More Reflections on Fatherhood from my Sabbatical

In 1 Corinthians 4:15-17, Paul urged the Corinthians to be imitators of him. He gave this reason why they should imitate him: he was their father in the gospel. Even though you have ten thousand guardians in Christ, you do not have many fathers. I became your father through the gospel. Therefore be imitators of me. To help them do this, he was sending them Timothy, whom he called his son. Paul couldn’t just write to them, although they needed to know what he wrote. He had to show them how to practice what they knew.

Our need for spiritual parents who model the Christian life in thought and practice for us is no less important today. In fact, one of the principle things I meditated on during my sabbatical was this subject of discipleship and parenthood: to discern their relationships, their commonalities and differences, and their impact on one another. There were two main things motivating me to do that. The first was that I kept running into Scriptures such as 1 Corinthians 4:15-17 that focused on the importance of parenting in general and fatherhood in particular and their connection to leading in the church. Second, I am well aware that one of the challenges of the ministry is to keep the ministry from becoming a mistress.

So to begin my study, I went back to the beginning, to Genesis, and I want to share with you what I found there.

Genesis gets its name from its first words, In the beginning. It was written by Moses to the people of Israel as they were getting ready to go into the Promised Land. Genesis gave Israel their identity as God’s people, it told them of God’s unconditional love for them in the covenant He made and reaffirmed with the Patriarchs, and revealed to them that God always intended to rescue them from Egypt and to give them the Promised Land—the land of Canaan. The first eleven chapters of Genesis serve as a kind of prologue that sets the stage for the rest of the book and indeed, the rest of Scripture.

For us, who are so far removed from the time, place, culture, and people to whom this was originally written, it is easy for us to miss the importance of the opening chapters on the creation. To understand its radical position you need to know something about the creation accounts of the other peoples at that time. The question driving the creation accounts was not really “how” but “why.” As in “who am I and why am I here?” Pagan creation accounts were all variations on a theme, and that theme went something like this:

In the beginning there were the gods, and some of the gods decided to rebel and against the authority of the gods who were in power. The gods took sides and went to war and the rebels were finally defeated. From their slain bodies came forth the earth and people. People, therefore, being the leftovers of the defeated gods lived to serve the reigning gods of the pantheon as their slaves.

When you set the creation account of Genesis next to the other creation accounts of the time, all the sudden the uniqueness of it and the message of it becomes crystal clear.

In the beginning was God. Not gods. God. And this God intentionally and methodically brings about the world. He speaks and creates light and separates it from the darkness. With another command He created the sky, and with another dry land and seas, plants, the sun, moon and stars, fish and birds. Then we come to the text I want to focus on this morning, Genesis 1:24-31 (NIV) which covers the sixth and final day of creation.

And God said, “Let the land produce living creatures according to their kinds: livestock, creatures that move along the ground, and wild animals, each according to its kind.” And it was so. God made the wild animals according to their kinds, the livestock according to their kinds, and all the creatures that move along the ground according to their kinds. And God saw that it was good.

Then God said, “Let us make man in our image, in our likeness, and let them rule over the fish of the sea and the birds of the air, over the livestock, over all the earth, and over all the creatures that move along the ground.”

So God created man in his own image,
in the image of God he created him;
male and female he created them.

God blessed them and said to them, “Be fruitful and increase in number; fill the earth and subdue it. Rule over the fish of the sea and the birds of the air and over every living creature that moves on the ground.”

Then God said, “I give you every seed-bearing plant on the face of the whole earth and every tree that has fruit with seed in it. They will be yours for food. And to all the beasts of the earth and all the birds of the air and all the creatures that move on the ground–everything that has the breath of life in it–I give every green plant for food.”

And it was so. God saw all that he had made, and it was very good. And there was evening, and there was morning–the sixth day.

This passage reveals some amazing stuff.

1. Humanity is not accidental or unintentional. Mankind was intentionally created by God.
2. People were the crown of creation. Everything God had created He created with us in mind.
3. We are made in God’s image. Far from being the leftovers of a defeated god, we were created by God in His image to be His regents on the earth.
4. Then God blesses them. In the context of the Pentateuch, to be blessed meant to receive God’s favor and the authority and power to do, be, or have. God was with them, He was empowering them. His blessing revealed that He did not want to be feared, but revered.
5. What is God’s first command to the man and the woman? Be fruitful and increase in number. God’s first command is to be fathers and mothers.

This teaches that the identity of fatherhood is a clear intent by God for men, and motherhood for women.

1. God built fatherhood into the identity of men. Fatherhood here is seen as being a central part of God’s plan and design for men before sin entered the world through Adam’s fall. Before the fall, Adam was without sin and able to walk in the presence of God Almighty, yet God Himself shockingly declared that he did not have everything he needed, saying “it is not good for the man to be alone” (emphasis mine). So God created Eve and gave her to him as a wife. Thus right from the beginning we see that God never intended man to be alone…even if man were alone with Him! This is a stunning fact! Family and fatherhood were central to God’s pronouncing creation to be not only good, but very good.
2. It also implies that fatherhood is one of the ways in which men have been made in the image of God. Both before and after the fall, we see that God meant for men to be in community, and that the core of that community was the family.

   As God said to the triune community within Himself, “It is not good for the man to be alone. I will make a helper who is just right for him” (Genesis 2:18, NLT). In this verse we see that God saw the community within Himself—Father, Son, and Holy Spirit—as being an indispensable part of His image in the creation of man. If the creation of Adam was to truly be in the image of Himself, the man could not be alone. As part of the perfection of the Godhead was in possessing the identity of “father,” so Adam being made in God’s image needed to have fatherhood in his identity.

3. God’s protection and continuation of the role of fatherhood after the fall and after the flood show the importance that God placed on this role for the men in His creation. This blessing was renewed with Noah and his family after the flood in Genesis 9:1 (NLT) “Be fruitful and multiply. Fill the earth,” and repeated again in Genesis 9:7 (NLT), “Now be fruitful and multiply, and repopulate the earth.”

   Despite God’s awful judgment on the sinful and corrupt nature of humankind in the flood, He nevertheless reaffirms the indispensable identity of fatherhood in man by saving not only the righteous Noah, but his wife and their three sons along with their wives as well. Even in his fallen nature, fatherhood was still central to man’s identity and purpose. It could not be changed or taken away. Certainly, it needed to be redeemed and restored, but it was a blessing that God would not revoke. To be a man is to be a father.