(Pages 572-582)
BIBLICAL DOGMATICS

Milton S. Terry, D.D.
Professor of Christian Doctrine in Garrett Biblical Institute
ã1907 By, Eaton & Mains.

PART THIRD

OUR FATHER IN HEAVEN

SECTION THIRD

THE REVELATION IN JESUS CHRIST

Chapter 4

The Everlasting Fatherhood

    1. Monistic, Immanent, Transcendent. It is only after a thor­ough study of the revelation of God in Jesus Christ that we can look back over the bygone generations of mankind and observe how our heavenly Father has been ever present and active in all the world of being. The biblical doctrine of God involves the pro­foundest monism and also the facts of divine immanence and transcendence. The eternal Spirit is the one principle and ground of all that exists, both visible and invisible. All the infinite and infinitesimal variations of phenomena are the products of his living energy, and without him was nothing ever made or unmade. His abiding immanence is but a necessary correlative of this primary concept of monism. There is and can be no place or entity from which he is absent, and so the Scripture speaks of him as in all and through all, from everlasting to everlasting. And this is the true pantheism, the only rational concept of omnipresence; and the divine immanence of God our Father is made the more affecting to our thought and feeling by reason of his attributes of omnisen­tience. Being an eternal personality of wisdom, power, and love, he must needs also be transcendent in the sense that he ever exercises conscious dominion over all that is. He is not separate from his world, or above and outside the things that exist, but he is consciously in all, through all, and over all, to make all things work together for good in the accomplishment of his eternal pur­poses of love and of wisdom. All, therefore, that we conceive and speak of as “the laws and order of the universe” are but the methods by which our heavenly Father worketh hitherto, and will work forever.

    2. God Conceived as Generator and Generatrix. Our concept of the creations of God should not ignore the fact that the heavens, the earth, and the sea, and all that in them is, are products of divine generation. According to Gen. 2:4, These are the generations (____________) of the heavens and of the earth.” God, the eter­nal Spirit, is the Generator and the Generatrix of every seed, and herb, and tree, of every living creature that moves upon the face of the earth, of every winged bird, and of whatsoever passeth through the paths of the sea, as well as of man to whom he has assigned a rank and dominion over them all.[1] Every argument and conclusion of a rational theism point to God as the great First Cause and intel­ligent Designer of all that has been made; the revelation of God in Christ adds to this the blessed thought that the Creator of the world and of all its living tribes of flesh and blood is an everlasting Father. The times and methods of his creative work are beyond our ken. We conceive them under our necessary limitations of thought, but there is no word or name that represents God’s causal relations to the world more suggestively and more fittingly than that of Father. He has begotten out of his own illimitable re­sources of power, wisdom, and love “all things that are in the heavens above, in the earth beneath, and in the waters that are under the earth.”

    3. Providential Oversight and Rule. The doctrine of divine Providence cannot be separated from that of creation, and the idea of God as the eternal Father fills the doctrine with a personal significance. It implies that there is no natural government of God that is not moral in its end and aim. The divine order is, first the natural, then the spiritual. The one prepares the way for the other, and it is God’s way. And so the natural is for the spiritual rather than the spiritual for the natural, just as the sab­bath was made for man, not man for the sabbath. There is for man an inestimable moral value in the very conditions of his exist­ence in a material body and a material world.[2] His subjection to physical wants, his limitations in time and space, and the natural ties of kinship and obligation are part and parcel of a providential discipline adapted to cultivate the ethical nature. The doctrine of God’s superintending providence is logically inseparable from the biblical concept of his immanence and his onmisentience. The aesthetic sentiment expressed when God beheld and pronounced all his creations “very good” (Gen. 1:31) evinces the moral sense as well as the intelligent judgment of the great “Master Workman.” His minute personal care extends to every sparrow and to the cattle on a thousand hills; how much more must he care for man who exists in his own image! For the most ignorant and degraded savage is of more value than all birds and cattle, and no nation or tribe of men has been left without the witness of his fatherly concern. Moreover each individual receives as minute attention as if there were no other in the world. “All the earth is mine” has been our Father’s declaration from of old (Exod. 19:5), and the great purpose of the call of Abraham and of the divine election of Israel was to secure innumerable blessings for all the families of the earth. For each and for all of these alike the everlasting Father cares with unspeakable tenderness, and makes all things work together for their good. He is at once the abiding and faithful Sustainer, Preserver, and Ruler. Our heavenly Father is in love with all his world, not willing that anything should perish.

