but again that’s not it. Because if those things are the reason he’s Father, then there was a time when we didn’t exist, and a time when creation didn’t exist. And so then, what was God before that, he couldn’t be Father, which means he’s something else first, and then he becomes Father. Which means we’d the ask what’s lurking behind him being Father, what’s he really like? No, God is a Father because he has a Son. And since the Son, the one who takes on our flesh in the person of Jesus, has always existed, more on that next week, God the Father has always been Father, there is nothing else lurking behind that. As Professor Michael Reeves says ‘God is Father all the way down, that’s who he is at the deepest level, most truly and deeply’.
God is Father. And the fact that God is Father means that he is, by very definition, fruitful, livegiving. God is fundamentally an overflow, a fountain, of life and love and joy. He’s not static or flat or lifeless, rather the God of the universe is abundantly fruitful, dynamic and lifegiving. God has always been a Father loving the Son in the joy of the Holy Spirit. More on that next week. But the Father is the source. He is the one from whom the Son and the Spirit proceed, as the Church Fathers put it. The Son is from the Father, the Spirit is from the Father and the Son. But the Father, he is the source, he is not from anyone, he is the source of the divine life. And out of this overflow comes creation. God isn’t a needy god, sat there lonely and lifeless and perhaps a bit bored so he creates so that he’s not alone, so that he’s not bored. God is Father and so out of the overflow and life of God comes creation. And it is the Father we call creator. For just as the Father is the source of the divine life, so creation is in many ways the source of everything else, and so we attribute it to the Father.
Now, point of order here which will keep coming up, all external acts of God are undivided. In other words anything God does, all persons of the Trinity do. We do not have a person of the Trinity who alone creates, a second who alone saves, and a third who alone brings life. No, God; Father, Son and Holy Spirit create, save and bring life. But as we read Scripture and as the Church Fathers write, we attribute certain acts to certain persons, the one we see most clearly acting. So in creation we see the Father in the foreground so to speak. But, as Irenaus, a Greek Bishop in what is now southern France, who was at Nicea, wrote, the Son and Spirit are like the Father’s hands in creation. The Spirit hovers over the waters, as the Father speaks the Word, the Word being another way of saying the Son. The Trinity creates, but the Father is in the foreground.
Now there have been some in recent decades who are rather uncomfortable with gendered language for God, and so have taken to saying you can call God Mother if you want, or have gone with the gender neutral ‘creator’. Why does it matter that we call God Father and not mother or creator? Well firstly because that’s how he chooses to identify himself to us. It’s not that he’s biologically male in some way, rather he uses masculine language and titles for himself throughout Scripture; King, Father, Husband. Now sometimes he uses feminine imagery to describe characteristics such as a nursing mother, but broadly speaking he speaks in masculine terms.
But why should it matter? It matters because it shapes how we relate to God and how God relates to us and creation. God as Father immediately removes any idea that creation was somehow birthed by a mother god, had come out from her. God as Father speaks of one who has to create from nothing, who forms and moulds us. And whilst some may shy away from God as Father for personal reasons, the failure or abuses of their own earthly Fathers, God our Heavenly Father speaks as one who comes to heal those wounds. The Father to the Fatherless he calls himself. A Father who will never leave or forsake or hurt. Don’t deny him that place where he longs to bring healing and balm. God is there waiting as the perfect Father, filled with life and love, longing to draw you to himself. But finally to use the gender neutral ‘creator’ of the first person of the Trinity is firstly to misunderstand the Trinity, as I say God acts in unison, but also places immediate distance between us and God. Feel the difference – We believe in one God, the creator… We believe in one God, the Father. God is not one who creates and then leaves, sets the clockwork of the universe in motion and then wanders off. God is a Father, he is relational, and longs for that relationship with you.
God is fundamentally the creator of everything, everything we see in our world, our universe, from the far off galaxies, the clouds skimming across the sky, to the beetles in your garden and the atoms and subatomic particles and forces which make up it all. All things, seen and unseen as the Creed puts it. Which means everything has purpose and meaning, we have purpose and meaning. But he is also a Father. This universe isn’t an accident, you’re not an accident, we were purposefully created by God for his glory. And because God is the Father of the Son, he can send the Son, so that through the him you might be able to call him Father too. So that your voice might join with the eternal Son in calling God your Father. You weren’t created by a needy God who needs something from you, you were created by a God who is Father, so that you might be adopted into his family. Isn’t that wonderful! We were created so that we might too call God our Father, and rejoice in him.
My brothers and sisters. God is first and foremost Father, first and foremost one who is defined by relationship. Just as he has existed from eternity in perfect relationship with the Son and the Holy Spirit, so now, he has created us for relationship with him. Not as servants or slaves to do his bidding or meet some need or lack, but as a people he longs to adopt as his children, so that we might, with his Son, cry out ‘Abba Father’. You were not an accident, but fearfully and wonderfully made so that you too might know the God of the universe not as creator or supreme being but as Father. And so all glory be to the Father, and to the Son, and to the Holy Spirit, as it was in the beginning, is now and shall be forever.
Amen.