http://rss.desiringgod.org/link/10732/15439733/the-greatest-crescendo-of-life-and-history
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We Call Him ‘Father’: The Privilege of Christian Prayer
If you primarily think of God as your Father, and if you usually address God as Father when you pray, you have Jesus to thank. For prior to Jesus, no one — not in Judaism or in any other religious tradition — spoke of God or to God as Father in the personal ways Jesus did.
It’s true that Old Testament saints occasionally referred to God as Israel’s father (Deuteronomy 32:6; Psalm 103:13) and even less occasionally called him their Father when they prayed (Isaiah 63:16). But the fact that they rarely did so reveals that they didn’t relate to God primarily as a Father. Certainly not in the way Jesus did — which was also the way he taught all his followers to relate to God.
‘Abba, Father’
In all four Gospels, when Jesus speaks about God, he typically refers to him as his Father. And when the Gospel writers allow us to listen in on Jesus praying, we hear him addressing God as Father.
“If you usually address God as ‘Father’ when you pray, you have Jesus to thank.”
This wasn’t merely an endearing metaphor to Jesus. God as his Father was a fundamental relational reality to him. This is clear when, as we hear him pray in Gethsemane, he cries, “Abba, Father” (Mark 14:36). Abba was the most common term Aramaic speakers used when speaking to their earthly fathers — Jesus and his (half) siblings would have used it when addressing Joseph.
This familial way Jesus referred to God scandalized and outraged the Jewish leaders. They understood God as their Father the way a potter might be called the father of his clay creation (see Isaiah 64:8). But Jesus viewed God as his “Abba, Father” the way a child views the paternal parent who begot him. To the Jewish leaders, this led to blasphemy worthy of capital punishment, because “he was even calling God his own Father, making himself equal with God” (John 5:18). Indeed, he was God’s own Son — a reality they tragically failed to discern.
And astoundingly, Jesus, the “only Son from the Father” (John 1:14), wanted all of his disciples, we who are not sons of God the way he is, to also relate to God as our “Abba, Father.” For when Jesus provided us a model or pattern for how to pray, what Christians down through the ages have called the Lord’s Prayer, the first thing he taught us was to address God as “our Father in heaven” (Matthew 6:9).
‘Our Father in Heaven’
In quoting Jesus here, Matthew remarkably uses the Greek word pater, the equivalent to Abba in Aramaic — the common, everyday term that everyone used for father. Pause and ponder just how astounding the phrase “our Father in heaven” is, considering the reality it represents: God as our heavenly Pater, Abba, Father.
Unless you were raised in a different religious tradition, addressing God as “our Father” probably doesn’t strike you as presumptuous or offensive. It probably sounds normal, something we take for granted, like calling our earthly paternal parent our father. If we have lost our wonder over calling God our Father, it’s time to recover it.
‘Holy Father’
Keep in mind that observant Jews have always considered God’s covenant name, Yahweh (Exodus 3:14), to be so holy that they dare not speak it aloud. When they write it, they abbreviate it to YHWH, so as not to profane God’s holy name through unholy human lips or hands. Even in English, many will write “G–d” instead of “God.” They consider it no small thing to speak of or to the “Holy One of Israel” (Psalm 71:22).
“It is no small thing for us to have the right to call the Holy One of Israel our Father, and ourselves his children.”
Indeed, this One whom we call “Father” is the One before whom the four living creatures “day and night . . . never cease to say, ‘Holy, holy, holy, is the Lord God Almighty, who was and is and is to come!’” (Revelation 4:8). He “is the blessed and only Sovereign, the King of kings and Lord of lords, who alone has immortality, who dwells in unapproachable light, whom no one has ever seen or can see” (1 Timothy 6:15–16). For no mere human can see him and live (Exodus 33:20).
Even the only begotten Son — he who “in the beginning was . . . with God and . . . was God” (John 1:1), he who is the very “image of the invisible God” (Colossians 1:15), he whom God has “highly exalted” and on whom he “bestowed . . . the name that is above every other name” (Philippians 2:9) — this holy Son of God (Luke 1:35), who called God his “Abba, Father,” also addressed him as “Holy Father” (John 17:11).
