The Character of God the Father - Part 2

The following is the second half of a talk I gave at the WYnet Passion conference 2010/11. (See my previous post for part 1). The theme for the week was Character, and I opened the event with this to say about God the Father, with the character of Jesus and the Holy Spirit being expanded on in later evenings.

In the first half, I have mentioned that our ideas of our Heavenly Father are not to be founded on our experiences of our earthly ones. I have also said that God Creates and Judges, and that judgment in the sense I used is the natural result after creation.

Loves

“God Loves you, He Loves me, He Loves everyone!” This side of God is probably so loudly proclaimed and tightly held onto by Christians recently that you can start to glaze over it, or forget that the Love of God is going to be more extreme than our own flimsy ideas about an emotion.

Love is a more deep-seated characteristic of God the Father because he Loved before He created (and therefore before he judged). The three-persons of God (Trinity) had Love for each other before the world, before even time itself began! This explains why God's Love for us is stronger than his Judgment on us, and why Jesus was always God's plan for saving us from eternal death instead of just plan B.

If Love is so important, let's consider how do we imagine it. Imagine 'Mr. Oh' had a son called Junior, whom he loved very much. Easy to imagine, yes? What if we say Mr. Oh loved Junior so much, he bought a slave boy to cater for many of his needs, and make his life pleasant. Still quite easy, yes? But what about if the slave boy was my own son, and after several warnings, I said to Mr. Oh, “Give me back my son or I will kill yours!”

Does what I did sound like love? Do you think that love could be driving me to such strong measures to reclaim my own boy? Do you think that God has a love like that, capable of violence if necessary? If you don't, please direct your mind to the story of God rescuing the Jews from slavery in Egypt using Moses, and read Hosea 11:1, where God calls Israel his “Son”. God warned the Egyptian Pharaoh with the plagues, but it had to go as far as God saying to the ruler of the country “Give me back my son (my people), or your son will die.” Killing is not God's plan A, but we should not put imaginary limits on how extreme God's love is.

I will briefly mention for the aspect of love, and Fatherhood in general, that probably the best image in scripture of God's love for us is found in the story of the Running Father (or the Prodigal Son, as it is usually known) in Luke 15:11-32. In a line, God cares about Who He is With, not What you have done: With, not What. This story has too much to unpack here.

Gives

The last characteristic of God the Father I present is that He Gives. This is the natural next step from Love, just like Judgment was the natural next step from Creation.

The natural language of Love is to Give.

Jesus tells us in the sermon on the mount that God the Father Gives us what we need to live (Matt 7:9-11). Also, Jesus keeps repeating throughout the Gospel of John that God sent Him. This is the best gift mankind could ever get! The generosity didn't stop there either, because when Jesus was taken back into Heaven, God sent the Holy Spirit to be a presence in all of us too!

Our Father

So God the Father Creates, Judges, Loves and Gives. Through Jesus, we are brought into the Family of the Church, and can refer to the maker of the universe as our close companion and true master (John 1:12-13, Romans 8:15-16 and Galatians 4:5-7).

Thinking of God as being so close is not our own idea either- Kenneth E. Bailey shows that it started with Jesus translating this respectful name of God from the religious Hebrew language to the everyday, heart-felt, Greek language of the people. He did this when he said “Our Father...” at the beginning of the famous Lord's prayer in Matthew 6:9. Jesus was demonstrating that we do not need to talk to God in a special language: He is so close to us that we can talk to Him with the language we most naturally use to express ourselves. He is close, and He knows us, like a good Father.

I finished the talk with a story taken from this video at Recycle Your Faith, to provide an example of God using With-Not-What in practice. I also made a note to myself that when I next do a talk, I will aim for it to be half the length of this one!



See another post about Love...

Image Source: http://www.myjewelrybox.com/articles/thelawsofgiftgiving/