I Believe in God the Father Almighty

Matthew 6:9

 

Have you ever stood at the foot of a huge mountain with the intention of climbing it, and suddenly realised that the reality is somewhat different from the thought. In your mind’s eye, you dreamed of a smooth ascent on a sunny day; but the reality is a tortuous ascent and the rain is lashing down. It’s higher than you thought. There are difficult ridges you’ve got to get over, and just when and exhausted you think you’ve reached the summit, you realise there’s another hours climbing to go.

 

As we face the first line of the Apostles’ Creed – ‘I believe in God the Father Almighty’ – we are faced with a mind stretching mountain. For the preacher, there are 3 problems: first, these words are literally packed with meaning – too much to tackle in one sermon. Do we talk about who the ‘I’ who believes is, what it means for ‘I’ to believe, what God is – what do we talk about? As it happens, I have decided to concentrate on what it means for God to be Father and for Him to be Almighty. The second problem is one of text – do we simply use the Bible as a source of proof texts for this proposition ‘I believe in God the Father Almighty’ – in which case we could prove anything and everything; or do we narrow down our focus on one Biblical text related to the Fatherhood and Almightiness of God and study the Biblical text itself? Again, I have decided to concentrate our thoughts on Matthew 6:9 – words well known to us all since they comprise the opening line of the Lord’s Prayer – ‘our Father, who is in heaven’. Forgive me if you would rather me have taken a different approach to the first line of the Apostles’ Creed.

 

Whereas the first problem faced is one concerned with homiletics – or the study of preaching; and the second concerned with hermeneutics – the study of understanding; the third problem is more complex. Namely, the apparent philosophical tension which exists between these two attributes of God – namely God’s Fatherhood which tends towards His love; and God’s Almightiness. The problem is brought into sharp resolve in something written by the Swiss Protestant Theologian Emil Brunner. Brunner had been a horrified observer of and commentator upon the atrocities committed in the Second World War. In 1945, against the backdrop of the devastation of Europe, he delivered a series of sermons on the Apostles’ Creed in which, thinking of this tension between the Love of God and the Power of God he asks, “If we look at the reality, at the world over which the black handkerchief of mourning is spread, at this world in which the individual no longer counts, in which life is extinguished as one snuffs out a candlelight – can we conceive of a majestic God … who is also … a God of Fatherly Love?” He’s exploring depths in which few of us dare walk – if God is love, how come bad things happen to us; if God is Almighty and could stop these bad things happening, why doesn’t He? It seems an apparent problem – the problem of Christian theodicy. Christian writers including such great men as C.S. Lewis, John Calvin and Alvin Plantinga have all offered their own solutions. Such a problem deserves the thought of a thousand sermons, not just one, but before we throw up our hands and leave God behind, we must reckon with the consistent Biblical teaching of both truths – that God is a loving Father and that God is an Almighty Lord.

 

The Lord’s Prayer, or more accurately the prayer He gave to the Apostles, hence the name Apostles’ Prayer, is the most repeated prayer in the Christian world. It’s first line, ‘our Father who is in heaven’, captures the tension between these two doctrines of God as Loving Father and God as Almighty Lord; the tension between the immanence and the transcendence of God; the tension between the love and the power of God. For Jesus, these two different attributes of who God is did not present a problem, but offered an opportunity to understand how we may approach Him in prayer. Before then, we resolve the conflict, we must unravel the problem by looking first at the Fatherhood of God and then secondly, at the Almightiness of God – our Father, who is in Heaven.

 

[A] The Fatherhood of God

For all too many people in today’s Western world, the idea of God as Father doesn’t hold the same positive, loving connotations as it should. 19 year old Ilenia Moretti from Luzzara in NorthenItalywent to her father last year asking for a loan of 5,000 euros to fund a holiday to theUnited States. But then, instead of going on holiday, she used the money she had borrowed from her father to hire two hitmen to kill him. Fortunately, the hitmen got cold feet and turned themselves into the police before they could murder her father. For years, Ilenia’s father had subjected her to a torrent of verbal abuse. For Ilenia Moretti, to talk of God as Father doesn’t hold good pictures. And yet, we mustn’t judge the Fatherhood of God upon the corruptions and perversions of bad human fathers. God is Father – the first level at which we understand Him. There are three areas in which we can speak about God as being Father: first, God as the Ultimate Father; secondly, God is the Father of our Lord Jesus Christ and lastly, God is our Father in Christ.

 

1. God is the Ultimate Father – to say that God is the ultimate father isn’t to say that God is like our human fathers. We can’t extrapolate from our human fathers a line which takes us back to God as our ultimate father – to do that would be to include within the fatherhood of God the sinfulness, limitations and mortality of our earthly fathers. Rather, we begin with God the Father – with His character and His attributes – and from there measure the standard of our fatherhood. You can’t judge how perfect the Pyramids of Giza are from a back of the envelope sketch I could draw – no, you judge how imperfect my sketch is from seeing the real Pyramids. God is the Ultimate Father – and if we want to understand what genuine, authentic fatherhood means, we need to go directly to Him.

