our God AND our Father

The First Commandment:  “You are to have no other gods.”  That is, you are to regard me alone as your God. 

What does this mean, and how is it to be understood? What does “to have a god” mean, or what is God?

Answer: A “god” is the term for that to which we are to look for all good and in which we are to find refuge in all need. Therefore, to have a god is nothing else than to trust and believe in that one with your whole heart…The intention of this commandment, therefore, is to require true faith and confidence of the heart, which fly straight to the one true God and cling to him alone. What this means is: “See to it that you let me alone be your God, and never search for another.” In other words: “Whatever good thing you lack, look to me for it and seek it from me, and whenever you suffer misfortune and distress, crawl to me and cling to me. I, I myself, will give you what you need and help you out of every danger. Only do not let your heart cling to or rest in anyone else.”

…you lay hold of God when your heart grasps him and clings to him. To cling to him with your heart is nothing else than to entrust yourself to him completely. He wishes to turn us away from everything else apart from him, and to draw us to himself, because he is the one, eternal good.

…mark well and remember the sense of this commandment: We are to trust in God alone, to look to him alone, and to expect him to give us only good things; for it is he who gives us body, life, food, drink, nourishment, health, protection, peace, and all necessary temporal and eternal blessings. In addition, God protects us from misfortune and rescues and delivers us when any evil befalls us. It is God alone (as I have repeated often enough) from whom we receive everything good and by whom we are delivered from all evil.

Let each and every one, then, see to it that you esteem this commandment above all things and not make light of it. Search and examine your own heart thoroughly, and you will discover whether or not it clings to God alone. If you have the sort of heart that expects from him nothing but good, especially in distress and need, and renounces and forsakes all that is not God, then you have the one, true God. 

Book of Concord, Kolb/Wengert, pp 386-390.

 For this reason I bow my knees before the Father, from whom every family in heaven and on earth is named. (Ephesians 3:14-15, ESV)

It is before the Father I bow my knees. That I call Him Father, this is not just a metaphor, not just some poor attempt to borrow an earthly concept and an earthly experience in order to attempt expression of that which is not easily expressed.  Men will, of course, declare all our statements about God vain attempts to say what cannot be said, or maybe only some empty projection of human need, human experiences of fatherly authority and the security of childhood, out in a space that in reality is empty.

But here the Bible tells us it is the opposite, that the only reason we can say something about God is because God reproduced something of His being down here on earth and lets us see it as in a mirror.  God's invisible being, His eternal power and divine glory, have been visible since the creation of the world.  They can be understood through His work.  They shine through all of creation, and it is man's mark of nobility that he can perceive it.  In the same manner, some of God's being shines through in all that deserves the name father on earth.  God has created the relationship between parents and children and everything of which that consists.  He has given it a particularity, a task, a possibility, and when some of this is realized, then it mirrors some of God's being. In all that father means on heaven and earth, in everything that gives basis for the mane, in all fatherly love, the tenderness of a father, fatherly care, fatherly worry, and fatherly joy, some of God's being is mirrored.  As He is in relation to the Son, so He is in His relationship to His children on Earth.  We know, that it is only a matter of a glimmer, something we conceive in glimpses and capture as a reflection.  And yet, it is a way for God to make Himself known, a piece of His revelation.  And He has given this revelation to every generation and to all people in the same manner as the revelation in nature and conscience that He has declared and confirmed in the revelation of His Word.  So He is.  We know it, for He has Himself said it.  As a father has compassion on his children, so the Lord has compassion on those who fear Him.  Your Father in heaven, He knows that you need all this.  The Father Himself loves you.  

And now I begin to understand what it means to be able to bow one's knees before the Father.  When the pastor does this and prays for his congregation, he speaks to the Father, who, as a matter of fact, is already out there among the people, who holds all creation in His hand, who lives and works in a hundred ways even in the natural life, in the love of parents and the trust of children, in loyalty and concern.  It can never be hopeless to work in a world that God holds in His hand and where His being is mirrored in so many ways.  Men may try to get away by whatever means, they may appear crazy and possessed by an insane desire to push God away at any price; still He is there among them.  He is the Father who gives them their lives and who still seeks after them.  It can never be hopeless to work in such a world.

And then, He is also our Father.  He knows all, knows what we need, long before we say it.  We are reminded of Luther's explanation of the Lord's Prayer; "God desires with these words to invite us to believe, that He is our true Father, and we are His true children, so that we should ask Him boldly and with all confidence as dear children as their dear Father."

It is before this Father that [we bow our] knees, before Him from whom all that father means in heaven and earth has its name. Therefore [we dare] to say, "Abba, Father, for You everything is possible."  Therefore [we] can also say, "Then not as I will but as You will."  No one can know better; no one can grieve more faithfully; no one can deal more certainly than the Father of all that father means. He is the Father of mercy and the God of all comfort.

Then Fell the Lord's Fire, Bo Giertz, pp 97-100.