But Thou Art Our Father
Minister: | Rev. Ronald Van Overloop |
Date: | 5/4/2014 PM |
Text: | Isaiah 64:8 |
Psalters: | 266, 241, 203, 278 |
Confession of Faith, Preparatory |
- The wonderful relationship.
- This is one of the few times God is called “father” in the Old Testament, with Ps. 68:5; Isa. 63:16.
- First, this speaks to a close and most wonderful relationship.
- Consider how we are created: formed after His likeness and image; and altogether we are His family.
- However fall made man to be after the image of Satan, naturally an enmity against God.
- But God’s powerful grace regenerates which re-creates us in the image of God (Eph. 4:24; Col. 3:10).
- Second, this speaks of a relationship of love and pity. Fatherhood means that He loves us (63:9)!.
- That the Creator would love His creatures, and sinful at that, is unbelievable.
- This love is emphatically His and not ours, which means that the life-current of this love never ceases to flow.
- This relationship of divine love is accompanied by divine right and power: God is the Potter.
- The figure of Potter and clay implies unlimited sovereignty and freedom along with unhampered power.
- The relation of God to His handiwork (the children of men) is more sovereign than the potter over the clay.
- God is “our Potter,” i.e., the One who formed and is forming us.
- He brought forth His people by a conscious and deliberate act of His determinative will.
- Not only did God conceive and will us, but He also forms us in time (His people as a whole and individually).
- Realize that the church (the vessels of honor) is making this confession, though it applies equally to the ungodly.
- But “we are all the work of Thy hand.”
- He has designed us with sovereign freedom in His counsel to be His own glorious inheritance to praise His glorious grace.
- He has chosen us in Christ, justified us in Jesus’ blood, delivered us from the slavery and dominion of sin and glorified us.
- We are only and always His work; nowhere is there a part which is ours.
- Thus it is His name and glory which is involved and concerned in our deliverance.
- If we are consumed, then the heathen could say, “Where is their God?” Would the powers of darkness then triumph?
- “But now, O Jehovah… our Father!” The Almighty shall not fail, nor shall He, Who is Love, be thwarted in His love.
- He has designed us with sovereign freedom in His counsel to be His own glorious inheritance to praise His glorious grace.