Our Father
by R. C. Sproul Jr.

There we were in the modular home office. Denise and I had gone to finish the deal, to pick out colors, lighting fixtures and other things that so attract the masculine mind. We came to a decision that did interest me, because it involved my wallet—what kind of kitchen counter to get. Denise wanted solid surface, apparently a very cool thing in deed. Sensing an opportunity, I cut her a deal. "I'll pay for the solid surface" I offered, "if you will bake me a pecan pie." Before you decide I got the short end of the stick, you have to try one of her pies.

It is not often that I negotiate with my wife. It's not because I lose all the time. Neither ultimately is it because as the head of the house I don't need to negotiate. Rather it touches on the nature of families. G. K. Chesterton wisely explained, "The only true and legitimately communist institution is the home. 'With all my worldly goods I thee endow' is the only satisfactory Bolshevist proclamation that has ever been made about property. It is therefore, of course, the one proclamation which Bolshevists would be the first to attack." No family gathers together at the end of the day and begins to balance their respective ledgers—"I folded your laundry for fifteen minutes, so that means you owe me $2.17 less the $1.73 I owe you for doing my dishes. Add sixty-five cents for the cookies I made for you and you now owe me $1.09. Will that be cash or credit?"

When every business in town is a cardboard cut-out of every other business in town, when some warehouse in Bentonville, Arkansas, knows when you have purchased a hammer in Bristol, Virginia, it's easy for all our relationships to devolve into an economic transaction. It's bad enough when our economic relationships lose any human touch. How much worse when all our human relationships sink to the economic level? And how much worse is it when we do the same with our relationship with God?

We begin down this path when we define covenant as contract. There are, to be sure, similarities. In a contract I agree to do something, and the person with whom I have contracted agrees to do something. When God makes covenant with man God promises to do something, and God requires the man to do something. The same is true of the covenant of marriage. I agreed to love, honor and cherish, and Denise agreed to love, honor and obey. But while covenant has contractual elements, such is not all there is. Covenant, in fact, is the marrying together, or binding together if you prefer, the legal and the familial, the economic and the relational.

One of the reasons we are awash in covenant confusion is that we all tend to prefer one side of the coin to the other. The heresiarch Scott Hahn fell into apostasy when in his paradigm family swallowed law. The Pope is our Holy Father, Mary is our Holy Mother, and it's all a holy mess. But grouchy Reformed folk nearly miss the gospel by falling off the other side of the fence. Here the cardinal element of the cardinal doctrine of justification is the healing of a legal breach. Here we envision our entrance into glory like a scene in a courtroom. The Father sits high and lifted up in his black robe and white wig. Our docket number is called, and we are asked what we plead. We rightly plead the finished work of Christ on our behalf, and the judge declares "Not guilty," bring His divine gavel down and then says to whomever is behind us in line, "Next." We embrace the O.J. view of the gospel—the good news is that we are acquitted.

I don't mind the courtroom imagery. Nor should we do anything but delight in God's declaration of our innocence. But the glory of the gospel isn't ultimately the acquittal, but the adoption. God isn't simply an austere judge. The Bible likewise presents Him as a Father, one who is his old age lifts the skirts of his robe that he might run to greet us, His prodigal children. He doesn't simply say, "Not guilty" but insists in putting on us royal robes, and in killing the fatted calf. Here is the good news—not just that God isn't angry at you, but He loves you.

Of course Reformed folk are about as comfortable talking about love as sloppy evangelicals are talking about sin. In rightly fighting the folly of romanticism, that sees love as something that happens to you, we insist that love is a choice, a decision, more an act than an emotion. True enough. God wasn't minding His own business when we walked into the room, and zing went the strings in His heart. But it is a deracinated love indeed if all it reduces down to is, "Don't worry, because of My Son, I've decided not to get you." We who wisely distinguish between His love of beneficence, that love that He has for all who bear His image, and His electing love, then turn around and treat His electing, indeed adopting love as if it were some safe doctrine. They are loved under category A, while we are loved under categories A and B. While the rest of the evangelicals are so embarrassed by the Song of Solomon that they turn it into an allegory of God's love for us, we Reformed are so embarrassed by that that we hurry up and turn it back into a sex manual.

God's love is manifest in His grace toward us. He redeems us, He rewards us, He meets all of our needs. And that He does so ultimately for His own glory not only doesn't negate, but establishes that He does this because of how He feels about us. He is glorified by His real, passionate, everlasting, and emotional love for us. How much does He love us? He allows us to be called His children.

