One of the natural consequences of having a Father is that we are under His authority. Violate that authority, and you bear the brunt of a Father’s discipline. The fact that the Father bears the lion’s share of this burden is evident from every time a mother tells her child: “Just wait until your Father gets home.”

There are two ways that earthly fathers distort this. The first and obvious way is for discipline to give way to abuse—whether it be physical, verbal, or emotional. The second way is less obvious, but it occurs when fathers fail to properly train their children in Godliness. The result of the first style is often a wild child, a “party girl” or guy who’s always trying to get back at daddy. The result of the second isn’t much different; it’s an unruly young adult whose lack of focus or direction leaves them listlessly searching for who they are.

When we consider God, we are confronted by a God who holds His creation to His infinitely righteous standards. This has profound implications for those inside and outside the Church.

THE FATHER’S JUDGMENT

When Paul was in Athens, he begins his speech by highlighting the fact that God is the creator of the universe, and we are his “offspring.” He then derives a conclusion—namely, that our tendency to fashion gold and silver idols is insufficient for real relationship, and apart from repentance mankind faces the danger of God’s righteous judgment:

29 Being then God’s offspring, we ought not to think that the divine being is like gold or silver or stone, an image formed by the art and imagination of man. 30 The times of ignorance God overlooked, but now he commands all people everywhere to repent, 31 because he has fixed a day on which he will judge the world in righteousness by a man whom he has appointed; and of this he has given assurance to all by raising him from the dead.” (Acts 17:29-31)

God’s Holy character—revealed in Himself as well as His Son—becomes the yardstick by which He measures all humanity. Peter echoes this same point when he tells his readers: “if you call on him as Father who judges impartially according to each one’s deeds, conduct yourselves with fear throughout the time of your exile (1 Peter 1:17).”

Peter, of course, emphasizes God’s judgment as a reason to conduct oneself with righteousness even when surrounded by a non-Christian culture. But for those outside the Church, this judgment is all the more severe, because it naturally involves just punishment.

And that’s a good thing. Why? Because a Father who loves but fails to set wrongs to right is really not much of a Father at all. I know that the idea of judgment sounds…well, terrifying, but even if it weren’t true, we should want it to be true. Because deep inside we should long for a God who establishes justice by putting wrongs to right and establishing His goodness across the whole world. And we can be equally thankful that we can experience freedom from the Father’s wrath through the atoning work of the Son.

THE FATHER’S DISCIPLINE

So what about those of us inside the Church? The writer of the book of Hebrews dedicates an extended passage to the Father’s discipline:

4 In your struggle against sin you have not yet resisted to the point of shedding your blood. 5 And have you forgotten the exhortation that addresses you as sons?

“My son, do not regard lightly the discipline of the Lord,
nor be weary when reproved by him.
6 For the Lord disciplines the one he loves,
and chastises every son whom he receives.”

7 It is for discipline that you have to endure. God is treating you as sons. For what son is there whom his father does not discipline? 8 If you are left without discipline, in which all have participated, then you are illegitimate children and not sons. 9 Besides this, we have had earthly fathers who disciplined us and we respected them. Shall we not much more be subject to the Father of spirits and live? 10 For they disciplined us for a short time as it seemed best to them, but he disciplines us for our good, that we may share his holiness. 11 For the moment all discipline seems painful rather than pleasant, but later it yields the peaceful fruit of righteousness to those who have been trained by it. (Hebrews 12:4-11)

It’s difficult, of course, to draw a one-to-one correspondence between our immediate circumstances and the Lord’s discipline. That is, I can’t always know whether a bad experience is something the Lord is specifically using to discipline me—but that’s all the more reason to press into God’s character in all circumstances. Not every experience we have may be pleasant, but all may be enriching.

This is where the gospel makes all the more difference. The gospel promises that Jesus bore the Father’s wrath that I might only experience the wounds of the Lord’s discipline. Our loving Father doesn’t walk us around harm, but sometimes through it, so that we might better understand His love and His grace. This is a far cry from either the abusive or absentee fathers of today’s world.

And ultimately, we can trust that the righteousness God sees in us comes not from our works, but through the finished work of the Son.  Because of this, we trust in God’s goodness, even amidst the storms.