What gives us — we “of unclean lips, [who] dwell in the midst of a people of unclean lips” (Isaiah 6:5) — any right to call the Almighty “our Father”? Our holy Father himself and his holy Son, our Savior, give us this unfathomable privilege.
See What Kind of Love
It is good for our souls to pause and ponder the astounding fatherhood of God to us, especially if the reality has become too familiar, so we can see with fresh eyes the father-heart of God for us. That is what the Holy Spirit, through the apostle John, wants for us:
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)
And what kind of love has the Father given to us?
In this the love of God was made manifest among us, that God sent his only Son into the world, so that we might live through him. 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 4:9–10)
The Father so loved us that he gave his only begotten Son, that through believing in him we should not perish but have eternal life (John 3:16). And the Son so greatly loved us that he willingly laid his life down for us (John 15:13) to become the propitiation for our sins.
To all who did receive him, who believed in his name, he gave the right to become children of God, who were born, not of blood nor of the will of the flesh nor of the will of man, but of God. (John 1:12–13)
It is no small thing for us to have the right to call the Holy One of Israel our Father, and ourselves his children. For at great cost,
the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ . . . has blessed us in Christ with every spiritual blessing in the heavenly places, even as he chose us in him before the foundation of the world, that we should be holy and blameless before him. In love he predestined us for adoption to himself as sons through Jesus Christ, according to the purpose of his will, to the praise of his glorious grace, with which he has blessed us in the Beloved. (Ephesians 1:3–6)
See with fresh eyes what kind of wonderful love the holy Father and the holy Son have given to us, that we should be called children of God.
‘Pray Then Like This’
This ocean of gracious love, this vast miracle of substitutionary atonement, this profound and mysterious gift of being both adopted by and born of God, is why when Jesus’s disciples asked him how they should pray to God, he began,
Pray then like this: “Our Father in heaven, hallowed be your name.” (Matthew 6:9)
God does not want us to relate to him as a mere subject relates to a king, or as a mere sheep relates to its shepherd. Fundamentally, he wants us to relate to him as a child relates to a loving, generous father who loves to give good gifts when his children ask him (Matthew 7:7–11). As Michael Reeves writes,
When a person deliberately and confidently calls the Almighty “Father,” it shows they have grasped something beautiful and fundamental about who God is and to what they have been saved. And how that wins our hearts back to him! For the fact that God the Father is happy and even delights to share his love for his Son and thus be known as our Father reveals just how gracious and kind he is. (Delighting in the Trinity, 76)
If you primarily think of God as your Father, and if you usually address God as Father when you pray, you have Jesus (and the Father) to thank — not only because he taught you to do so, but because he (and the Father) has given you the right to do so. And both Father and Son have provided you with the Holy Spirit — “the Spirit of adoption as sons, by whom we cry, ‘Abba! Father!’” (Romans 8:15). Make good use of this grace. For your Father in heaven delights in his children.
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Your Most-Asked-About Bible Verse
Audio Transcript
God is all-sovereign. Amen. But in his all-sovereignty, is he fair? That topic of God’s impartiality comes up on the podcast a lot. Is God governed by objectivity, or does his sovereignty somehow excuse a bias, an unfairness, in how he works in this world and deals with each of us? Many episodes on the podcast come at this essential question, which you can see in my episode digest in the new APJ book on pages 355–64. You’ll see the diverse ways this question has come up over the years.
The fairness of God is such a dominant theme for you, our listeners, that I was not surprised at all to discover that Romans 9:22 is the most-asked-about verse in all of the Bible in our inbox. No other verse has been asked about more often in our inbox, your emails to us, in our eleven-plus years of podcasting than Romans 9:22. And this most-asked-about text happens to be next up in our reading tomorrow, if you’re reading along with us through the Navigators Bible Reading Plan.
So, to prepare for that reading in Romans 9 tomorrow, here’s one representative question from a listener named Leslie that captures the heart of a hundred-plus other emails that we have: “Pastor John, hello. I could use your help in my struggle with Romans 9:22. It seems to me to imply that those who are not elect are not even given a chance to repent since they were born for destruction. Is this right, that many people are created with no chance of ever being saved?”
I’m not surprised that Romans 9 is among the texts that people have the most questions about, because my own history bore that out. Just recently, I’ve been perusing some of my old journal entries from 1977 to 1979. I was in my early thirties, and almost all of my discretionary time was spent studying and writing about Romans 9, especially Romans 9:14–23.