    4. Suffers with the Groaning Creation. The idea of our heaven­ly Father as the continuous Generator of all that lives and moves involves the further thought of his abiding sympathy with the suffering world. The Pauline hint of “the whale creation groaning and travailing in pain together until now” comports with this idea, and gives to the providence of God a still more profound sig­nificance. When we contemplate the ages of ages of physical strug­gle and death which preceded the appearance of man upon earth and keep in mind that never one living thing suffered and died without our Father, we obtain a most thrilling concept of the omni­sentience of God. How appalling to our thought the millions of millions of living creatures that have gone down in the struggle for existence! And the groaning and travail and dying still go on. Our inference is that he who is the personal Generator and Genera­trix of all forms of sentient life suffers along with them, and not a pang of insect, reptile, fish or bird or beast ever fails to move the emotions of his love. And not these only, “but ourselves also, who have the first-fruits of the Spirit, we ourselves groan within ourselves, waiting for the redemption of our body.” In this same connection we are assured that “the Spirit helpeth our infirmities, and maketh intercession for us with groanings which cannot be uttered” (Rom. 8:23, 26). Whatever else this means, it shows the whole suffering world of God’s creation to be groaning as with travail pains, and the eternal Spirit himself to be in sympathetic emotions of unspeakable affection. There seems to be no such thing as “dead matter,” for its most inert forms appear to be in such subserviency to the eternal Force that thrills all things that we may not think of them as dead. There is no force in the uni­verse but the conscious energy and activity of the eternal Spirit, the loving, sympathetic Spirit of our heavenly Father. Oh, what a passionately loving Soul is this, the Soul of the world! It is in and through this all-embracing Spirit that we live and move and have our being. This paternal sentiency must needs have embraced all the tribes and families of mankind, the prehistoric races from the first man onward. However obscured and sunken in depravity, no human being could ever have escaped the affectionate notice and yearning of the Father, for “God so loved the world” as to give his only begotten Son for its redemption.

    5. The Cry, “How Long, O Lord?” The suffering creation may well cry out, as the ages pass, “How long, how long, O Lord?” It is quite natural for us, with our limited knowledge, to think God “slack concerning his promise,” as men in all times have had their notions of slackness in the management of this world (cornp. 2nd Pet. 3:9). We may well wonder why the struggle of life should go on through such immense periods of time, and yet reach no end apparently worth such incalculable pains and toil. Why should our heavenly Father, who has all power and wisdom, tolerate such apparent waste of energy? Why permit the long, long times of ignorance, and vice, and wars, and oppressions, and crimes? Perhaps we ask such questions in our ignorance, and look too lit­tle upon other aspects of the facts. Why birth and growth at all? Why not have fruit without seed, and without blade, stem, bud, or blossom? Why should anyone be born blind, or live for fifty years an invalid and helpless? We do not find that God makes any organism perfect at the start. There may be, each in its order, a perfect seed, a perfect bud, a perfect full-grown fruit. But the higher we rise in the order of life the more sensitive to pain becomes the being capable of suffering. Why should the Christ of God be born a helpless babe, and slowly grow into youth and afterward become a man of sorrows and give his life a ransom for many? Alas, the questions of theodicy are many, and it is not given unto any of us to answer them.[3] We can at most only see in part, but if we look with care, we shall see enough to estab­lish us in faith and hope and love. God’s method in all the world of life is evolutionary. Organisms grow and pass by processes of development from simple to complex forms of being. But when our thought turns to the unknown extent of all cosmic suffering we find ourselves incompetent to judge of the times and seasons which the eternal Father “has set within his own authority” (Acts 1:7). With him “a thousand years are but as yesterday when it is past, and as a watch in the night” (Psa. 90:4), and the days of the years of our suffering are not worthy to be compared with the ages of struggle through which the Father sees it needful to sub­ject the whole creation to frailty and to travail. But since he is a Father, acting in the perfection of wisdom and of love, his long and varied chastening must aim to bring many sons into glory, fit them for the highest liberty of sons of God, and make them par­takers of his holiness. We may be assured he wastes no time in the consummation of his holy purposes, but he provides that when that which is perfect is come it shall not possess the frailty and immaturity of childish things. It shall be an imperishable growth of God’s own planting and development.

