The Father and His Children 4. The Love of the Father 25.7.07
Introduction: RF
How this topic is the pinnacle of the series
The great struggle of human life is the reality of the love of God in our experience
The question, “Does God love me?” is always tied to a child’s crisis of conscience, “Am I good enough to be loved.”
Beginning with God
Part of the difficulty we have in understanding “The Love of the Father” is that we always start off with our personal sense of God’s love in our life journey. However, just like the love of a husband and a wife in the covenant of marriage is designed to precede and issue in the generation of children, so it is in the eternal love of the Father for the Son that the plan for the creation and restoration of humanity is generated.
Jesus was aware of these things, “Father, I desire that they also, whom you have given me, may be with me where I am, to see my glory that you have given me because you loved me before the foundation of the world… I made known to them your name…that the love with which you have loved me may be in them, and I in them.”” (John 17:24, 26)
Polarising God
Many believers struggle spiritually with the relationship between Jesus and his Father. Thirty plus years ago I was part of the so –called “Jesus Movement”, involved in two “Jesus Houses”, we had the Jesus “One way” sign, I had a “Jesus badge”, many of us even looked like Jesus. Jesus was cool, he was our brother. Now it is true that Jesus is our brother[1], but if he is our brother, we must have a common Father[2].
Why didn’t we ever have “Father badges/houses/signs/movements” etc? At the time we weren’t even aware of these issues. More seriously, most of the mature age Christians around didn’t help us to know God as our Father. I now see they had the same sorts of problems with a “scary Father” as we did. Sadly, most of the teachers of the church, then and now, lacked a practical understanding of God as trinity.
The love of the Father cannot be found in himself, but only in Jesus, God is Christlike[3]. The love of the Father is to reveal Christ to us, the love of the Father is a person, Christ is not only the wisdom and power of God[4] but the love of God. In the four Gospels the only statements about God loving humans are in John’s Gospel, and in they all follow a Christ – centred principle, “for the Father himself loves you, because you have loved me and have believed that I came from God.” (John 16:27)[5]
I don’t think we really saw Jesus clearly in those early days, but largely a projection of our youth culture, if we truly had seen Jesus we would have seen the Father in him, “Whoever has seen me has seen the Father.” (John 14:9).
For a long time the tendency in the “Bible- believing” church has been to overemphasise the deity of Jesus and to minimize his humanity. If we have done so this means we have also minimised what some theologians have called “the humanity of God”[6].
Through sin’s deceit[7] we hear the Word of God through the lens of a hardened heart[8] and find it almost impossible to believe that the Father experiences things as we do, with sensitivity to mental, moral and physical pain at least equal to ours. If however God lives in Christ[9], he now thinks and lives in his deepest being as the Father of a human person; he is who he is for us solely in the humanity of Christ[10]. The way that God softens our hearts, so that we experience his love for us as he loves Jesus[11], is through the gospel.
Why isn’t the Love of God Preached Evangelistically in the New Testament?
There will be no lasting revival without a recovery of the gospel, “For I am not ashamed of the gospel, for it is the power of God for salvation” (Rom 1:16). There is much preaching of the gospel recorded in scripture, but there is no record of the public preaching of God’s love to the Gentiles, the word “love” doesn’t even appear in the book of Acts. The only possible exception to this rule of the language of love being restricted to believers is John 3:16[12].
Scripture approaches the whole matter of God’s love through the lens of judgement; this is what John 3:16 does. This is not because the Father is “into judgement”, but because we are people of judgement.
The Judgement of Man
Blame and accusation are everywhere e.g. the bullying that everyone has experienced in the school yard, fights between siblings always end in blame, so often the same is true in marriage , walking past a bin with a Reader’s Digest on the top (Nov 2003), Parent Report Card, (teens grade their mums and dads), the “I’ve gotcha reporting” that jumps on any mistake a politician makes, most seriously, when the footie team fails we always have to find a scapegoat.
Some societies even lack a word for forgiveness e.g. “payback” in aboriginal culture. I remember being shocked by a statement from a prominent national Christian Aboriginal leader, who I saw on TV last week, “We’ve forgiven you but we are still angry” – unconditional forgiveness leaves no room for anger.
All of this judgment started when Satan judged God’s Word and accused him of lying, “did God say… “You will not surely die.”[13], Eve believes him and Adam joins in. In choosing a spiritual father[14] who is a slanderer[15] the human race were united to Satan in the way he knows good and evil. Blame became an essential aspect of the fallen human heart.