Sent by Sovereignty
It may interest our listeners that this text — which is so problematic for most of us, the text that highlights the absolute sovereignty of God over salvation as clearly, as forcefully as any other text in the Bible — was the text God used in 1979 (I could even date it, December 14) to move me from being an academic theologian (after teaching six years in college) to becoming a pastor at Bethlehem Baptist Church, where I served for 33 years. It moved me to become a pastor with a longing that God would use me to save lost sinners from the cradle to the grave, and to grow a strong church that would send hundreds of people to the unreached peoples of the world in world missions.
So, I’m saying, I’m bearing witness, that the most controversial chapter in the Bible with regard to the sovereignty of God in saving sinners was the chapter that God used in those years to move me out of an academic dealing with the word of God into a frontline effort to save lost sinners and strengthen the church and reach the nations.
“The moral accountability of man is not destroyed by the absolute sovereignty of God in salvation.”
That’s important, and I say it because people think that if you believe in the absolute sovereignty of God over the salvation of sinners, you would be disinclined to be a soul-winning pastor and a missions-driven church. That’s not true. It had the opposite effect on me, as it did on William Carey, as it did on John Paton, as it did on Adoniram Judson and hundreds of other missionaries and pastors who laid down their lives to reach lost people with the gospel.
Open-Armed Calvinism
There is such a thing as hyper-Calvinism, which is not historic Calvinism. It’s always been a tiny group who have twisted the Bible by their unbiblical logic to say that the only people you should invite to Christ are those who give evidence of being among God’s elect. So, you don’t share the gospel indiscriminately (like I do). You wait and you look for signs among unbelievers that they might be elect. That’s absolutely wrong. It is not what Romans 9 teaches or implies. It’s not what any other text in the Bible teaches or implies.
The lover of God’s sovereignty who is saturated with a big, biblical view of God’s power in saving sinners says to every human being, without exception, words like these:
Listen, everyone who thirsts. Come to the waters. You who have no money, come, buy and eat. Why do you spend your money for that which is not bread and labor for that which does not satisfy? Come to the water of life. Drink freely.
Everyone, absolutely everyone, who receives Jesus Christ as the Son of God, crucified for sinners, risen from the dead — every one of you who puts your trust in him as your only and precious Savior will receive with him everything that God has done through him, everything that God is for you in him. You will have it all, nothing good withheld from you. If you will have the Lord Jesus Christ, you have everything that he achieved, climaxing in everlasting joy in the presence of God.
That’s what you say. If people will let you talk a full minute like that, that’s what you say to every single human being.
Challenge of Romans 9
Now, here are the words from Romans 9 that cause people to stumble. Let me say a word about them. Romans 9:18–19: “So then [God] has mercy on whomever he wills, and he hardens whomever he wills. You will say to me then, ‘Why does he still find fault?’” In other words, we’re not asking a question Paul didn’t ask. We’re not thinking, “I’ve got a question, Paul, that you never thought of.” No, you don’t. The questioner asks, “Why does he still find fault? For who can resist his will?” And now Paul did not say, “Well, everybody can resist his will. We’ve all got free will. Everybody can resist his will.” That’s not the way he answered the question “Who can resist his will?”
He says, “Who are you, O man, to answer back to God?” (Romans 9:20). Now, he did not mean by that question that we should never ask God questions. That’s not what he meant. He meant that you should never react with disapproval when he answers. And he goes on:
Will what is molded say to its molder, “Why have you made me like this?” Has the potter no right over the clay, to make out of the same lump one vessel for honorable use and another for dishonorable use? What if God, desiring to show his wrath and to make known his power, has endured with much patience vessels of wrath prepared for destruction, in order to make known the riches of his glory for vessels of mercy, which he has prepared beforehand for glory? (Romans 9:20–23)
Two Compatible Truths
Now, Leslie asks, “It seems to imply that those who are not elect are not given a chance — even a chance — to repent since they were born for destruction. Is this right — that many people are created with no chance of ever being saved?” My answer: no, that would not be a faithful, biblical way of stating the situation. Let me put beside each other two biblical truths that many people consider contradictory but are not. And then I’ll draw out of those two truths an implication for Leslie’s statement.