    6. No Waste of Material or Energy. Not only is there no waste of time with our everlasting Father; there is also no waste of material or of force in the evolution of his universe. From our limited point of view there are no doubt many seeming wastes in the earth and in the heavens. The immensity of the universe transcends all our calculations. Astronomers have estimated the distance of the sun from us to be somewhat over ninety millions of miles; the earth, then, must in her annual circuit move around a space of more than one hundred and eighty millions of miles in diameter, and yet this immense circle forms comparatively but an inconsiderable measure of that vaster circle of the heavens in which the fixed stars appear to us as so many little points of light. Even the utmost bounds of our entire solar system would include a space of relatively small extent if viewed from any one of those distant paints of light. But the stars which we call fixed are found to be in immeasurably rapid motion, and many of them are suns a thousand times larger than our own, and rushing through depths of space with a force and a swiftness that utterly amaze us and baffle all human computation. What an incalculable waste of power is this, and what good purpose can it serve?[4] Or shall we rather say that the everlasting God who made and upholds these suns and systems knows perfectly what he is doing and what he intends to do forever? It is not only in the immensities that we find what seem like wastes of energy. Wherefore the myriad flowers that “blush unseen, and waste their sweetness on the desert air”? What countless seeds fall into the earth and never bring forth fruit unto perfection! What shall we think of the enor­mous loss of life in all the vegetable and animal world? Some will think we do not answer wisely, and many may say that our answer is a worthless fancy; but we hesitate not, in view of the revelation of our Father which the Lord Jesus has made known, to affirm that the infinitely wise and beneficent Power that num­bers the hairs of our heads and watches with care every sparrow that falls to the ground, must needs care for every atom of his universe. With him there are no wastes, as we count wastes. No life of insect, shrub, or flower, no living soul in any animal (least of all in man) goes out of being. Every atom of matter, every energy or force, however great or small, and every living soul of fish, or fowl, or beast, or man, must needs be utilized. It is not ours to know or tell how these things are, but, once possessed with the concept of the everlasting Father of the universe, we argue a priori that all things work for good, and not a fragment of the whole is lost. Whatever endless suffering and possibilities of self-depravity are inherent in beings made in the image of God, they cannot change his eternal purpose to make the whole creation move on toward the goal for which he is working hitherto and forever. In the working out of that blessed purpose nothing in time or space is wasted. And in view of this illimitable operation and abiding presence of God in all the universe of being, it is, perhaps, suggestive that in the language of the Lord’s Prayer, as given in Matt. 6:9, our Father is the one who is “in the heavens” (___________). This plural form suggests that our heavenly Father is in all the heavens. He fills the illimitable universe, and nothing in earth or in the uttermost heavens beyond us can for a moment be apart from him. Such is the Father who has given us his most blessed revelation of himself in the incarnation of Jesus Christ.[5]

    7. Defective Concept of Monarchy and Absolutism. This larger concept of our heavenly Father should offset and clarify such other concepts of him as are based upon the imagery of conven­tional terms, like king, ruler, governor, potentate, lord, and master (_________). These all have their place and propriety in the bibli­cal writings, but when any one of them is exalted into such prominence as to magnify the idea of an absolute monarchy and a monergistic sovereignty over man and his eternal destiny, the true doctrine of God is perverted, and the concept of the everlast­ing Fatherhood is lost from view. No small portion of Christian theology took shape at a time when absolute monarchy and the divine right of kings were acknowledged widely in human govern­ment. The Anselmic doctrine of atonement has its roots, in the notions of absolute sovereignty prevalent in mediaeval times. Many rulers even seemed to act upon the principle that “might makes right.” It may be easily seen how such a habit of think­ing should develop a one-sided doctrine of the everlasting Father. His sovereignty is ever to be acknowledged and adored, but it is no arbitrary dominion. His lordship and power are those of a loving Father rather than those which most men associate with a powerful king. The kingdom of Christ and of God, as we have seen, is a kingdom of truth, having for its fundamental law the commandment of love. It is like seed growing secretly, by night and by day, and putting forth “first the blade, then the ear, then the full grain in the ear” (Mark 4:28). The great Sovereign of this kingdom is a nourishing Father, who welcomes with joy every returning prodigal son. He goes far and suffers long to seek and to save that which was lost. In the light of such revelations of the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ such deistic terms as the Absolute and the Unknowable become irrelevant. They express at best only a vague philosophical con­cept which can have no real value to one in whose heart has been given the “illumination of the knowledge of the glory of God in the face of Jesus Christ” (2nd Cor. 4:6).