Firstly, Adam accuse himself inwardly, we know this because he had to cover up his shame before Eve (3:7). Then our fallen earthly father begins to imply others are to blame: ““The woman whom you gave to be with me, she gave me fruit of the tree, and I ate.”” (Gen 3:11). The human experience of guilt and shame is rooted in the conviction of the fallen conscience that we, and others, are “worthy of blame”[16].
By rejecting the indwelling Word of God, our hearts experience guilt and shame as totally isolating, something we must bear alone. I come to believe with my whole heart that no – one can share my responsibilities/blame, and there is nothing I can do about it[17]. Spiritually, we are trapped by the accusations of Satan and the blaming conscience. To hand us over to this sorry state of affairs is the inner content of the wrath of God. Thankfully, God’s judgement is wider than his wrath.
The Judgement of God
The judgement of God must not be construed in terms of the dynamics of human judgement, for God is not an individual but an eternal community of love. Spiritually, most societies will grasp the meaning of the trinity much easier than our western individualism will allow. Behind this African proverb, “It takes a village (= community) to raise a child”, is a notion of corporate responsibility.
If there is nothing so alienating, isolating/alone/naked as the sinful/guilty human conscience, there can be nothing so unifying as the divine conscience. By “the divine conscience”, I mean God’s knowledge of good and evil[18], God’s own knowledge about himself in the mutually entailing love of the Father for the Son in the bond of the Spirit[19].
There are not three individual consciences in God, the conscience of God as trinity is one [20]. This means that the members of the trinity can take responsibility for one another in an absolute way. In becoming a human being God the Word[21] has taken up the responsibility of the lost children of God on behalf of the Father[22].
In speaking about his death Jesus emphasizes how he and the Father are in each other, “Jesus said, “Now is the Son of Man glorified, and God is glorified in him. 32 If God is glorified in him, God will also glorify him in himself, and glorify him at once.” The scriptures speak of Jesus’ love for the Father and the Father’s love for Jesus in the context of the cross, “I do as the Father has commanded me, so that the world may know that I love the Father.” (John 14:31), “For this reason the Father loves me, because I lay down my life that I may take it up again.” (John 10:17)[23]
Christ’s prayer inGethsemaneis unfathomably deep, ““Abba, Father, all things are possible for you. Remove this cup from me. Yet not what I will, but what you will.”” (Mark14:36). Jesus knows that God is only truly Abba if he destroys evil by good, and that the Father’s Almightiness expressed in creation, healings, miracles, deliverances etc, comes to nothing unless it is a love that forgives through judgement whatever the cost.
His despair in Gethsemane, ““My soul is very sorrowful, even to death.” (Mark 14:34), is that there is only one way in which the guilt of the human race can be taken into the Almighty Father and crushed. It is by himself taking on the guilt of humanity so that its guilt[24] is crushed by the Father in him.
Isaiah describes Jesus’ experience on the cross this way, “Surely he has borne our griefs and carried our sorrows; yet we esteemed him stricken, smitten by God, and afflicted.” (Isa 53:4). “Yet it was the will of the Lord to crush him; he has put him to grief; when his soul makes an offering for guilt,…” (Isa 53:10)
You cannot reason with guilt, you cannot bribe it, cleanse it by emotional distress, you cannot extinguish it by dope, booze or sex, and religious works only intensify it – hence the compounded neuroses in the church. Evil must be crushed. The only way to destroy guilt – most cultures have instinctively understood this and it is everywhere in scripture – is for a God shaped conscience to crush it through judgement. But it is only the revelation of God in Jesus that shows us that he is a Father whose love is so great as to take our sin upon himself. Jesus is the one who will “crush the head”[25] of the accusing serpent by being crushed himself.
Unlike us, Jesus had never experienced the shame of guilt in his life. He had no ego defences, no repression, denial, avoidance etc. none of the mechanisms by which we hold our fragile lives together in a fallen world. He always was aware of the love of the indwelling Father; the witness of his conscience was the knowledge of the Father as the basis for his reputation/ status/integrity/morality and his spirituality. Now, on the cross the impact that our sin has always made on the heart of God is internalized on the conscience of Jesus. If humanity made God Fatherless, in the cross God now embraces Sonlessness, for Jesus this is an experience so isolating that it is entry into the absolute anonymity of hell.
