The Element of the Father
The first element of our faith, the blessing we were made to give away, and the idols that quietly take it back.
Scripture: Deuteronomy 6:4-5 · Genesis 12:1-2 · Galatians 4:4-7 · 1 John 5:21 · Adapted from a sermon preached November 13, 2022.
The truths a church confesses are like the elements on a periodic table. The table is only an arrangement of the elements, ordered so that a chemist can predict what will happen when two of them are combined. Two parts hydrogen and one part oxygen give water, and water sustains life. Add a second oxygen and the same two elements become hydrogen peroxide, which can kill. Same building blocks, different combination, opposite outcome. The confessions of the faith behave the same way. Father, Son, Spirit, sin, grace: combined the way God intends, they produce a single living act of worship. Combined carelessly, or mixed with something that does not belong, the same truths produce division and death. One claim about the first element, God the Father, carries a sharp edge: the Father blesses in order to make us a blessing, and the most common form of Christianity in our culture quietly reverses that, turning the blessing into something we consume on ourselves. That reversal has a name in Scripture. It is idolatry.
What a father is
Start with what Scripture means by the word. Some of the oldest places God is called Father are in the writings of Moses. In Exodus 4 God calls Israel his firstborn son. In Deuteronomy 1 Moses reminds the people that the Lord carried them, as a father carries his son, all the way through the wilderness to the place he had prepared. In Deuteronomy 6, the great confession, the Lord is one, and Israel is to love him with all the heart and soul and strength. Read together, these tell us three things a father does. He protects, hearing a people groan under slavery and breaking what held them. He guides, going before them toward a freedom he has already prepared. And he teaches, showing them how to live not by force but the way a good parent does. Solomon states the pattern plainly: train up a child in the way he should go, and when he is old he will not depart from it.
The blessing was always meant to move
Ask why a good parent does any of this, and part of the answer is legacy. A family reaches for something larger than itself by handing something down. In the world of the Old Testament the father would love and protect and teach, and then pass his blessing forward to his children. Billy Graham said the greatest legacy is not money but character and faith. John Wesley put it more bluntly, warning parents not to send their children to hell by leaving them wealth. This is where the governing text arrives. In Genesis 12, before Abraham leaves everything he knows, God says, I will bless you and make your name great, and then comes the hinge, and you will be a blessing. The blessing was never designed to stop with the man who received it. God blesses a person so that the person becomes a means of blessing to others. That single turn is the pattern the rest of the argument depends on.
The reversal has a name
It is easy to laugh at Israel in the wilderness. The sea opened, water came from a rock, fire lit the night, and the moment Moses stayed on the mountain too long they melted their own gold into a calf and bowed to it. Isaiah marveled at the absurdity of a man who cuts a tree, burns half to bake his bread, and worships what is left, feeding on ashes and never asking whether the thing in his hand is a lie. But the laughter should stop quickly, because the same move is everywhere in the modern church. When God intends to bless, people routinely take the blessing into their own hands and build an idol with it instead. They trust red elephants and blue donkeys to save them. They put their security in documents and rights and amendments. They defend traditions that were once good but now keep others from ever exploring the faith. They build altars around family, finances, weapons, and politics, and bring them loyalty and sacrifice, hoping for security and direction in return. This is why the first commandments God gave are dominated by warnings against exactly this. Anything that successfully competes with the love of God is an idol, and idolatry is simply the blessing turned back on the self instead of passed on.
This is why John ends his letter the way he does. After never mentioning the subject once, he closes with, little children, keep yourselves from idols. The clue is in chapter two, where he warns against loving the world, because the desires of the flesh and the eyes and the pride of life are not from the Father but from the world. He surely means carved idols, and he is right to. But the principle reaches anything that competes with love for God, and the tragedy is precise: God wants to give a blessing, and the idol takes it back. In a world where God says he himself is enough, the idol always asks for more. It demands time, maintenance, and endless sacrifice, and in return it hands over comfort and an immediate result. People grow so used to that exchange that they carry it into church, asking God what he will give and when, forgetting that the blessing was never meant to be spent that fast. It was meant to be inheritance, received and passed down, and the greatest inheritance being traded away for lesser things is Jesus himself.
The test is whether the heart cries Abba
There is a way to tell which combination a life has produced, and Paul supplies it. Because you are sons, he writes, God has sent the Spirit of his Son into our hearts, crying, Abba, Father (Galatians 4:6). Abba is not the formal word. It is closer to Daddy. Because a believer has been adopted through faith in Christ and made an heir, God has placed the Spirit of his own Son inside, so that the heart cries out in genuine love. So the test is not whether a person can recite the doctrine of the Father. It is whether the heart actually cries Abba in worship, or whether an idol stands in the way, absorbing the affection that belongs to God.
An honest objection belongs here, because the idols in question are rarely wicked things. Consider a parent facing an ordinary hard choice: a child is offered a chance to train with stronger athletes, which really would make her better, but it falls on the night the family gathers with the church. Wanting what is best for a child is not idolatry. It is love, and the Father himself models it. But there is something better than best, and it is receiving the blessing of Jesus in order to hand the blessing of Jesus to someone else. The good thing becomes an idol only at the moment it starts consuming the blessing rather than passing it on. That line, not the thing itself, is what has to be watched.
Which combination
Return to the table. The elements of the faith are fixed and good. What varies is the combination. Confessed alongside a surrendered heart, the Fatherhood of God produces a people who are blessed and who become a blessing, an inheritance moving from one generation to the next. Confessed alongside an idol, the same truths curdle into a religion that asks God what it can get and keeps the blessing for itself. The outcome really is predictable, the way the chemist can predict water or poison before the reaction runs. The only question left for any worshiper is which combination his own life is running, and whether, underneath the words, the heart is free enough to cry Abba, Father.