The concept of God as our father is largely foreign to the Jew, especially in Old Testament times.
References, or more commonly, inferences to God as our father in the Old Testament are infrequent, exceptional and communal … not personal. Consider, for example:
You are the sons of the Lord your God … For you are a people holy to the Lord your God, and the Lord has chosen you to be a people for his treasured possession, out of all the peoples who are on the face of the earth (Deuteronomy 14:1–2).
As a father shows compassion to his children, so the Lord shows compassion to those who fear him (Psalm 103:13).
Is Ephraim my dear son? Is he my darling child? For as often as I speak against him, I do remember him still. Therefore my heart yearns for him; I will surely have mercy on him, declares the Lord (Jeremiah 31:20).
So foreign a concept to the Jews, when Jesus would call God “Our Father” or especially “HIS” Father, they would cry out against him and even pick up stones to stone him.
That was why the Jews were seeking all the more to kill him, because not only was he breaking the Sabbath, but he was even calling God his own Father, making himself equal with God (John 5:18).
For the Christian, God as our father can often be taken for granted. As commentator Gerald Bray posits:
Christians today take it for granted that God is our Father, but few people stop to think what this name really means. We know that Jesus taught his disciples to pray “Our Father” and that the Aramaic word Abba (“Father”) is one of the few that Jesus used and that it has remained untranslated in our New Testament. Nowadays, hardly anybody finds this strange and many people are surprised to discover that the Jews of Jesus’ day, and even his own disciples, were puzzled by his teaching. This is because the deeper meaning and the wider implications of the term “Father” are largely unknown today. So widespread and generally accepted has the name become that we no longer question it, and so we often fail to realize how important it is for our understanding of God.
A common misconception is that everyone is a child of God. While God is the father of all as the “Creator of the universe,” God as Father in terms of redemption is reserved for those who have received Jesus Christ; they are the true “children of God.”
He (Jesus) came to his own, and his own people did not receive him. But to all who did receive him, who believed in his name, he gave the right to become children of God, who were born, not of blood nor of the will of the flesh nor of the will of man, but of God (John 1:11-13).
Because you are sons, God has sent the Spirit of his Son into our hearts, crying “Abba, Father!” So you are no longer a slave, but a son, and if a son, then an heir through God (Galatians 4:6-7).
Hopefully, you took time to celebrate your earthly father on Sunday, living or not, we have the great privilege and opportunity to honor our fathers, which is a lifelong admonition.
For some, earthly fathers were not good and maybe even abusive, for those I pray for healing and restoration.
For everyone, I pray that you would pursue the perfect father, our God in heaven, through a relationship with Jesus Christ, His Son, our Savior.