Part 2 Christ Embraces the Mission
Fatherhood & Sonship
Christ Embraces the Mission
Bruce Billington
Hosea
Hosea 1 teaches that God after so many up and downs, cancels the Covenant He has made with His people, Israel. He totally disowns them, saying they are no longer His people, and He is not their God. They are about to lose everything. However, we know there must be another plan because the original covenant He made with Abraham was unconditional. God had taken it upon Himself to fulfil it.
When we come to verse 10, we see that something new is taking place:
Yet the number of the sons of Israel
Will be like the sand of the sea,
Which cannot be measured or numbered;
And in the place
Where it is said to them,
“You are not My people,”
It will be said to them,
“You are the sons of the living God.”
Here God reiterates the promise made to Abraham, affirming that the covenant is still going to be fulfilled. The key to this – and the focus of this chapter – is how He is going to fulfil it.
It is going to be based upon sonship.
God is not abandoning His people; rather He is opening the way for something new; something previously unheard of in human history. God’s judgement is always redemptive. Although Israel deservedly forfeits everything, the way is now opened for a new beginning; the promise of things to come.
Malachi 4:6,
“He will restore the hearts of the fathers to their children and the hearts of the children to their fathers, so that I will not come and smite the land with a curse.”
God is taking it upon Himself to restore sonship – obviously in the human realm – but also between Himself and His people.
Christ and the New Covenant
Matthew 3:16-17
16 After being baptised, Jesus came up immediately from the water; and behold, the heavens were opened, and he saw the Spirit of God descending as a dove and lighting on Him, 17 and behold, a voice out of the heavens said, “This is My beloved Son, in whom I am well-pleased.”
Important Principle
God says He is pleased with His Son before Jesus has done anything. Who He is, comes before what He does. This was the beginning of Jesus ministry. He had not done any works yet.
Sonship comes before servanthood. We must draw our identity from who we are, not what we do.
Enter Jesus – Abba Father
Jesus is addressing the crowds in the cities, and He says this,
Matthew 11:27
“All things have been handed over to Me by My Father; and no one knows the Son except the Father; nor does anyone know the Father except the Son, and anyone to whom the Son wills to reveal Him.”
One of the primary reasons Jesus came to earth is to reveal God as our Father and to bring us to a place where we could relate to Him as sons.
Now nothing or no one had ever considered such a thing before. But grasping hold of it is essential to the task of us finding our true identity. Why? Because the most significant revelation to humanity is that God is the perfect Father. Nothing is of more value to us than that.
Jesus gives us this new name for God which is Abba. Nowhere before in the entire wealth of devotional literature produced by ancient Judaism, do we ever find a word like Abba, that was allowed to be used by a people to address God. But we are not only given this privilege – we are also urged to relate to God in this way.
Abba is a very warm Aramaic word that implies a oneness with God as a Father and calls us to address Him in that manner. It brings us into a oneness with the Almighty God. This concept was implying such a close relationship with God that the Jewish leaders considered it to be blasphemous. John 5:18 says,
For this reason, therefore the Jews were seeking all the more to kill Him, because He not only was breaking the Sabbath, but also was calling God His own Father, making Himself equal with God.
This is taking God’s people into a far greater relationship than being a most favoured people or race. It enables those in Christ to come up into the Trinity, the sacred place where the Father, Son and Holy Spirit commune. As a result, we become joint heirs with Christ in this relationship (Romans 8:17).
In Matthew 6 when teaching us how to pray, Jesus tells us to “Pray, then, in this way: ‘Our Father who is in heaven, Hallowed be Your name…(Matthew 6:9).
Here Jesus breaks this right open by teaching us to pray by addressing God as “Our Father.”
The Apostle Paul also took up this wonderful truth in Romans 8:15 and Galatians 4:6. Paul is making the point that because we too can call God “Abba” that we also share a common sonship and a common inheritance with Him in Christ. It means all that Christ is before God so are we. All He is entitled to, so are we. All the love, grace and favour Christ has with the Father, also belongs to us. Paul goes on to tell us that we are to be conformed to the likeness of His Son (Romans 8:29).
God wants nothing less for us than we relate to Him this way. Yes, we are called to serve, and we are even called to enslave ourselves to Him, but only after knowing that He is the Father, and He has called us forth as sons and daughters. Galatians 3:26 tells us that “we are all sons of God through faith in Christ Jesus.”
So how do we begin to get an image of God as Father?
John 14:8–9
8 Philip said to Him, “Lord, show us the Father, and it is enough for us.” 9 Jesus said to him, “Have I been so long with you, and yet you have not come to know Me, Philip? He who has seen Me has seen the Father; how can you say, ‘Show us the Father’?
If we have seen Jesus, if we have given our heart to Him and entered into a relationship with Him, we HAVE seen the Father. No longer can we claim not to know Him because that is the journey the Holy Spirit leads us on. We have an inheritance to go to and for this we must also embrace sonship. Fatherhood, Sonship, and inheritance go together.
This is a journey that calls us up to maturity. We cannot get to our inheritance while we are still babies in arms. Once we begin to move into the Promised Land there is work to do – there are beasts and weeds and enemies and resistance. This is part of the deal – it is how we grow up further and together – and as we do, we claim more and more of the unclaimed land, which is our inheritance – the Kingdom of God.
God bless you.
Bruce Billington