Our Children; Children of God

I'm sitting here in a Hilton hotel in downtown Seattle on a Saturday morning. I'm trying to finish a white paper on changing XML files in a WebSphere configuration. Two things are rattling around in my heart:

1. What's wrong with me? Why am I in the hotel room when downtown Seattle -- a great downtown area, by the way -- beckons?
2. The parallel between the way we look upon our own children and the way God may look upon us may be a more powerful parallel than we first give credit to.

We'll leave #1 untouched. The answer is simple: I'm an introverted workaholic nutcase. It really needs no further explanation. :-)

Let's explore the second.

Our Children

This topic is a challenge for me because I have no children. But let me pose a few questions of you, deep.thought --

• When you make rules by which your daughter must abide, do you do that to be harsh, arbitrary and restrictive? Or do you make the rules because you know them to be in her best interest?
• When your daughter abides by the rules but complains, do you feel some satisfaction knowing that perhaps even in her partial rebellion she by following the rule is learning the important lesson you intended?
• When your daughter abides by the rules and does so out of an obvious sense of devotion and obedience to you as her father, how does that make you feel?
• When your daughter asks of you to do things for her, or provide things to her, do you abide by her every request? Or do you say "no" on occasion because you know that satisfying her request would be, in the larger scheme, not in her best interest?
• What emotion goes through your heart when you see your daughter trusting in you, her father, and doing so unreservedly?

God's Children

The analogy of God being our "father" in the same way we might be fathers in this world strains under the weight of a few things:

• We may not be able to comprehend God in a direct, personal way such as our minds recollect our relationship with our fathers. If God is to our minds (as He is in some ways to me) an indiscrete deity, then applying the parallel is difficult.
• We may struggle to see God as a benevolent father if our relationship with our earthly father was something else. Such is, to some degree, the case with me.

Still, it would be difficult to simply discard the notion of God as our "father" simply because we struggle with it personally. The Bible relies too heavily on the construction, particularly the New Testament.

There is a doctrine that runs throughout the New Testament, particularly Paul's epistles, regarding our adoption. Therein lies an important Scriptural distinction, one that runs afoul of much of today's more permissive new-age thinking:

We are not by nature God's children. We are only God's children through his adoption of us based upon our saving faith and trust in the work of his son, Jesus Christ.

By adoption, God is choosing us to become part of his family, to have all the rights and privileges of such a status. This is what permits us to begin to develop a personal relationship with God, by which we can use the term "father" in the earthly sense.

Confession: this is, in many ways, still a complete mystery to me. I have experienced brief glimpses of this "personal relationship" thing. But only brief. My disobedience too often prevents me from developing it further.

In summary, while the idea of thinking of God as "our Father" seems foolish by 21st century standards, there is (or, I feel, must be) an elemental truth in it.