God is Father Part 2: The Paradigm Shift

We’ve got four biographies of Jesus in the New Testament of the Christian Bible: Matthew, Mark, Luke and John, written by Jesus' friends or friends of his friends. And these four biographies are full of all sorts of teaching and stories about what Jesus did and what he said and how he healed people and taught all kinds of crazy things about God and people and life.

In two of the four biographies we get the same really powerful bit of teaching from Jesus about prayer:

Matthew 6

9 "This, then, is how you should pray:
" 'Our Father in heaven,
hallowed be your name...

Prayer was a big deal to the Jewish folks in Jesus’ day just like it is today to many people who practice various religions. And the question of how to pray or what was the most effective prayer was a hot topic for many of Jesus’ contemporaries.

And so people asked Jesus, "how should we pray?" And Jesus is an authority on the subject, the records of his life are peppered with prayers, times he pulled away to pray. And Jesus’ response is important for us to consider as we talk about this issue of God as Father

In answer to the question: “why do Christians insist on calling God Father?” we first point to this prayer that Jesus has given us and say that we call God "Father" because we have been invited to do so.

Jesus opens up this prayer with two words that change everything: Our Father—it's an inherently relational word--there's no such thing as a "father" apart from having a child.

If you look back over the Old Testament and at the ways that Jews had prayed to this point, there is almost nothing whatsoever that looks like this. In several thousand years of recorded history of people praying and talking about God in the Old Testament, do you know how many times God is referred to as Father?

Eight. In all of the Old Testament God is only referred to as "Father" eight times in approximately 3,000 years of recorded Jewish religious tradition.

So here’s Jesus, a good Jewish teacher, who knows his OT and knows what’s up with prayer and how the people have related to God over the course of the past several thousand years. And he’s teaching his disciples this model prayer and he pulls this name, this title from the outer margins of the religious understanding of the day and puts it front-and-center: Father.

This is a Copernican shift in Jewish religious history, it's a complete paradigm shift for the average God-worshipper to refer to the God of the universe as "Father."

Father—this is not just a new title but a new invitation to a new way of relating to God, a new experience of God. It's not a name that demands something but rather one that invites into further conversation.