    8. The Idea of Divine Maternity. We cannot overlook the fact that in some religious cults and from ancient times the idea of divine maternity has been associated with the concept of God. In the polytheistic cults we meet with the names of male and female deities. The greatest gods of the pagan peoples have had their female consorts, and the worship of such deities has naturally resulted in practices of most revolting sensuality. But these facts should not prevent our observing the biblical intimations of the qualities of maternal affection in our heavenly Father. The divine unity and fatherhood are not compromised by any new or enlarged conception of the love of God which truly magnifies him in our hearts. The Old Testament has not a few suggestions of motherly qualities in God. The feminine participle employed in Gen. 1:2, conveys the thought that the Spirit of God was brooding like a mother bird over the face of the waters. Further on in the same chapter, where it is said that “God created man in his own image,” it is immediately added, “male and female created he them,” as if it required both male and female in the creature to represent fully the image of man’s Maker. Accordingly, as we have already seen (p. 572), the Creator may well be thought of as both Genera­tor and Generatrix. All “the generations of the heavens and the earth” (Gen. 2:4) are his offspring. In Isa. 49:15, it is written: “Can a woman forget her nursing child? Yea, they may forget, yet will not I forget thee.” In the same chapter the prophet speaks of “nursing fathers” as well as “nursing mothers,” and in 66:13, he represents Jehovah as dandling and. caressing his people like little children, and saying to them: “As one whom his mother comforteth, so will I comfort you.” And such ten­derness of motherlike affection became incarnate in the Lord Jesus. When he took little children in his arms and blessed them, and also when he said that his heavenly Father numbers the hairs of our heads, he leads us to think of a loving, fondling mother rather than of a mighty Ruler of worlds. Even the Mariolatry of the Church of Rome has its relevant suggestions here, and a scientific student of religion may do well to inquire whether this form of madonna worship was not the product of a deep yearn­ing in the human heart for some tender maternal element in God. It is noteworthy that this Romish practice arose about the fourth century of our era, when many a yearning heart might well have turned away in disgust from the cold, metaphysical concepts of God and of Christ, which were forced upon the Church in the storms of the trinitarian controversies, and sought elsewhere for something more human and divine. A wholesome reaction from one-sided and superstitious notions on this subject must be sought in a recognition of the real maternal qualities inherent in the essential nature of our Father in heaven. Paternal and maternal love abide eternally in the bosom of our God. “The highest human is divine,” and has been manifested in the person and mediation of Jesus Christ, whom a beloved disciple could speak of as “what we have heard, what we have seen with our eyes, and our hands have handled, concerning the Word of life.”

    This union of paternal and maternal qualities in our concept of God well fits the truth that GOD IS LOVE. In the divine per­sonality as in the human there abideth wisdom, power, and love, these three; and the greatest of these is love. For Love is the most active energy in creation, in redemption, and in providence. With a fatherly and motherly tenderness, in all creation, God is active hitherto and evermore so as to make all things work together for good to them that love him. All manner of love implies some sort of reciprocal affection. It is no mere poetic license that speaks of “mother earth.” The seed that falls into the ground, the blade that springs up, and the ear and the full grain in the ear respond at every stage of growth to the maternal nursing of earth and light and air. We find the qualities of male and female in the forms of vegetable life. The glad spring-time is redolent with what seem to be emotions of mingling joy and struggle in grass, and blossom, and bird, and the cattle on a thousand hills. And though the whole creation groans and travails, what is it but the striving after an object of desire?—“the liberty of the glory of children of God.” But first comes the natural, then the animal (which, alas! too often shows its beastly aberrations), and then the spiritual and the heavenly, in which the male and female natures become exalted into the perfection of deathless angels of God. For they become one in the glory of the Father and the Son and the Eternal Spirit, who loved before the foundation of the world.