The first truth is that, from all eternity, God has chosen from among the entire fallen, sinful humanity a people for himself, but not everyone. Thus, this selection is owing to no merit at all in those chosen people. God pursues their salvation not only by effectively achieving the atonement for their sin through Christ, but also by sovereignly overcoming all their rebellion, and bringing them to saving faith. So, that’s the first truth.
Here’s the second. Everyone who perishes and is finally lost and cut off from God perishes because of real, blameworthy self-exaltation — sin — and because they are hardened against the revelations of God’s power and glory in nature or in the gospel. No innocent people perish. Nobody who humbly wants Christ for a Savior is lost. No one is judged or condemned for not knowing or believing or obeying reality to which they had no access. All lostness and all judgment are owing to sin and rebellion against the revelation that we have. That’s the second truth.
Now, what keeps those two truths from being contradictory is this: the moral accountability of man is not destroyed by the absolute sovereignty of God in salvation. Or to say it another way, God’s final and decisive governance of all things, including who comes to faith, is compatible — it fits — with all humans being morally accountable to God for whether they believe or not.
“There will be no innocent people in hell, and there will be only forgiven sinners in heaven.”
Now, we live in a world that, by and large, refuses to embrace God’s purposeful sovereignty in all things. That is Ephesians 1:11: “[He] works all things according to the counsel of his will.”
People reject this largely because the only solution their minds can embrace for maintaining human accountability is the presumption of ultimate human self-determination, otherwise known as “free will.” But ultimate human self-determination is not found anywhere in the Bible — nowhere. But God’s sovereignty is, and man’s accountability is, and nowhere are these considered contradictory.No Innocent People in Hell
Therefore, my response to Leslie’s statement — that many people are created with no chance of ever being saved — is to say that everyone is being wooed and invited by God every day, either through natural revelation (the sun rising on the good and the evil, or the rain falling on the good and the bad, Matthew 5:45) or through conscience, or they’re being wooed and invited by gospel truth.
These revelations of God are their chance to be saved. It is a real invitation. It is real precisely because if they humbled themselves and received God’s grace, they would be saved. Those who do that, those who humble themselves and receive God’s grace, know that it was only the sovereign grace of God that enabled them to believe. And those who don’t do it know that it is because of their own sin that they loved something else more than God; that is why they didn’t believe.
There will be no innocent people in hell, and there will be only forgiven sinners in heaven.
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Is Violent Crime Under God’s Providence?
Audio Transcript
We end the week talking providence. We started the week talking providence, in explaining the pains of life to children. Today, a question comes from a grieving young woman, a new believer, and a listener to the podcast who is now struggling to process a very deep trial. We don’t have her name, but here’s her email: “Hello, Pastor John, and thank you for APJ! I write because last year someone very close to me was assaulted and murdered. At the time of the tragedy, I had not devoted my life to Christ. The pastor at the funeral service said, ‘I don’t think it was God’s plan for this to happen.’ I remember feeling so lost and angry. I gave my life to Christ a few months later. But I still don’t understand why my loved one would be murdered if God is omnipotent. Does God allow sin to roam unchecked? Does the Bible say anything about God allowing such awful sin to happen, and why? I am a new Christian with a lot to learn.”
Oh, how I wish I knew your name so that I could speak to you very personally and directly, but let’s do the best we can.
I am very sorry that you lost this close friend of yours — especially in such a brutal way. But it’s good for me to know this because I can tell that your question is not theoretical. Lots of people ask this question in a very antagonistic and theoretical way. But yours is very personal, very urgent, and that’s the kind of question I like. I think it’s the kind of question that God is very willing to hear.
Perfectly Sovereign, Wonderfully Good
It’s difficult for me to know what the pastor at your friend’s funeral meant when he said, “I don’t think it was God’s plan for this to happen.” Maybe all he meant was that God never does anything wrong and never sins against anyone. But it’s one thing to say that God never does wrong, and it’s a very different thing to say that God does not govern or oversee or direct or control the wrong that happens in this world. If that’s what the pastor meant — that God doesn’t do that — I think he’s mistaken, because the Bible teaches from cover to cover that God does, in fact, govern all the details of the world, including the bad things that happen to us and to our friends.
