What do you make of God?

We tend to resort to depending on other people to tell us about something we don’t know rather than investigating for ourselves. We take someone else’s word for it. I’ve seen and heard God characterized as a big booming voice in the sky ordering people around. He’s a big tyrant, sitting up on the clouds calling the shots as we toil and suffer down on the earth below. Others say God isn’t an actual being at all, but rather a metaphor. With over 4,000 different religions around the world, it’s safe to say there are a lot of thoughts and mental constructs about who or what an all-powerful, all-knowing, all-present God really is like. For the most part, none of them are consistent or flattering.

The Bible teaches many things about God that vibrantly contrast with what the human mind has concocted. One of the foundational aspects of God is his role as a Father. God’s paternal characteristics are traced throughout each page of His book, the Holy Bible. He’s a father to Jesus and to those who believe in Jesus, the gift he sent to the world to save sinners of which each person qualifies.

One day during Jesus’ ministry, he tells a parable, or a simple story used to illustrate a moral lesson. In the parable, a father has two sons and gives them both a share of his estate, as prompted by the younger son.

The younger son then takes all he has and squanders his wealth on a reckless lifestyle. Soon, a famine comes and the younger son is forced to hire himself out to another just so he can barely survive. Finally he “comes to his senses” and realizes if this continues, he’ll starve to death. He thinks of his father’s hired men who had food to spare and decides to go back home planning to say “Father, I have sinned against heaven and against you. I am no longer to be called your son; make me like one of your hired men.”

His father sees him coming from a distance and runs out to his son.  Embracing and kissing him, he calls to his servants to start preparing for a feast to celebrate. The father’s finest robes are placed on the boy, while his fattened calf is prepared for the feast.

However, the older brother is furious. He blasts his father saying “I’ve been slaving for you and never disobeyed your orders. Yet you never gave me even a young goat so I could celebrate with my friends. But when this son of yours who squandered your money on prostitutes comes home, you kill the fattened calf for him!”

The father graciously replies “My son. You are always with me, and everything I have is yours. But we had to celebrate and be glad, because this brother of yours was dead and is alive again; he was lost and now is found.”

Before Jesus told this parable, some hypocritical Pharisees and teachers of the law were mumbling on about how Jesus was welcoming sinners, eating with them and talking to them. But through the parable, these men were shown Jesus’ heart towards the people they considered lower than themselves. They were shown the heart of a father.

Just like the younger son in the parable, the sinners surrounding Jesus recognized they were in need. They also realized Jesus was the very one they needed, so they came to him. They talked with him, ate with him and listened to his teaching. After believing in Him, they began to realize that God was their father.

This knowledge expands in the human heart that has received the message of Jesus, much like an ice crystal slowly grows on a frigid winter day. To know God as your heavenly Father is all the acceptance a human heart could ever desire. There is no identifier of the love of God more compelling than the fact that he paid the debt incurred by our sins so that we could become his sons and daughters and skip the judgement we earned. When you see how the tendencies we attribute to “good fathers” here on earth are perfectly found in the God of the Bible, you begin to understand what you were made for.

All throughout my life, I’ve been fortunate enough to have multiple father figures present in addition to my actual dad, all who teach me a little something about life. There has always been a desire in my heart to be loved, taught, and disciplined from my dad. This is a need that all young boys and girls share as they experience the turbulence of childhood in a fallen world.

Sadly though, fatherhood is vanishing in our world today. Many young children are left to search for these things in obscure places. They begin to travel down dark and scary roads they didn’t know existed. Left to fend for themselves, a hole in their heart widens as they cry out “why?” Some wonder what their father was like, having never met him. Others wish they’d never met their father. Yet the desire for the things only a father provides persist.

No matter your previous experience with your earthly father, a relationship that supersedes all is available to you today. This father-child relationship was paid for with the greatest price in Jesus’s blood, yet only becomes true for an individual when they receive that payment for their sin. If we all face the music, we see that we are that younger son Jesus talked about that day. The question then becomes, will we see our need and receive the grace given by the father as that son did? Or will we choose to remain fatherless? He’s standing at the door waiting for you to come home. He loves you.

Is God your Father? 

The following scripture was referenced throughout this blog. Please check these wonderful truths out for yourself!

Luke 15: 11-32 – The parable of the prodigal son

1 John 3:1 – God’s love and our sonship/daughtership explained

John 1:12 – How to be saved and be united with your Heavenly Father