God, however, is no nominalist. That He allows us to be called His children isn't the equivalent to calling your mom's best friend "Aunt" So and So. God indeed can't be a nominalist. He is too strong for such. His tongue is to reality what Midas' finger was to gold. He speaks, and it can't help but be. If He allows us to be called His children there is but one thing we can conclude—we are His children. It is no more analogy. God doesn't simply promise that He loves us as much, or with the same fervor that an earthly father loves an earthly son. Instead, He is our Father. Love is love, Father is Father, and child is child.

The helmet-haired prosperity preachers have tried tainting this truth. They have reached the conclusion that since we are God's children, that we now have access to our Father's wallet. Nothing's too good for this king's kid, after all. And we, instead of insisting that our Father will decide our allowance, implicitly deny that we are the children of the king. We're only "like" His children, in that we share a more checking account with Jesus. The next thing you know we are hanging around street corners with our Pelagian gang, thinking we can slave our way into the kingdom.

No, we work, we suffer, we die, we grow, we serve, precisely because of our divine pedigree. And all the while we rest, because we are being held in His arms. All the while we rejoice in all things, because we have been adopted by the King. Our inheritance is found not in diamonds and pearls, but in the very fruit of the Spirit. We are indeed to reflect the glory of the Father, which is to stoop, to condescend, to love.

We have to remember not only that He is our Father, but that we are His children. As children we are free from the burden of leadership. Instead we are to follow. As children we no longer have to figure everything out, but instead must only listen to every word that flows from His mouth. As children our calling is to believe Him first when He tells us that He loaves us, and in believing, rejoicing.

It is not by accident that Satan is the accuser. We are tempted to think of him first as the tempter. But before he tempts us to illicit sin, he tempts us to illicit forgetting. His rage is that He loves us, and so there is nothing he would rather have us forget. How could God love a horrible sinner like me? By putting me in union with a glorious Son. The union isn't a legal fiction, but an ontological reality, and we are therefore the many bretthren of which He is the firstborn. He not only loves me now as much as He will for eternity, but He loves me now as much as He loves His only begotten Son. We are all the apple of His eye.

This is the simplicity of faith, that we would believe God's promise. This is the simple answer to every Gordian knot that sin entangle me in—that God loves me, that I am His child, and He my Father. I do not labor to become His son. I do not labor to remain His son. I simply labor as His son. And nothing can tear me from His hands, for my Father is not only stronger than all who would oppose Him, but is the very strength of those who would oppose Him. My Father can not only whip the Father of Lies, but can cast him into the outer darkness. May we learn to simply look into His eyes, and delight in His love for us, resting as His children under His wing.

This, in turn, is what separates us from the rest of the world. Antithesis is a good thing, a great thin, a fundamental reality that ought to shape all that we think and do. But we haven't succeeded in grasping the antithesis if we see reality simply as the battle between the soldiers of light and the soldiers of darkness. This it truly is. But the Bible's language isn't exactly so. Instead we are shown the seed of the serpent, and the seed of the woman. They are the children of the Father of Lies, and we are the children of God. We aren't simply soldiers, but sons. We are separate because we are members of a different family, all who are in Christ.

We, because we are proud, have confused milk and meat. We think doctrines of baptisms, repentance and good works are the complicated issues, rather than the foundational. If we would grapple with heavy mysteries, we ought instead try to grasp the meaning of being children. If we were deliberate in our thinking we would remember that maturity is found in being a child, that the older we grow, the younger we become. If we were deliberate, mature, we would seek the faith of children, and delight in Abba our father. If we were deliberate we would put aside our comical pretensions, our theological dress-up games, and instead proclaim as our fathers did before us this most profound of thoughts—Hosanna to the Son of David! Blessed is He who comes in the name of the Lord! Hosanna in the highest. If we were deliberate we would suffer to be little children that have come unto Him.

We were not saved to be saved, but saved to be citizens. The new heavens and the new earth will not be created to house the redeemed. Instead the redeemed are redeemed to fill the new heavens and the new earth. Soteriology serves eschatology. We do indeed get there through battle. But we must remember that the weapons of our warfare are not carnal. The kingdom doesn't come by power and might, but by weakness and dependence. Which is why of such is the kingdom of God. May we grow enough to shrink, mature enough to play, may we move forward to victory in the children's crusade.