 

2. God is the Father of the Lord Jesus Christ – throughout the New Testament and the Epistles, God is presented as the loving Father of the Lord Jesus Christ. He it is, who in the language of Psalm 2 and John 1, begets His Son. This is the God who from the depths of eternity has been a Father and who exists as in person as Father. Within the rubric of the Apostles’ Creed, I think we should see this reference to the Fatherhood of God as primarily a Trinitarian distinction – I believe in the Father … I believe in His Son … I believe in the Holy Spirit.

 

Historically, in the fullness of time, the Son, not considering equality with His Father something to be grasped, made Himself nothing by taking the form of a slave. Throughout this Son’s earthly life, the voice from heaven spoke, ‘you are my beloved Son, with whom I am well pleased’. This is the Son who spoke frequently, affectionately and reverently about His Father. This is the Son who lost all awareness of His Father’s love as He hung and suffered for us on the Cross at Calvary. This is the Son who ascended to the Right Hand of His Father. This is the Son who will return in His Father’s glory. Throughout His ministry He is secure in the awareness that He is His Father’s Son. Paul often refers to God as ‘the Father of our Lord Jesus Christ’. He is the Father who gave His Son the Spirit beyond measure – the Father who gave His Son the security, ability and motivation to complete His work of redeeming a lost mankind for Himself.

 

3. God is our Father in Christ – there is a sense in which God is the Father of Creation – but the major Biblical emphasis is upon how He becomes our Father. It happens through the change in status which Christ has achieved for us. Through faith, we are united to Him – He is the firstborn among many brothers. And in Him, united to Him, we have God as our Father – the Father who, in different sections of the New Testament, is spoken of as providing for us; as guiding and directing us; as disciplining and training us; as calling us to imitate Him and as promising us an inheritance of inestimable treasure. In one of the most magnificent of Biblical Texts, John exclaims, ‘Behold how wonderful is the love the Father has given to us that we should be called children of God.’ How great is the love of the Father for us! So deep and intimate is our relationship to Him through Christ, that Christ encourages us to call Him ‘Abba’, the affectionate Aramaic word for Father. ‘Abba’ doesn’t mean daddy, but it is a term of deep affection and intimacy. Jesus tells us that our eternal home is in the house of His and our Father.

 

God is our loving, heavenly Father in whom we can rest secure. He is the Father in whom there is no sinful imperfection and no mortal limitation. Death will not steal Him from us – only usher us into His presence. Adolf Saphir, converted Jew and close friend of Andrew Bonar once wrote, “These words (our Father) are simple, yet all our lifetime we are but spelling them, and eternity alone can unfold all their meaning.” In terms of its immediate application to prayer, these words, ‘our Father’ teach us, in the words of our Catechism, ‘to draw near to God with all reverence and confidence, as children to a father, ready and able to help us.’ Pray to your Abba, Father with reverence and confidence in His Christ-shaped love for you.

 

And now, as we conclude this point, perhaps the hardest question I will ask tonight: do you believe in God the Father? I know plenty of Reformed Christians who believe in the wrath and anger of God, but do you really believe, not just in your mind but in your heart, that God is your heavenly Father who loves you? Perhaps its easy to say now, but for those of you who are grieving over loss, anxious about your health or frustrated with life, do you believe it still, because it is still true!

 

[B] The Almightiness of God

A picture from my youth constantly comes into mind when I think of God – the picture is the Record Cover of Pink Floyd’s Album, ‘The Dark Side of the Moon’. A pure, white light is being shone through a glass prism which refracts the light into all its constituent colours. As we shine the pure white light of our Father who is in ‘heaven’ through the prism of inspired Scripture, to try and understand what we mean when we talk about God our Father being Almighty, we see three colours in view: first, His transcendence; secondly, His attributes and thirdly, His sovereignty.

 

1. His Transcendence –to say that God is transcendent is simply to say that He is not like us. He is not a big version of you and me – He is of a different kind altogether. We take our descriptions of the Transcendence of God from the overall teaching of the Bible itself. For a start, God is a spirit. He doesn’t have hands and feet, a mouth and a nose – He isn’t bound by the same territorial limitations as we are. Because He is Spirit, He can be present everywhere at the same time. He doesn’t get sick and He is never poorly; He doesn’t sleep and He never lets His guard down. God is also infinite. He cannot be measured or calculated. He cannot be confined to a particular space or time. We are unable to think in terms of infinity because all we are used to is the finite. But God is Himself infinite. God is also eternal – without beginning and without end. There is no point at which God did not exist and which He will cease to exist. He is there at the beginning of your life and at its end. God is also unchangeable. Who He is He has always been and always will be. He doesn’t stand in time but beyond time. God does not change for the better or for the worse. His Name ‘Yahweh’ means ‘I am that I am’ – He is the same yesterday, today and forever. We can’t even begin to fathom how gloriously different God is from us – how much higher are His ways than ours and His thought than ours. Rather, in humble adoration, we bow before His otherness and transcendence with bent knee and adoring hearts.

