Sermon On God The Father-Fundamental Belief #3

Sermon on God the Father-Fundamental Belief #3

Text Revelation 4:11

God the father is often very misunderstood. Many of us in the world today and in the past are quite familiar of the mission of Jesus Christ to earth for humanity and we have gone over extensively now the role of the Holy Spirit as we have walked through the first five chapters of the Book of Acts, but what has the Father to do with us?

Let us pray!

Fundamental belief #3 declares God the eternal father is the Creator, Source, Sustainer, and Sovereign of all creation. He is just and holy, merciful and gracious, slow to anger, and abounding in steadfast love and faithfulness. These qualities and powers exhibited in the Son and the Holy Spirit are but revelations of the Father.

Is God the Father as many today would claim, in contrast with the gracious, loving, passionate and grace filled Son Jesus Christ and Holy Spirit, totally removed from the world in which He has formed from His own word! As some would proclaim, the absentee landlord, the unmoved first cause!

Or is He as some would think of Him as the God of the Old Testament—a God of vengeance, characterized by the dictum “an eye for an eye”, and a “tooth for a tooth”, and exacting God who requires perfect works—or else!! A God who stands in utter contrast to the New Testament portrayal of a loving God who places stress on turning the other cheek and going an additional mile if asked to carry another coat a mile.

When I was in seminary one of the papers I was tasked to write was on Genesis 6 and the flood. I was taught by my Old Testament professors that God was in deed the God of vengeance and wrath and that Genesis 6 proved it without a shadow of a doubt.

AS I read through Genesis 6 I saw that God was angry at humanity and that He declared with ultimate finality the complete destruction of thousands of people just like that and I began to think the Old Testament professors might be actually correct in their summation of God!

I prayed long and earnestly for God to bring me relief from this view of God the Father and to open my eyes to what God is really like in the Old Testament.

One day I was walking through the campus of the university and all of a sudden an epiphany struck me out of the blue and I understood. You see brothers and sisters in Christ, the Bible is very clear that all of humanity had rejected God at this point in time with one exception and that was Noah and his family who were still loyal to the sovereign Lord of the universe!

Now as sovereign Lord, as creator God has the right to step back and say you know the human race in which I placed my love and life has rejected me entirely and since I am the creator I will wipe the slate clean and start over. God has that right as the sovereign Creator.

If you and I were to create a beautiful synthetic organism that was create to serve us and carry on a relationship with us and all of a sudden after many years that synthetic organism turned on us and rejected us, in all reality we would simply turn it off and try again!

Yet we know and understand that God created the entire universe in order to place us on earth in order to have a personal relationship with His creation, and God was not about to let that cease to exist.

God found one family, one family out of all humanity that was loyal to Him and he decided to start again with them because He was a God of love, compassion, mercy and relationship and He could not, absolutely could not destroy those who loved Him!

So with that one bright spot in a sea of darkness God found goodness and light and the hope of humanity, the spark of light ignited again in God and He saw a future out of darkness because with light, darkness cannot exist.

And it was because the loving God of the universe did not want to give up on the love that was shown to Him by Noah and his family, and because God the father loved his Creation so much He knew that if He did not act now, that His creation, humanity would be lost forever more and that would break His heart!

So God acted in the only way possible to save the creation He so loved by starting over through Noah and the human race was saved by God because He loves us to much to give up on us. Amen!