By the Word becoming our flesh and dying under our judgement the impact of our sin is taken into the heart of God through the tortured conscience of Jesus and destroyed forever. God’s responsibility to crush our evil and our responsibility to be crushed are united in the Father- Son love so that in Christ all judgement has been taken away.
Sacrifice for another is the reality of love. In praying about this I had a picture of a judges gavel (wooden hammer) being raised and falling in sentence, it was about the judgement of God falling on the cross. What impacted me was a sense of how almost impossibly heavy the gavel was to raise (even for anAlmighty God) and how grievously hard to bring down. This is part of the revelation of God as Father.
It is the crushing of Jesus that completes and perfects[26] his openness to the Father. The cleavage experienced between the Father and the Son on the cross is the absolute entry point of his Christ’s spirit into God, the offering up of his spirit to the Father[27] carried our fallen human nature into the depths of the holy trinity so that it was forever destroyed[28]
The Revelation of the Love of God in Forgiveness
The consistent pattern in the New Testament is that the work of the cross is the revelation of the love of God e.g. “God’s love has been poured into our hearts through the Holy Spirit who has been given to us. 6 For while we were still weak, at the right time Christ died for the ungodly.” (Rom 5:5- 6); “but God shows his love for us in that while we were still sinners, Christ died for us.” (Rom 5:8); “In this is love, not that we have loved God but that he loved us and sent his Son to be the propitiation for our sins.” (1 John 4:10).
The love of God is only knowable by us in the way it is first known in the relationship between Jesus and his Father, knowable in terms of the knowledge of good and evil, the witness of the conscience of Jesus that human guilt has been internalized into the trinity and destroyed through judgement. To see God as he sees himself in Christ, is to see his judgement taken away, it is to have a radical transformation of the contents of our conscience forever. “I tell you, her sins, which are many, are forgiven—therefore she has loved much. But he who is forgiven little, loves little.”” (Luke 7:47)
It is only when the Holy Spirit reveals to us that in Christ the authority of our fallen conscience has been crucified and raised again[29] so that we are blameless before God[30] can our ego defences be broken down and we can come to experience the riches of grace[31]. We enter into a realm without fear of final judgement, the sphere where guilt is gone, shame removed, the naked soul becomes open to God for the outpouring of his love in the Spirit – revival comes.
P.T. Forsyth once said, “Conscience is what makes man man, makes him one and makes him eternal”. Bonhoeffer said, “Jesus Christ is my conscience.” Jesus is the conscience of God. Whatever is true for the humanity of Jesus is true for you; when your conscience is renewed by the death and resurrection of Christ you know not only that you are a new creation in Christ, but that your personal transformation is a participation of the future transformation of the whole world.
If Jesus is the conscience of God when God sees us he can no longer see the filthy rags of our own righteousness[32] trying vainly to cover our shameful guilt, he can only see Jesus. This is the meaning of the love of the Father.
The hearers of this series may now be in a position to understand what these talks are all about. They have not been about an individual we call the Father, they have been about the total dynamic of God’s relationship with the world. They have been gospel messages, because the recovery of the gospel is God’s chosen way to renew the church on the way to the restoration of all things[33].
How can we connect with the power of the gospel[34]? I was praying yesterday with some others about God giving me a key to a problem that I have had for about 12 years, I can’t remember having a normal nights sleep in that period. Since this disturbed sleep started the night I had a flashback to a church crisis my self diagnosis is that it is a symptom of post traumatic stress disorder. We prayed that God would speak to me during the night and I believed it would relate to these talks about the Father. I woke up several times in and had nothing, but I knew the Lord would be faithful. About 3.30 a.m. he started to share with me in a simple and clear way saying, “Why don’t you and my people cry out to me as a Father[35]. Cry out in distress and I will answer you, this is the promise: “Call to me and I will answer you, and will tell you great and hidden things that you have not known.” (Jer 33:3). Is this easy or is it hard?
Firmly believe the Lord brought to mind the words of an army chaplain (this is an image/analogy of how people relate to the Father), as they had lain dying he had heard young men crying out for their mothers, but in all his experience had never heard a man cry out for his father. How grievous to the heart of God is this! But take courage[36], Jesus’ Spirit will make this possible for us.
Conclusion and Application : RF
[1] “For those whom he foreknew he also predestined to be conformed to the image of his Son, in order that he might be the firstborn among many brothers.” (Rom8:29)
[2] “For he who sanctifies and those who are sanctified all have one source. That is why he is not ashamed to call them brothers, 12 saying, “I will tell of your name to my brothers; in the midst of the congregation I will sing your praise.” (Heb2:11 -12)
[3] Jesus is the “is the image of the invisible God,” (Col1:15)
[4] “but to those who are called, both Jews and Greeks, Christ the power of God and the wisdom of God.”(1 Cor1:24)
[5] See also John 14:21, 23.
