But Thou Art Our Father

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