22. What Is a Fathering God?
God cannot be "absent" in any way from anything. All things exist entirely inside of God and God is found, all of God is found, at every point inside of all things.The problem is entirely that God is not known, for He cannot be known. Thus we come always back to God's purpose, the Covenant, that Father God might be seen and known by all creation through His elect, His image, man.
Thus our knowledge of the church age MUST begin with a VERY here, a very now, a very ALL, a very Personal, a very determined Fathering God. We cannot know anything about reality except we begin here.
The problem with "God," however, is that He is defined by all children of Adam, Christian and non-Christian, as someone who looks like the highest of all the angels. Christians refuse to accept God's testimony of Himself that when He appears to His creation, He looks like, He is, a Man, a Man on His knees to serve.
Lesson 22.1 God Is Great defines the word "great," first from man's point of view and second from God's point of view. We discover that what God calls "great" is the very opposite of what man calls "great," we have been standing upside down. To God "meek and lowly of heart" is the greatest great of all greatness.
Lesson 22.2 The Ekenosis opens up the mind-blowing passage of the Ekenosis, as Jesus called forth an invisible God into visibility, God appearing as a Man, God humbling Himself. The lesson also compares this same ekenosis with the Father as fountains of water springing up inside of us.
Lesson 22.3 Sons of Father seeks to know a Fathering God through the reality of God bringing forth sons. Who and what we are, just like the Lord Jesus Christ, gives us some means by which we are able to know, just a bit, what is a Fathering God.
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