God the Father Almighty

I believe in God, the Father Almighty, Maker of heaven and earth…

“The Creation of Adam” (Sistine Chapel: Michelangelo, c. 1512)

What does it mean that God is our Father?

Some would accuse the church of being typically patriarchal in naming God this way. The assumed ‘male-ness’ of God is purported to be another example of men running the show, so to speak—making God in their image. Yet since God is Spirit, He is neither male nor female in the human sense; but He is our Father. This is the manner in which God reveals Himself. Moses asks the people of Israel: “Is not He your Father, Who created you, Who made you and established you?” (Deuteronomy 32:6).

Jesus teaches us to call God ‘Our Father.’ He is not called ‘Master’ (though He is the Lord). He is not like the false gods, the ‘Baals’, who lord it over people and demand to be appeased in some way. He is the Father Who gives, the Father from Whom all good comes. “Every good gift and every perfect gift is from above, coming down from the Father of lights with Whom there is no variation or shadow due to change” (James 1:17).

The Father is God Who has made heaven and earth. With His Son and the Holy Spirit, He is the Creator of all that is, and ever will be. “The heavens declare the glory of God, and the sky above proclaims His handiwork” (Psalm 19:1). The Father is the Maker of heaven and earth. There is nothing that is which He has not made. “The earth is the Lord’s and the fullness thereof, the world and those who dwell therein” (Psalm 24:1).

Yet God the Father is not a mass-producer. He is our personal God. We confess in the Catechism that “God has made me and all creatures; given me my body and soul, eyes, ears, and all my members, my reason and all my senses, and still takes care of them.” David prays to the Father in his psalm: “For you formed my inward parts; you knitted me together in my mother’s womb” (Psalm 139:13). Our Father is not distant, but has singly and personally created each one of us. His creation is ongoing; His preserving is what keeps us alive in this world, and in the world to come.

“God the Father – Arise” (Church of St. Francis of Assisi, Krakow): Stanislaw Wyspianski, 1904

Luther writes in the Large Catechism that “He causes all created things to serve for the uses and necessities of life. These include the sun, moon, and stars in the heavens, day and night, air, fire, water, earth, and whatever it bears and produces…. They also include whatever else there is for bodily and temporal goods, like good government, peace, and security.” God’s fatherly care is all-encompassing. He leaves nothing out that we and our world need. “The eyes of all look to You, and You give them their food in due season. You open Your hand; You satisfy the desire of every living thing” (Psalm 145:15-16).

Your Father is directing all things in this world for your care. I had a good earthly father. He arranged our house and life so that his children would have all the gifts we really needed to live and learn, to love and to be loved. But God in heaven is “our Father by Whose name all fatherhood is known, Who does in love proclaim each family Thine own” (LSB 863:1)

Maybe you didn’t have a great earthly father.  That happens in this sinful and broken world. If that is or was the case, your Father in heaven is and remains your true, loving Father. Isaiah reminds us that though earthy father or mother forsakes us, God remains our constant, true Father: “For you are our Father, though Abraham does not know us, and Israel does not acknowledge us; you, O Lord, are our Father, our Redeemer from of old is your name” (Isaiah 63:16).

This is not something we take for granted. While God is the Maker and Creator of all people, that is not what really makes Him our Father and us His children. In a true sense, all human beings are created as children of the Father in heaven. But we don’t stay that way. Like the younger son in Jesus’ famous parable, we run away from the Father’s house, from the place we should have in the Father’s family. In our sin, following after Adam in his disobedience, we are rebels, we have left the family. We have no inherent right to call God ‘our Father.’

Yet like that same son in the parable, the Holy Spirit draws us to repentance, to see our hopelessness apart from the fatherly care of our God. He calls us home, by Baptism and Holy Word. We are called to come home, not to make it up to God, not to earn our way into His fatherly care. He is the Father Who is waiting for us, drawing us to Himself through His Son. He wants us not as servants or slaves, but as daughters and sons, in Christ. St. Paul makes that clear: “For you did not receive the spirit of slavery to fall back into fear, but you have received the Spirit of adoption as sons, by whom we cry, ‘Abba! Father!’” (Romans 8:15).

“The Creation of the World” (Illustration in the Luther Bible): Lucas Cranach, 1534

So God is your Father only because He is Jesus’ Father. And Jesus makes Him to be your Father. Jesus makes those who have spurned the Father’s love to be those who receive His love again. From His blessed cross He prays specifically for us: “Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do” (Luke 23:34). Our God is not against us, but for us. That is, He truly and actually wants us in His eternal family. Jesus tells you that very clearly: “For this is the will of my Father, that everyone who looks on the Son and believes in Him should have eternal life, and I will raise him up on the last day” (John 6:40). We call God ‘Our Father’ then because, as Luther writes in the Small Catechism, He “tenderly invites us to believe that He is our true Father and that we are His true children, so that with all boldness and confidence we may ask Him as dear children ask their dear father.”

That God is our Father means that we are His family. “See what kind of love the Father has given to us, that we should be called children of God; and so we are” (1 John 3:1). We are being remade in the image of His Son, by the forgiveness of sins and the working of the Holy Spirit. And looking like the Son, we also begin to bear again the image of our Father. Although the fullness of our being children of the heavenly Father will not be seen until the resurrection and the world to come, we already have begun, by His grace, to be recognized as His ‘kids’. So Jesus tells us: “In the same way, let your light shine before others, so that they may see your good works and give glory to your Father who is in heaven” (Matthew 5:16).

And since we are children of God the Father, we are also sisters and brothers. We belong to a family that will never end, where all have a place, where each of us is the apple of our Father’s eye. We already live, by His grace, as that family within His holy church.

We all believe in one true God, Who created earth and heaven, the Father Who to us in love has the right of children given.  He in soul and body feeds us; all we need His hand provides us; through all snares and perils leads us, watching that no harm betide us.  He cares for us by day and night; all things are governed by His might. (LSB 954:1)

Rev. Warren Hamp is pastor of Faith Lutheran Church in Kitchener, Ontario.

Print this article