Chapter 8 Excerpt -- Parent

Excerpts so far from God with Ten Words:

• Mystery
• Love
• Power (excerpt 1)
• Power (excerpt 2)
• Knowledge (excerpt 1)
• Knowledge (excerpt 2)
• Presence (excerpt 1)
• Presence (excerpt 2)
• Immanuel (excerpt 1)
• Immanuel (excerpt 2)
• Good (excerpt 1)
• Good (excerpt 2)

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The Lord’s Prayer is surely the best-known prayer in the Bible, the prayer that Jesus taught his disciples to pray. It famously begins, “Our Father, who is in heaven.” The fact that Jesus on earth and the earliest Christians prayed to God as “Father” may not have been entirely unique among Jews, but it does seem to have been distinctive.

There are a handful of places in the New Testament where the Aramaic language of the earthly Jesus and the earliest Christians peeks through clearly. The Gospel of Mark has four instances where it quotes Jesus in the original Aramaic. Paul lets Aramaic peek through three times. By far the most common word that comes through is Abba, “Father.”

Although it is common to hear it quoted as “Daddy,” that term may be a little more familiar than the tone it would have had in biblical times. It is simply, “the father” in Aramaic, a way of addressing your father. Western children can sometimes have an unusually casual relationship with their parents that the ancients would not have understood. But no doubt the term carried all the warmth of an ancient parental relationship.

This is a picture, a picture God has given us. It is important to realize that it is a picture. Otherwise we make an idol of God in our minds and limit God without realizing it. The point of the revelation is not for us to create God in the image of our human fathers. God is again speaking baby talk to us. God is giving us a glimpse in our categories of what God is like. We should not use our human concepts of a father to limit God to our ways. Rather, we should take our human relationship of father as giving us a small taste of what God is like.