    9. The Everlasting Trinity of Wisdom, Power, and Love. The revelation of God in Christ makes manifest the everlasting Trinity of Wisdom, Power, and Love.[6] These correspond with intellection, volition, and sensibility in our self-conscious personality, and those three axe so essentially one that we cannot conceive any one of them existing or acting apart from and independently of the others. One or another may become prominent on occasion, and for the time seem to leave the others out of sight or in abeyance, but a thorough analysis of the facts of personality shows the essential unity of these faculties of the living soul of man. We conceive the personality of God to be like that of man, and herein we recognize the image and glory of God in which man exists and was originally made (Gen. 1:27; 1st Cor. 11:7). That this trinal personality of God is something immeasurably more than that of man should be assumed, since omniscience, omnipotence, and omnisentience must needs transcend all human knowledge. It is to be observed also that in the trinity of Father, Son, and Holy Spirit each of these essentials of personality is manifest. The Holy Spirit is the Spirit of wisdom and of power by whose divine ministrations the love of God is shed abroad in the hearts of men. Jesus Christ, the Son of God, is the manifested wisdom of God and the power of God, and his mission of divine mediation is the supreme demonstration of the love of God; and the love of the Father, the wisdom and the knowledge of God and his everlasting power and divinity are everywhere extolled in the biblical revelation. Besides all this, it may, perhaps, be truthfully affirmed that in some deeper sense the everlasting Father is preëminently the Almighty; the eternal Word or Son of the Father is the revealer of all heavenly wisdom; and the eternal Spirit fills our fullest and richest concept of the all-pervading omnisentience of God. According to the Johannine teaching, the Son is the only begotten of the Father (John 1:14, 18; 3:16); the Spirit proceeds from the Father (15:27); the Son and the Spirit are sent by the Father (3:34; 14:26); and the Spirit is sent both by the Father and the Son (14:26; 15:26). The holy and heavenly Personality that exists and acts in these mysterious interrelations is “the only God” (_______, 5:44; 17:3), but he exists and acts as Father, Word, and Spirit, an adorable UNITY. Men may never be able to resolve the difficulties of the Trinity as they have been magnified by the polemics of centuries; but if we turn our thought to the trinal unity of every normal human personality, and keep in mind that man exists in the image and glory of God, we shall be able the better to worship the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit, and at the same time behold and believe that the Spirit and the Son of his love are truly one with the Father, essential and insepa­rable in the divine personality, and evermore revealing the nature of the everlasting Father.

    10. The Everlasting Goal. It remains for us only to observe that in the everlasting power, wisdom, and love of God the entire universe moves onward toward a goal of perfection and glory worthy of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. Our limited vision can set no bounds to God’s future operations. As he has been working hitherto, so doubtless he will keep on working through the ages of ages. Every stage of progress and accomplishment serves only to open into illimitable possibilities beyond. The apostle Paul looked forward to an END, when Christ shall have abolished all adverse powers, and shall have brought all things into subjection to himself, and “shall deliver up the kingdom to the Father” (1st Cor. 15:24-28). But whatever glorious revelations and tri­umphs that grand event may show, they will not and cannot exhaust the resources of eternal Wisdom and Love. In these mysteries of the ages we may safely argue a priori on the basis of the nature and power of the God whom Jesus Christ reveals. All things are possible to his Father and our Father, his God and our God. In the order of his wisdom there seems to be no stage or state of being which is not of the nature of an intermediate state between what went before and what is sure to follow it in glory. “From glory to glory” is the motto of his continuous transformation of the sons of God. We need have no manner of doubt that in his own times the whole travailing creation shall be delivered from its pains and bondage and corruption and become transfigured into higher forms of life and power. The Omnisentience of eter­nal Wisdom and Power will not refrain from his sympathetic inter­cession and groaning so long as any living creature is waiting and yearning for the glorious liberty of the children of God. For as a father pitieth his children, and as a mother comforteth, so shall our Father who is in the heavens comfort and glorify his own.

