Abba, Father

For a few weeks we are featuring material from Teach Us to Pray©1995  by Discipleship Publications International and edited by Tom and Sheila Jones. This week’s post is an excerpt from a chapter by Tom.

For you did not receive a spirit that makes you a slave again to fear, but you received the Spirit of sonship. And by him we cry, “Abba, Father” (Romans 8:15).

  

God is amazing.  He can shine enough light through a small window to illuminate a whole house.  In three small New Testament verses he opens up for us a whole new way of understanding him and the kind of relationship we can enjoy with him now and forever.  First, we have Jesus in the Garden of Gethsemane, saying  “Abba, Father, everything is possible for you. Take this cup from me. Yet not what I will, but what you will” (Mark 14:36).  Then we have Paul, in Romans 8:15 (above) and in Galatians 4:6, saying that those of us who have come into Christ can also cry “Abba, Father.” 

Research has shown that prior to Jesus [the word Abba] was never used as a reference to God. Indeed to have done so would have been considered disrespectful at best and blasphemous at worst.  But Why? you may ask.  Because this was a word used in the very intimate settings of family life.  It was often the first word a baby spoke.  It was something akin to the expression “Da-Da” in English.  It was the word the little toddler used every day to refer warmly and affectionately to his father.

As we  [saw last week] God is the Almighty.  No human mind can grasp his greatness and power.  It is right for us to behold his majesty and stand in awe.  And yet what we learn in Jesus, the supreme revelation of God, is that we can know God as a little child knows his daddy.  We can, amazingly, come to him with the same familiarity and the same confidence.

 Before Jesus, no one dared suggest such a relationship.  It would have been scandalous to imply that you could be on such personal terms with God and that there was so little distance between the two of you.  But speaking in Aramaic, Jesus probably used this word in most of the cases where he spoke of God, teaching his disciples that they too could know God in exactly this way.  (Why else would the word have shown up 30 years later in letters like Romans and Galatians, written to churches where virtually no one spoke Aramaic?) 

Before Jesus, there was no one who could tell us what he could tell us about God. There was no one who had been with the Father as he had.  But from intimate personal experience, he could assure us of the kind of relationship we could enjoy.