stephen R Harrison

I love being a father. God’s gift of our three children is one of His best, along with salvation and marriage to my wife. I had a great father. He and my mother adopted my sister and me, and he modeled how to be loving, patient, gentle, and so much more. He showed me how to be a good husband, father, and man. I often think about how my dad interacted with me when I interact with my kids. He was a good, godly father. On the flip side, my biological father abandoned my sister and me. I only had one weird interaction with him. He was not a man of integrity or Christ-like character, and was not around to display attributes of a good father. Through his absence, he modeled bad fatherhood. I’m a very imperfect father. Although I have tried to be present, loving, giving, and an example of how to live for Christ, I have fallen short so many times. Neither my inadequacies as a father nor my biological father’s bad example has kept me from striving to be a good dad. It has pointed me to my need to learn from and be shaped by the best of fathers – God the Father.

The first Person of the Trinity is God the Father. We see His title of “Father” a couple of dozen times in the Old Testament, but hundreds of times in the New Testament. It speaks clearly to His nature, character, and actions. God as Father communicates the intimate, personal, and familial relationship we can have with Him through His Son, Jesus. “Father” was Jesus’ favorite way of referring to God, as this revealed His relationship with Him by nature as “The Son of God”. Their preexistent (before creation) relationship as God the Father and Jesus the Son (evidenced in John 3:16-17) displays their eternal and perfect love for one another. It overflows and is demonstrated toward us. The Father sent the Son to redeem us from sin (at the perfect time – Galatians 4:4). We can call God Father because we have been adopted as sons and daughters of God through Christ the Son (Galatians 4:4-7; Ephesians 1:5). We now have the right to be called children of God because of Jesus (John 1:12). Jesus calls God Father over 60 times in the Synoptic Gospels (Matthew, Mark, and Luke) and over 100 times in the gospel of John (over 50x in John 14-17). This leads us to believe that calling God Father is the primary way we should approach Him. This is evidenced by Christ, who told His disciples to regularly pray, “Our Father, who is in heaven…” (Matthew 6:9-13). The Fatherhood of God also influenced Paul’s perspective and writings to the early church, as his letters refer to God as Father over 40 times.

God is compared to a lot of things in Scripture, including the sun (Psalm 84:11), a fire (Hebrews 12:29), a light (Psalm 27:1), a rock (Deuteronomy 32:4), and a shield (Psalm 84:11). These are all true and right, but I love that He is Father. He’s not just compared to one – He is the ultimate one. He’s also described in human form, such as a physician (Exodus 15:26), shepherd (Psalm 23:1), and a husband (Isaiah 54:5). These are also incredible and perfectly displayed in Him as our Father. He is described as a God who knows (Genesis 18:21), remembers (Exodus 2:24), hears (Exodus 2:24), and sees (Genesis 1:10). What a loving Father! Although he doesn’t have a human body, these examples of anthropomorphic terms and qualities describe the God who “has” eyes (Psalm 11:4), ears (Psalm 55:1), and a mouth (Deuteronomy 8:3). These reveal His nature and ability to know us completely and be known by us intimately. Scripture describes His character – good, merciful, holy, and so on. God is infinite and omnipresent, but He is also knowable and personal. He is all-powerful and all-knowing, but gentle and gracious. He is wise, truthful, good, loving, merciful, righteous, perfect, and glorious – all attributes displayed in His Fatherhood. This short devotional cannot convey the depth of the nature of God the Father, but hopefully it provides a worshipful glimpse and springboard that invites more study, contemplation, understanding, and adoration of God our Father.

What a Father!