That, in fact, I would argue, is what it means for God to be God. I say that because Isaiah 46:9–10 says,
I am God, and there is no other; I am God, and there is none like me,declaring the end from the beginning and from ancient times things not yet done,saying, “My counsel shall stand, and I will accomplish all my purpose.”
So God’s counsel, God’s wisdom, God’s purpose always comes to pass. That’s what it means to be God. Not the devil, not nature, not fate, not chance, not sinful man — nobody and nothing can thwart the plan of God.
Job 42:2 says, “I know that you can do all things, and that no purpose of yours can be thwarted.”
The apostle Paul says in Ephesians 1:11 that God “works all things according to the counsel of his will.” All things includes the largest things, like the rise and fall of nations, and the tiniest things, like the fall of a bird out of a tree or the roll of the dice.
Daniel 2:21 says, “He removes kings and he sets up kings.”
Jesus said in Matthew 10:29, “Are not two sparrows sold for a penny? And not one of them will fall to the ground apart from your Father.”
Proverbs 16:33 says, “The lot is cast in the lap [which is an old-fashioned way of saying that the dice are thrown on the table], but its every decision is from the Lord.”In other words, from the tiniest, most insignificant happening, to the largest global happenings, God governs all things.
Alongside that absolute sovereignty of God over all things, we need to embrace the teaching of Scripture that God is always just, always good. For example, there is a beautiful statement in Deuteronomy 32:4: “The Rock, his work is perfect, for all his ways are justice. A God of faithfulness and without iniquity, just and upright is he.” That’s beautiful. Psalm 34:8 says, “Oh, taste and see that the Lord is good! Blessed is the man who takes refuge in him!” He is good. He is wise. He is faithful. He is just. He’s upright. There is no iniquity in him, no darkness in him at all.
Purposes in Suffering
We naturally ask (and this is why I said your question was so good and right at the beginning), “Why does God permit so much suffering and evil, if in fact he’s in control?” Now the Bible gives numerous answers to that question. If you go to Desiring God’s website and just type in the search line What are the purposes for suffering?, you will find several articles right at the top of the list that point to those answers. But let me mention two of them, two answers just briefly.
One of God’s purposes for suffering is to show all of us the horror of sin. Suffering entered the world when mankind fell into sin (Genesis 3). Suffering is a trumpet blast to all humanity that, just like pain is an outrage to the human body, so sin is an outrage against God’s character and glory. The horrors of physical suffering are an echo of the horrors of humanity’s belittling of God by our disobedience and unbelief.
But maybe what’s most important for you, as a newer Christian, is to focus your attention on the death of Jesus. I assume that, not long ago, because of what you said, God opened your eyes to see the death of Jesus on the cross for your sins as a compelling and true and beautiful reality, and you believed. You are saved today from guilt and from wrath and hell and meaninglessness because Jesus suffered on the cross in your place.
Now put the death of Jesus together with God’s sovereignty. That’s what Acts 4:27–28 does. The early church prayed in those verses like this:
Truly in this city [Jerusalem] there were gathered together against your holy servant Jesus, whom you anointed, both Herod and Pontius Pilate, along with the Gentiles and the peoples of Israel, to do whatever your hand and your plan had predestined to take place.
So Herod, Pilate, Gentile soldiers, Jewish mobs — all of them combined to kill Jesus. The murder of Jesus was like the murder of your friend, only worse because Jesus is the very Son of God. The Bible says that the sins of his murderers — Herod, Pilate, soldiers, mobs — their sins in murdering Jesus were predestined and planned by God. He did this, God did this, without himself sinning. He can govern, rule, oversee, control, guide, the evils of the world without being evil.
Point of Greatest Love
If God had not planned the death of his Son, neither your sins nor mine would be forgiven. God orchestrated the worst sins that ever happened in the murder of his Son so that you and I, and millions of those who believe on Christ, would be saved from destruction and given eternal joy. Romans 5:8 says, “God shows his love for us in that while we were still sinners, Christ died for us,” which means that we simply could not know the depths of God’s love without the death of Christ. There would be no death of Christ without sin and suffering and the sovereignty of God.
So, when you feel that you can’t understand why God does what he does, let your heart rest here: the worst suffering and the deepest sovereignty meet at the point of greatest love — the cross of Christ. So rest there.