8.1 Our Father
What is God? God is first a Person. As a Person, God is a Story of Words inside of a Spirit Self-Awareness. This Person is One. – There is One God, the Father. We who come out from this Person acknowledge Him as Father.
Second, God is. – I am what I am. – What I am is all there is; all that is, is what I am. – Now, all things are out from God. The “Am-ness” of God means two things, that God is Pure and that God is True. Pure is a description of God’s Word, and True is a description of His Spirit Self-Awareness. Pure is Value, and True is Faithfulness. Another Word for the two together, the “Am-ness” of God, is Love. God is Love.
My Father. Now, the question – what is God – is of immediate, critical, and personal importance to us because of that staggering placement of two words together, “our Father.” A child is not concerned about what a father is in the world, or in the larger scheme of things, or of how much he owns, etc. A child is concerned only with “what my dad is to me.”
The Father will love you, and we will come to you and make our Home in intimate closeness and participation together with you. – This is the unfolding of your life every moment forever, to know the One True God, your Father, and Jesus Christ whom He has Sent into you. There is a time and place to know about “God,” but in this chapter, I want to know my Father.
God as Creator. In order to know God as Father, we must first distinguish God as our Creator. Knowing God as our Creator is huge, but knowing Him as Father is actually something different. As Creator, God is All-Here-Now and continuous. All-Here-Now references God’s Form, but “continuous” references God’s Energeia. There is nothing static or past tense with God. His mighty workings and His perfect rest are one.
To comprehend God as Creator, we must rehearse His Pro-Knowing. God is a Story of Words inside of a Spirit Self-Awareness. Inside of God’s Story of Words, there is an infinite number of sets of words, each containing an infinite number of words. Included are God’s thoughts concerning every created thing and every moment of time over eternity.
Pheron-ing All. None of these thoughts are yet the created thing or experience. In fact, none of them are yet Christ Jesus. All of them are part of God Himself, inside His own Being. Then God speaks those thoughts. The speaking of God is the entrance of Christ Jesus, Spirit and Word always together, THROUGH Whom every created thing and moment comes into its existence in time and space.
Sustaining all things by His power-filled Word (Hebrews 1:3). “Sustain” is the Greek word pheron. It has three distinct meanings fully together in this context. – Bringing forth all things, carrying all things, and giving sustenance to all things – Jesus as Word-Spoken filled with Spirit-Power. And the verb is present progressive, which means always happening in all in every ongoing moment.
Making It Personal. To make this staggering reality of every created thing in all the spiritual heavens and every physical thing of earth and stars personal to me, I could say it this way. Everything I am, spirit, soul, and physic, comes every moment out from God’s thoughts concerning me through the good-speaking of Jesus by Spirit-Devotion power.
Yet this is also completely true of everything, heavenly or earthly, animate or inanimate, sentient or non-sentient. It is the continuous and ongoing relationship between Creator and created through Christ Jesus. God as our Father is something incredibly different. As believers in Jesus, we have a relationship with God right now that is not “created,” but rather “procreated.”
An Uncreated Connection. Inside of our created condition, we possess an uncreated connection with God, Being to being, a direct and living Connection with God Himself inside His own divine Being.
You see, KNOWING our created condition, continuously coming out from God’s thoughts through the good-speaking of Jesus, is general to all things, but it does not make us sons of our Father. Rather – to as many as RECEIVE Jesus, to them God gives the right and authority to become sons birthed out from God (John 1). To be a son birthed out from God is to know the Father; it is to share LIFE with God. We are sons, just like Jesus, sharing the same non-created relationship with God that Jesus possesses. – Let’s now trace out this beyond-all relationship.
The Reproduction of Life. Out from His own desire, He gave birth to us by the Word of truth, for us to be specific firstfruits out from His created beings (James 1:18). – You have been conceived from above, not out from perishable sperm, but out from imperishable Sperm, through the living and abiding Word of God (1 Peter 1:23).
God instituted the reproduction of life inside of creation out from who and what He is. Then He uses this quality as a metaphor to show us who and what we are out from Him. The female in this equation is our humanity on the one hand and the Church on the other. The female egg inside of us is our faith, into which the Sperm of God, the living Word of God, enters. Yet we are not just the mother, but also the child.
Meek and Lowly of Heart. Before proceeding, let’s establish several things. First, creation itself does not exist separately from God, but is sustained every moment by the same Word spoken that is Christ Jesus. Second, the God who is our Father is meek and lowly of Heart and thinks “more highly” of others inside of His own concerns. God our Father places Himself beneath that He might lift others up. God our Father carries all.
Being birthed out from such a God means that we retain no sufficiency in ourselves, but all sufficiency in God. The nature of being sons of God is this continuous flow of God into us, God as our Source into all of our human expression. This Flow inside of sons is uncreated and is distinguished from creation by a depth of personal intimacy.
Ever Increasing Depths. We also consider that, whereas biology is the scientific study of physical life, of living organisms, so, in a very similar way, symmorphy is the scientific study of the shared Life relationship between God and His human sons. God has placed these two sciences side by side so that, in our study of every part of biology, we comprehend, in agreement with God’s Word, every aspect of our symmorphy with God.
Finally, the Life that unfolds our every next moment forever is to KNOW the Father. To know is a “sliding scale” word, and it is infinite in its depths. God desires all creation to “be aware” of God as their source and to acknowledge Him. But the ever increasing depths of an intimate KNOWING of God is unique to sons, both shared together and personal to each.
Born of the Same Womb. Because those whom He pro-knows, that is, whom He knows inside Himself as part of Himself, He also pro-determined them symmorphosed with the image of His Son, into Jesus being the firstborn among many brothers and sisters, that is, of His same kind, born of the same womb.
The two words together, firstborn and brothers, are of critical importance to our understanding. God is able to plant His Sperm into our faith that we might bring forth His Life – BECAUSE we are of His same kind, born of the same womb. More than that, it means that every aspect of Jesus’ relationship with God transfers directly into our having that same literal relationship with God. Jesus, in His essence, shows us what being sons of our Father really is.
The Direction of Receiving. This is why it is so important for us to know that it is Jesus who comes into union with us first. Then, when we know that He is what we are, as we find ourselves to be, only then do we receive also what He is ascended in glory. Jesus always receives us as we are, but also always leaves us free to know Him as He is, as we wish.
In exactly the same way, we receive others first, adapting ourselves to them, though never under obligation, even when they are very different from us, even when we do not understand or even like them. Only as we have received them, in just the same way that Jesus receives us, are they free to adapt themselves to us as much or as little as they wish.
We Know God Our Father. In the same way, the Father shares our life with us first, just as we are. There is a Gospel Word for this quality of God; it’s called Grace, the Gift of Himself. Then, inside this personal SAFETY, knowing that God respects and honors us as we are, coming always out from Him, God opens Himself to us, that we might enter into ever further, ever deeper intimacies of knowing Him.
We know God our Father symmorphically, which is the same as biologically or organically, connected vitally to Him through Jesus. We know Him with filial affection and care, in the deepest of shared intimacy, Father and son KNOWING one another. And we know Him as heirs, as sharing together with God our Father His care for all created things.