Fathers don’t exactly have the best reputation these days. The days of “Father Knows Best” have given way to a world of Homer Simpsons—and that’s if we see families on TV at all. Men are often portrayed as bumbling accessories, necessary for the relationship but redeemable only through a woman’s gentle insistence.

I don’t mean to say that there’s some sort of “war on men” out there. After all, men are still seen as being in a position of greater power, socially speaking. But the lines between masculinity and femininity have blurred—so much so that both men and women are expected to occupy both ends of the gender spectrum. That’s why you might see a young man with a flannel shirt, a big ferocious beard—but he’s wearing skinny jeans and eating a kale salad.

So in some ways, I suspect that being distinctively “masculine” carries some cultural baggage. For some, labeling God as “Father” might seem culturally repressive, maybe even a little sexist. Some modern denominations have even taken to praying to “Mother-Father” God as a way to be more gender-inclusive.

What does the Bible say? Is God really a man?

DOES GOD HAVE A BODY?

Several clues help us. First, we acknowledge that the Bible never really confirms that God the Father has a body at all—let alone a “male” body. Again, let’s be clear: God the Son became a man when He arrived on earth as Jesus, and He remains a man in His resurrected body today. But God the Father? Jesus hints that the Father has no body, He is only “Spirit:”

²⁴ God is spirit, and those who worship him must worship in spirit and truth.” (John 4:24)

This helps explain why John opens His gospel by saying that “no one has ever seen God” (John 1:18), meaning that Jesus is the first and only direct encounter we can ever have with God.

But wait. If you’ve grown up in Church you can probably remember lots of examples of people in the Old Testament seeing God in one form or another. Moses catches a glimpse of God’s back as He passed by the mouth of the cave (Exodus 33:18-34:9). Isaiah saw the throne of God, whose robe filled the temple (Isaiah 6:1). Didn’t these men see God?

Some would actually say that in these examples, these men were actually seeing Jesus before Jesus officially came to earth. Personally, I’m not that confident. I think we should see these examples as ways that God chose to reveal Himself to these people for a specific purpose. I mean, God also appeared in a burning bush, a pillar of fire, a smoking fire pot and a flaming torch—but I don’t know anybody who wants to argue that God is any of those things.

The Old Testament may even affirm that God has no form:

You saw no form of any kind the day the LORD spoke to you at Horeb out of the fire. Therefore watch yourselves very carefully (Deuteronomy 4:15)

Elsewhere we’re told that “God is not human that He should lie” (Numbers 23:19), and if we look at the whole scope of the Bible, I think we find a God who is so utterly different from us that God the Father does not share a physical form.

GOD’S FEMININE SIDE

The second clue comes from the fact that occasionally, the Bible uses feminine imagery to describe God. This is actually consistent with the idea that both men and women are created in God’s image (Genesis 1:26); this seems to indicate that God has feminine characteristics. For example, we read:

As one whom his mother comforts,
so I will comfort you;
you shall be comforted in Jerusalem. (Isaiah 63:13)

And in the New Testament we hear similarly “motherly” language:

³⁴ O Jerusalem, Jerusalem, the city that kills the prophets and stones those who are sent to it! How often would I have gathered your children together as a hen gathers her brood under her wings, and you were not willing! (Luke 13:34)

Later in Luke Jesus likens God to a housemaid searching for a lost coin. Feminine imagery is rarely applied to God, but it is there, it is part of God’s word, and it is therefore good and beautiful and true.

REVEALED AS FATHER

Still, there’s a distinction to be made between being described as “motherly” and being described as a mother. In the above examples, the authors are saying “God is like a mother,” and never “God is a mother.”

Furthermore, the dominant imagery we have of God is that of a Father. He reveals Himself in distinctively masculine terms. And so while we acknowledge that God is not like us, we should also treat Him the way that He has chosen to reveal Himself—as man, as Father, as King.

In the novel Fight Club, the author describes a pair of young men who—having not grown up with the best fathers, turn to violence and aggression as the truest expression of their masculinity. “Our fathers were our models for God,” one man says to the other. “Our fathers abandoned us. What does this tell you about God?”

I suspect for many the idea of “God the Father” seems challenging because your earthly father left much to be desired. But what if instead of using earthly fathers as the standard by which we judge our heavenly Father, we looked to God’s character as the standard for today’s male leadership? Maybe then we could truly see God as our truest and best Father, the One who knows us, loves us, and the One who welcomes us home.