Looking to Our Loving Father

The devil’s deceptions can be so enduring that many Christians doubt whether God truly is their kind and generous Father in heaven. Today, Sinclair Ferguson explains the advice of John Owen to “eye the Father as love.”

This week on Things Unseen, we’ve been thinking about the fall, and just some of the lessons that Genesis 3 continues to teach us. Yesterday, we began to touch on something of great spiritual importance to us, I think—the way Paul speaks about exchanging the truth about God for the lie; that is, the lie about Him, the lie that He isn’t in fact a wonderfully kind and generous Father.

And at the end yesterday, I was suggesting that many of the great pastoral masters of the spiritual life have noted that this can actually become a kind of spiritual pandemic among Christians. And like what we sometimes have referred to as long COVID, the effects of it sometimes go down pretty deeply, and they linger long.

You don’t need to take my word for this. Here are the words of arguably the greatest English theologian since the time of the Reformation. I mean John Owen, and there is something I think that’s important in what he says. Let me quote him. He says: “Christians are but little exercised . . . in holding immediate communion with the Father in love. Unacquaintedness with our mercies, our privileges, is our sin as well as our trouble. We hearken not to the voice of the Spirit which is given unto us, ‘that we may know the things that are freely bestowed on us by God.’ This makes us go heavily, when we might rejoice; and to be weak, where we might be strong in the Lord.”

And then he says this: “How few of the saints are experimentally acquainted with this privilege of holding immediate communion with the Father in love! With what anxious, doubtful thoughts do they look upon him! What fears, what questionings are there, of his good-will and kindness!”

And then he adds this: “At the best, many think there is no sweetness at all in Him towards us, but what is purchased at the high price of the blood of Jesus. It is true, that alone is the way of communication; but the free foundation and spring of all is in the bosom of the Father.”

And he goes on to offer us the solution to this affliction. He says, “Eye the Father as love.” That is to say, keep your gaze fixed upon your loving Father. And that, of course, is exactly what Satan was attacking in Eden: the love of the Father for Adam and Eve. And so, he sought to deceive Eve into doubting it, and then to entrap Adam to choose a lesser love. They both lost their grip on the assurance of God’s love for them, and when God came looking for them in the evening, they had pathetically covered themselves in fig leaves and were hiding from Him. They were no longer eyeing the Father in love.

The same can be true for us. We experience the influences of the Spirit. We believe in the grace of the Son, but somehow, sometimes we’re not so sure of the love of the Father. After all, we think, Didn’t Jesus have to die to persuade the Father to love us? No, no, no. Never. Really? Yes, really. It’s the other way around: God the Father so loved the world that He gave His only begotten Son for us. God the Father proves His love for us in that while we were still sinners, Christ died for us.

Poor Adam and Eve in their fig leaves. They’d lost the sense that the Father is love. At least for the time being, they’d exchanged the truth about God for the lie. And even when they were restored, that lie was now in the bloodstream of the human race.

People say they believe in a God of love, but their lives often give the lie to what their lips say, and often, their attitude to the Father proves it. We’re suffering not just from long COVID; we’re suffering from the long lie. And if you take away just one thing from Things Unseen this week, make it John Owen’s quaint but vital statement, his wonderful counsel, “Eye the Father as love.”