Who your Father is

Who is the Father who adopted you? I want to be straight with you, because you will meet people who explain this differently, and you should know what you believe and why.

There is one God. "Hear, O Israel: The Lord is our God, the Lord alone" (Deuteronomy 6:4). Jesus called that the first of all the commandments (Mark 12:29). Not one Godhead of three persons. One God, with no distinctions in his eternal nature. Isaiah has him say it in his own voice: "I am the Lord, and there is no other; besides me there is no god" (Isaiah 45:5).

That one God came himself. Isaiah said the child to be born would be named "Mighty God, Everlasting Father". John says "the Word became flesh and lived among us" (John 1:14). Paul says that in Jesus "the whole fullness of deity dwells bodily". All of it. Not a third. He calls it the mystery of godliness: the living God of one verse is "revealed in flesh" in the next (1 Timothy 3:15-16). When Philip asked Jesus to show them the Father, Jesus answered: "Whoever has seen me has seen the Father." He did not say he could point you to him. He said, you are looking at him.

So Father, Son and Holy Spirit are not three persons. Father is God in relationship, the one who made you and bought you. Son is that same God come in flesh, conceived in Mary "from the Holy Spirit" (Matthew 1:20), which is why the Spirit who overshadowed Mary is the Father of the child she bore; there are not two fathers. Holy Spirit is God at work as Spirit, the one now living in you. One God, who has shown himself these ways. And his name, the name he gave when he came, is Jesus.

Why does this matter to a new convert? Because your Father is not one member of a committee. The God who spoke to Moses, who walked in Galilee, and who is living in you right now is the same one. Everything he is, is yours to call on. And when you pray in the name of Jesus, you are calling your Father by his name.