Our Father

For ye have not received the spirit of bondage again to fear; but ye have received the Spirit of adoption, whereby we cry, Abba, Father. ROMANS 8:15

If one word could stand for the whole of MacDonald’s teaching, it would be the word Father. He believed that the deepest truth about God is that He is a Father, and that the deepest truth about every human being is that he is God’s child. Nearly everything else he taught grows out of that root. His sermon on the cry of Romans 8:15 opens with a sentence that sums up his life’s work: “The hardest, gladdest thing in the world is, to cry Father! from a full heart.” He wrote, he said, to help whoever he could to call upon the Father in that way.

A Father, not a sovereign only

MacDonald grew up among Christians who spoke much of God as King, Judge and Lawgiver, and he did not deny that God is all of these. But he believed that a great deal of popular theology had put the King in front of the Father, so that the God men worshipped was a ruler first, who might choose to be a father to some, rather than a Father first, whose rule is the rule of love. He thought this got the order of things backwards. In his sermon Abba, Father! he put it as strongly as he could: “The refusal to look up to God as our Father is the one central wrong in the whole human affair; the inability, the one central misery.”

Our Father which art in heaven, Hallowed be thy name. MATTHEW 6:9

For MacDonald, the proof that God is Father was Jesus. The Son came to show us the Father, and everything Jesus was — His tenderness to sinners, His anger at hypocrisy, His patience with slow disciples, His welcome to children — was a window into the heart of God. MacDonald never tired of saying that God is just like Jesus. Whatever we believe about God that would not fit the face of Christ, he thought, we had better stop believing.

What a Father wants

But a father, as MacDonald understood the word, is not an indulgent old man who wants his children to have a pleasant time. A true father wants his children to be good, and he will go to any lengths to make them so. This is where MacDonald’s teaching about the Fatherhood of God becomes searching rather than merely comforting. Because God is our Father, He will not be satisfied with anything less than our holiness. He will not leave His children in their selfishness, their lies or their pride. He will discipline them, pursue them, strip them, and bring them through fire, because He loves them too much to leave them as they are.

For whom the Lord loveth he chasteneth, and scourgeth every son whom he receiveth. HEBREWS 12:6

The child’s part, then, is trust and obedience. MacDonald thought the whole of religion could be gathered into the relationship of a child to a good father: to look to him for everything, to do what he says, to believe that what he asks is good even when it is hard, and to go to him at once when one has done wrong. A child who trusts his father does not need to understand everything his father does. He needs to know his father.

Into Thy hands

MacDonald found the deepest picture of this trust in the last words of Jesus on the cross, as Luke records them: Father, into Thy hands I commend My spirit. In his sermon The Hands of the Father he called this the summing up of the whole life of Jesus, who had been giving Himself back to the Father every day He lived. And he drew from it a lesson for every believer: “Every highest human act is just a giving back to God of that which he first gave to us.” Worship, obedience, sacrifice and death itself are all, at their best, the same act — the child placing himself in the hands of the Father who made him.

And when Jesus had cried with a loud voice, he said, Father, into thy hands I commend my spirit: and having said thus, he gave up the ghost. LUKE 23:46

He urged his readers to make that prayer their own, not only at the hour of death but every day: in the morning when the day’s work lies ahead, at night when its failures are behind, in sickness and in fear. A life lived in that prayer, he believed, is a life that cannot finally be lost.

Weighing it

MacDonald’s teaching on the Fatherhood of God is one of the great gifts of his work, and much of it is simply the teaching of Jesus. The Lord taught His disciples to say Our Father, and He spoke of God as the Father who sees in secret, who knows what we need before we ask, who clothes the lilies and feeds the sparrows, and who runs to meet the prodigal on the road. MacDonald’s insistence that God is like Jesus has helped many readers whose picture of God had been darkened by fear.

There is one point at which evangelical readers will part company with him, and he made it a point of argument. MacDonald held that every human being is God’s child by creation, and that sin, however it defaces the image of God, cannot undo that fact. In the same sermon he therefore attacked the doctrine of adoption, by which, as the Reformers and evangelicals have taught, sinners are taken into God’s family through faith in Christ. He called it a cold wind blowing at the very gate of heaven, and an evil doctrine that had darkened his childhood, and he argued that the word Paul uses should be read as the full placing of sons — the redemption of the body — rather than as adoption.

There is truth in what he saw. Scripture does speak of all people as God’s offspring, made in His image, and it does speak of the sonship that will be revealed at the resurrection. But the New Testament also speaks plainly of a sonship that is given, not possessed by nature, and given to those who receive Christ. Jesus told some who were proud of their descent that they were not the children of God but of the devil. John says that to those who received Him He gave the right to become the sons of God. Paul says that God sent His Son to redeem those under the law, that we might receive the adoption of sons. To be a creature made in God’s image is a great dignity; to be His child in the full sense of the gospel is a gift of grace through faith.

But as many as received him, to them gave he power to become the sons of God, even to them that believe on his name. JOHN 1:12

But when the fulness of the time was come, God sent forth his Son, made of a woman, made under the law, to redeem them that were under the law, that we might receive the adoption of sons. GALATIANS 4:4–5

Read with that in mind, MacDonald’s passion for the Fatherhood of God can do the reader much good. The doctrine of adoption, rightly taught, is not a cold legal arrangement; it is the warmest word in the New Testament, the Father running to meet His child. MacDonald feared that the word had been made cold. The answer is not to give up the word but to let it be as warm as Scripture makes it.

FOR REFLECTION AND ACTION

1. When you pray, whom do you picture — a distant ruler, a stern judge, or a Father? Read Luke 15:11–24 and let the father in the story correct your picture.

2. Is there anything you believe about God that would not fit the face of Jesus? Bring it to the Gospels and test it.

3. Think of a hard thing in your life. Could your Father be using it to make you good? Ask Him to show you.

4. Pray Luke 23:46 at the beginning and end of each day this week, giving yourself back into the Father’s hands.

5. Read John 1:12 and Galatians 4:4–7, and give thanks that through Christ you have received the right to call God Father.

A PRAYER

Father, the hardest and gladdest thing in the world is to cry Father from a full heart. Give me that heart.

Forgive me for the times I have thought of You as less good than Jesus, and for the fear that has kept me from running to You.

Thank You that through Your Son You have given me the right to be called Your child, and have sent the Spirit of Your Son into my heart.

Into Your hands I commend my spirit, today and every day, until You bring me home. Amen.