Why do you call God your father?

A Muslim friend asked me that question after lunch together one day. It seems to wrangle Muslims that Christians should be so presumptuous as to refer to the One and Only God as a relative, as if there could be anyone near His equal. To suggest that the one true God has a partner is the unforgivable Islamic sin called “shirk,” and is denounced in no uncertain terms in many parts of the Qur’an (for instance, Surah 4:48 and 116).
To reply to my friend that the Bible tells us to refer to Him as Father in prayer (Matthew 6:9) would neither satisfactorily answer his question nor endear him to my source.
A better explanation is that the question is really backwards:
God is not my father in the sense of bloodline, and He is indeed without peer, predecessor, or sequel (Isaiah 43:10-11). God does not fall under our definition of father, because He existed before fathers were invented. On the contrary, He invented fathers to help us understand a little bit how He feels about us.
I should have said to my friend, “You are a father. How do you feel about your children? Do you love them? Do you want them to grow up healthy? to do well in life? Do you do for them what they ask or what they need? Do you discipline them for their own good? Would it hurt for your child to turn away from you? Can the positive response of one of my children make up for the turning away of another?”
God is not my father, but He says to use that word toward Him as the closest approximation from our experience to grasp the awesome way He feels about each of us (Psalm 103:13).
Christians do not commit shirk, because they do not consider themselves to be God’s equal; we don’t even consider ourselves worthy to be in His presence. The right to have any relationship at all with Him must be a pure, unmerited gift, only possible if He makes it available to us (John 1:12). To think that by my attitude or action I could earn any meager level of merit before God… That would be to put an upper limit on God’s greatness above us. To me, that would be shirk.

This entry was posted on July 8, 2011 at 10:43 pm and is filed under Comparative religion. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response or trackback from your own site.