 

2. His Attributes – when we talk about God’s attributes, we mean His character – who God is and what God does. Again, we could refract the light of His attributes through Scripture and learn that He is wise, powerful, just, good, holy and true. But I want to focus on the two most prominent attributes of God in the Bible.

• God’s holiness is the focus of much of the Bible’s teaching. In the Old Testament, God is presented as a holy God who, being other from us, cannot abide the presence of sin and injustice. The angels who fly in His presence continually sing ‘Holy, Holy, Holy is the Lord God Almighty’. Their three-fold repetition of the motif of holiness drives home the serious holiness of God. The New Testament also presents God as a holy God – the God whom Jesus calls, ‘holy Father’, who sanctifies (or makes holy) His people through the blood of Jesus and who demands holiness from His people. This is a holy God – not to be played with as we might manipulate an imaginary friend or a cosmic toy. But, with the same reverence as Isaiah, we fall down before Him crying out, “woe is me, for I am undone, for I am a man of unclean lips, and I dwell among a people of unclean lips, and my eyes have seen the King, the Lord Almighty.”
• God’s Love is to be understood as the chief of His attributes and the crown of His excellencies. John says of Him, ‘God is Love’. One of the Scottish Fathers, Ebenezer Erskine once wrote of God, “never were the perfections of God so gloriously manifested as they are in His Love in Christ.” The Bible’s consistent teaching is that the glory of God is seen in the love of God. His love is full of mercy and grace towards us, demonstrated in this – while we were yet sinners; and as we heard so eloquently this morning, His love for us led to Him sparing not His own darling, precious Son. How dare any of us doubt the love of God for us when we see His Son dying in agony on the Cross? If the glory of His holiness is not enough to bring us to our knees, the glory of His love will.

Great is our God – the God who is infinitely, eternally and unchangeably holy and loving. In prayer, this is the God we approach – a God whose attributes are perfectly suited to our needs.

 

3. His Sovereignty – in Psalm 115:3 we have some of the most challenging theology in the Bible. The Psalmist says, ‘our God is in the heavens; he does whatever pleases Him.’ God is sovereign – He is in control of all things and is Lord of Lords. None bend His will to theirs; none thwart His purposes. All authority and dominion is His. He is, as the New Testament consistently describes Him, the Almighty God. His purposes have been set from before the foundations of the world and they will come to pass. He doesn’t remove our free-will, but in a way we don’t always appreciate, our decisions are in His hands.

 

At the end of the age, when time and space shall be no more, we shall behold a golden throne on which shall sit the Lord Almighty. He shall be surrounded by an innumerable multitude and the voice of their praises shall be deafening. The glory of His holiness will light up the sky and His loving presence will give life to all. This is our God – our transcendent God – the Almighty God – and before Him we bow. In the context of our prayers, how does this vision of the Almightiness of God affect you? In the context of the Lord’s Prayer, it meant that Jesus teaches us to put God’s priorities before ours – ‘hallowed be your name, your kingdom come, your will be on earth as it is in heaven’. Our prayers are shaped by the great purpose clause of our catechisms – ‘man’s chief end (even in prayer) is to glorify God and to enjoy Him for ever.’ No prayer we make for His glory will ever fall on ears which are deaf or a will which is powerless to answer. But again, I ask the hardest question – do you really believe in the sovereignty of God? It’s easy to glibly talk of His sovereignty when life is going well, but what about when life is hard – when we’ve lost our jobs or developed depression, when we hear the C word or are troubled by our singleness? Believe it and say it, because you know that God is Almighty.

 

Let’s go back then to the beginning and try and square the circle of what it means to believe in God the Father Almighty. Given the presence of so much pain and suffering, how can we say that God is both loving and Almighty? Given that black handkerchief of mourning, as Emil Brunner put it, that hangs over the world, how can we see clearly what it means to believe in a loving, Almighty God? I leave the last word to Emil Brunner, the theologian who set us the problem in the first place. He says, “the Almightiness of God and His love do not stand in opposition to one another but in a reciprocal relation. Were God not Almighty, how could we trust that He could really carry out His plan of love? And if God were not love, how could we ever (have enough confidence) to call Him God”. Though our minds may struggle with it, ultimately, through Christ and His Word, we know that He is our Loving Father, and we know that He is our Almighty Lord. Can then we say, both by Jesus-driven word and Gospel-transformed actions this week – “I believe in God the Father Almighty?”

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