[6] The title of a volume by Karl Barth.
[7] “Take care, brothers, lest there be in any of you an evil, unbelieving heart, leading you to fall away from the living God. 13 But exhort one another every day, as long as it is called “today,” that none of you may be hardened by the deceitfulness of sin.” (Heb3:12- 13)
[8] Which responds to a distorted conscience (see later).
[9] “Do you not believe that I am in the Father and the Father is in me?” (John 14:10)
[10] In technical terms, this is what the Incarnation means for the content of perichoresis considered paternally. Compare Matthew1:23, “Behold, the virgin shall conceive and bear a son, and they shall call his name Immanuel” (which means, God with us).
[11] “as he (Jesus) is so also are we (believers) in this world.” (1 John 4:17)
[12] Some commentators hold that the words of Jesus spoken to Nicodemus finish at verse 15, and that verse 16 is the beginning of a section in John’s own words to the reader.
[13] Genesis 3:1
[14] “You are of your father the devil, and your will is to do your father’s desires.” (John 8:44)
[15] This is the meaning of the Greek term diabolos translated as “devil”.
[16] This self – judgement is an inversion of glory.
[17] Theologians argue that the individual is less than a person and that it is sin that creates the former.
[18] See Genesis 2:9, 17;3:22; 2 Samuel 14:17.
[19] Usually, we would express this in terms of the glory of God. There are not three separate glories in God, but one glory in three expressions.
[20]This is an application of one of the ancient creeds, the Athanasian Creed, “The Father eternal, the Son eternal, and the Holy Spirit eternal. And yet they are not three eternals but one eternal.” Etc.
[21] John 1:1, 14
[22] He can do because the Father and the Son live in one another and have everything in common except Fatherhood and Sonship.
[23] Similarly, John 15:10 speaks of Christ keeping the commandments of the Father.
[24] “For our sake he made him to be sin who knew no sin, so that in him we might become the righteousness of God.” (2 Cor5:21)
[25] I will put enmity between you and the woman, and between your offspring and her offspring;
he shall crush your head, and you shall bruise his heel.” (Gen 3:15). See also Romans 16:20.
[26]“ For it was fitting that he, for whom and by whom all things exist, in bringing many sons to glory, should make the founder of their salvation perfect through suffering.” (Heb2:10); “Although he was a son, he learned obedience through what he suffered. 9 And being made perfect, he became the source of eternal salvation to all who obey him,”(Heb 5:8 – 9).
[27] “Then Jesus, calling out with a loud voice, said, “Father, into your hands I commit my spirit!” And having said this he breathed his last.” (Luke23:46); “When Jesus had received the sour wine, he said, “It is finished,” and he bowed his head and gave up his spirit.” (John 19:30)
[28] “We know that our old man was crucified with him in order that the body of sin might be destroyed, so that we would no longer be enslaved to sin” (Rom 6:6); “By sending his own Son in the likeness of sinful flesh and for sin, he condemned sin in the flesh” (Rom 8:3).
[29] This is why the apostles do not directly preach God’s love but the death and resurrection of Jesus.
[30] See Eph 1:4;5:27; Phil 1:10;Col 1:22; 1 Thess 5:23; Jude 24; Rev 14:5.
[31] In Christ, the Trinitarian community and the human conscience have interpenetrated one another absolutely. Since Jesus has no ego defences before God, as he shares his mind with us (1 Cor2:16) ,especially as to forgiveness, our defences are dissolved.
[32] “all our righteous deeds are like a polluted garment” (Isa 64:6)
[33] See Acts3:17- 21.
[34] “For thekingdom ofGod is not a matter of eating and drinking but of righteousness and peace and joy in the Holy Spirit.” (Rom14:17)
[35] The word used for “cry” in Romans8:15 and Galatians 4:6, “And because you are sons, God has sent the Spirit of his Son into our hearts, crying, “Abba! Father!””, is the same word for Jesus crying out on the cross, “Jesus cried with a loud voice, “Eloi, Eloi, lema sabachthani?” which means, “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?”” (Mark15:34).
[36] I have said these things to you, that in me you may have peace. In the world you will have tribulation. But take heart; I have overcome the world.” (John 16:33)