Grace Bible Chapel, June 16, 2024, Greg Rhodea PhD
I. God as Father in the
Number of times God is called “Father” in John: over 100 times.
Number of times Jesus is called “Son” in John: over 40 times.
Jesus and God in Relationship: 1:18; 5:19; 10:30; 14:10, 28, 31; 16:15; 17:10a
Father and Son before the Incarnation: 1:1-3; 16:28; 17:5, 24
The love of the Father: 3:35; 5:20; 15:9-10; 3:16
The Fatherhood of God extended in Jesus to us: 20:17 (see 16:27; 17:26)
II. God as Father in the Essential
of the
The dark and dangerous path: starting our thinking about God as Creator, Almighty One, Ruler, Uncaused First Cause, or as an absolutely solitary person.
If these are our foundational ideas about God, they can mislead us.
If God is essentially Creator, then he is nothing without a creation and dependent upon it. If God is essentially Almighty, then he is most basically pure power, and pure power need not be loving or good. If God is essentially Ruler, he may be only a cosmic policeman, and we may be only lawbreakers before him. If he is primarily an Uncaused First Cause he could be something impersonal. If he is absolutely a Solitary Person, he could not be essentially loving and would depend on the existence of other creatures to love.
The well-lit and safe path: starting our thinking about God with Jesus, the Son of God.
This approach to understanding God will give us the true God of the Bible in all his beauty.
Because God is a Trinity of three persons, God is essentially and eternally the loving Father of Jesus, the Son who loves and reveals the Father, and the Spirit who lives with Father and Son in harmony. This means God is eternally and essentially loving, life-giving, and relational—a family! That God is a Trinity is the heart of the good news of the Christian faith, because we are invited into their love!
The Bottom Line
Look to
…by recognizing the
…by seeing it is the Father’s nature to
…by
…by defining
On the Three and One (Michael Reeves, Delighting in the Trinity: An Introduction to the Christian Faith [IVP Academic: 2012], 33-34).
Now, because the Father, Son, and Spirit are persons who have real relationships with each other (the Father loving the Son and so on), Christian theologians have happily and unabashedly spoken of the fellowship of the Trinity. The eighteenth-century theologian Jonathan Edwards could write about the “society or family of the three,” even going so far as to say that the very “happiness of the Deity, as all other true happiness, consists in love and society.” But (and this is a big but) that is not to say that the Trinity is like a club that the Father, Son, and Spirit have decided to join. They are not three persons who simply manage to get along well—even very well—with each other.
What then? Well, let us go back to the beginning, and to the Father. Before creation, before all things, we saw, the Father was loving and begetting his son. For eternity, that was what the Father was doing. He did not become Father at some point; rather, his very identity is to be the one who begets the Son. That is who he is. Thus it is not as if the Father and the Son bumped into each other at some point and found to their surprise how remarkably well they got on. The Father is who he is by virtue of his relationships with the Son. Think again of the image of the fountain: a fountain is not a fountain if it does not pour forth water. Just so, the Father would not be the Father without his Son (whom he loves through the Spirit). And the Son would not be the Son without his Father. He has his very being from the Father. And so we see that the Father, Son, and Spirit, while distinct persons, are absolutely inseparable from each other. Not confused, but undividable. They are who they are together. They always are together, and thus they always work together.
That means that the Father is not “more” God than the Son or the Spirit, as if he had once existed or could exist without them. His very identity and being is about giving out his own fullness to the Son. He is inseparable from him. It also means there is no “God” behind and before Father, Son, and Spirit. That, actually, can be the problem with talk about “God”: it can all too easily lead us to imagine that there is some stuff (or worse, some person) called “God” out of which the Father, Son, and Spirit then emerge.