God Our Father

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Category: Pastor's Blog

Published on Friday, 17 May 2013 14:45

If you turn to the book of Proverbs in most study bibles the first nine chapters or so are captioned, Guidance for the young, or some such thing. Maybe you haven’t ever thought about it but an overwhelming number of those verses are addressed to “my son.” It is very touching to me to imagine Solomon writing this to his own son, and perhaps he did, but in a greater sense God intended these proverbs for us all.

God offered Solomon the ability to petition Him in a dream, and Solomon requested an understanding heart, to discern good and evil that he might rule justly. God was so pleased with Solomon’s request the He promised Solomon that his wisdom would be renowned (See 1 Kings 3). God at that moment was also choosing to bless you and me through Solomon, by sharing His own wisdom with him AND the world.

Of course God uses the masculine term son but you can be confident that God is speaking directly to us all, boys and girls, men and women. He is our loving Father and wants the very best for each of us, so he starts out with this statement:

The fear of the LORD is the beginning of knowledge,

But fools despise wisdom and instruction. (Proverbs 1.7)

The Hebrew word we translate as “fear” means moral reverence, and from this passage and many like it, we can easily discern that it’s a parent’s responsibility to teach moral reverence. Try inserting those two words in the place of fear a few times in various proverbs and they really begin to speak to you…. In a way that a father would, lovingly yet firmly, with a righteous outcome in mind; He is God our Father, instructing us in parenting, by example and through proverbs.