FOOTNOTES

  1. In the grand biblical picture of creation God is represented as dividing the light from the darkness, and “the Spirit of God was brooding upon (_____) the face of the waters.” In obedience to God’s life-imparting Word (_____) the waters swarmed with swarms of living things (Gen. 1:2, 20). Many expositors have noticed the suggestiveness of the feminine participle _____, brooding, and some have seen in it an allusion to the mythical conception of the world-egg which figures in some ancient cosmogonies. Dillmann (on Genesis, in loco) admits such a reference, but he remarks that “here the sensuous and gross representation is transfigured into a tender, thoughtful figure; as the bird over her nest, so the all-penetrating Spirit of God moves over the primeval waters, producing therein, or communicating to them, vitals powers, and so rendering creation possible.” Whatever its recognition in the myths of the world, the concept of the Creator as both Generator and Generatrix is worthy of all acceptation, and has its noteworthy biblical setting. The creations of God are the generations of his eternal Spirit of life. In him is the fountain of life, not only of the life of men, but of every living creature in the earth and the heavens.
  2. See J. T. Crane’s article on “The Moral Value of a Material world,” in the Methodist Quarterly Review for April, 1858, pp. 228-241.
  3. Men wonder and question how God can be truly the Father of all men, and yet permit anyone to “suffer punishment, even eternal destruction from the face of the Lord and the glory of his might” (1st Thess. 1:9). We answer that this is not a question of God’s might, or will, or love. Our Father willeth not the ruin of any angel, or spirit, or man. If any perish eternally, it must be in spite of the utmost exertions of God’s love and wisdom and power. See our discussion of penal consequences of sin (pp. 122-135).
  4. Scientists have computed “that the sun emits as much heat each second as would result from the burning of 11,600,000,000,000,000 tons of coal, and of this enormous amount of energy the portion utilized (that is, in our solar system) corresponds only to that due to the consumption of about 50,000,000 of tons. Remembering that what is true of the sun is true of his fellow suns, the stars, that all the thousands of stars we see, all the millions revealed by the telescope, as well as many myriad times as many more that lie beyond the range of our most powerful telescopes, are suns similarly pouring heat and light into space, how enormous, according to our conceptions, is the waste of energy!” But what man is competent to speak of all the possibilities and purposes of such stupendous manifestations of energy? We believe there is no Energy, but that of the living Father, immanent in all his works. The same devout scientist, from whom we have just quoted, beautifully adds: “Our faith in the wisdom of God need not be shaken unless we assume that our science teaches us the whole of that which is. But inasmuch as science itself has taught us over and over again how little we really know, how little we can know, I think that we may very well believe in this instance that the seeming mystery arises from the imperfection of our knowledge. If we could see the whole plan of the Creator instead of the minutest portion, if we could scan the whole of space instead of the merest corner, if all time were before us instead of a span, we might pronounce judgment.”—R. A. Proctor, Our Place Among Infinities, pp. 43, 44. New York, 1876.
  5. The idea of incarnation is repugnant to some. Herbert Spencer slurs the notion that the Cause to which we can put no limits in space and time, and of which our entire system is a relatively infinitesimal product, took the disguise of a man for the purpose of covenanting with a shepherd chief in Syria. But he seems to be awed by the vision of the astronomer, who sees in the sun a mass so vast that even into one of his spots our earth might be plunged without touching its edges. To which a Scotch minister replies that “no conception of God is less imposing than that which represents him as a kind of millionaire in worlds, so materialized by the immensity of his possessions as to have lost the sense of the incalculably greater worth of the spiritual interests of even the smallest part of them.” That which the universal heart of man cries out after is not a God of vast bulk, abso­lute and unknowable, but a heavenly Father, who is abundant in loving-kindness and truth.
  6. This trinal concept of the divine personality is admirably stated in W. N. Clarke’s lectures entitled, Can I believe in God the Father? In the chapter on “Divine Personality” he elaborates the propositions that God is a great Thinker, a great Willer and a great Lover.

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