Dr. Ron Sumners
August 24, 2003
An ocean liner, loaded with passengers, was caught in a furious storm. The passengers were putting on their life jackets and checking the cabins. In one cabin they found a little girl all alone, playing on the bed with her dolls. When they told her about the storm, it did not seem to disturb her at all. She remained as quiet as before, playing with her dolls. Someone asked, “Aren’t you frightened?” Calmly, the little girl replied, “No, the captain is my father.”
The Lord’s Prayer begins with the realization that for the disciple of Jesus Christ, “the captain of this world is his Father!”
When we say, “Our Father who art in heaven,” is that God’s address? Does God live in a place called heaven like I live in Birmingham, Alabama? God, who is in heaven, is also on the earth. We live daily in his presence here. Heaven is not necessarily His address. God cannot be limited to any locality. He is omnipresent. He is everywhere all at the same time.
On Christmas day 1960 these words were spoken from a radio station in Moscow. “Our rocket had bypassed the moon. It is nearing the sun and we have not discovered God. We have turned out lights in heaven that no man will be able to put on again. We are breaking the yoke of the Gospel. Let us go forth and Christ shall be relegated to mythology.” It is now forty-three years later and it is the lights of the Soviet Union that have been turned out and the church of Jesus still remains.
When a Russian Cosmonaut returned to earth, he was quite proud of the fact that he had seen neither angels nor God in space. But when Colonel John Glenn returned from orbiting the earth, he said, “The God I pray to is not so small that I expected to see Him in space.”
H.G. Wells made a true statement when he said, “Until a man has found God, he begins at no beginning and works to no end.” So, it is with prayer. Until we realize that we live constantly in the presence of God, then our words are voiced to someone “out there.” Prayer is sharing with the one who dwells within me. Our prayers are real when they speak to our own heart because that is where God dwells. God does not dwell somewhere beyond the Milky Way. Heaven cannot be charted on a map of the heavenly constellations. God’s kingdom, while you live in this created order, is within you!
We have such warped concepts of God, and I’m not just talking about those outside the church. I’ve found that people who have been church members all their lives have either no concept of God or such a distorted one that it makes their faith a burden rather than a joy! I think it would be worth our time to look at some of the false and inadequate concepts of God. I’ll give them names that will make them easier to remember.
There is the Lone Ranger concept. To many people, God is the anonymous hero who appears only when we are in trouble. Some people look on God as if He were a super-hero who is needed only when things get beyond our control. This is the concept that spawns such comments as “If things get bad enough, I’ll pray about it.” God becomes a last resort when everything else has failed. Things get beyond our control and we pray and God is supposed to come charging in and rescue us and solve our problem! The awful thing is that when these people do pray and their problem isn’t miraculously solved, or their disease isn’t healed, or their marriage is not saved; they blame God. After all, they did pray!
There is the Grandfather concept. To some, God is a doting, old grandfather type. He lives upstairs and he doesn’t come down very often. He really isn’t too involved with what’s going on. But, He really loves us and since he isn’t involved in the world, he really doesn’t care what we do. And if he did catch us in an indiscretion, he would just smile; pat our head and say, “it’s all right.” After all, we expect grandfathers to spoil children.
My grandfather ran a country store. He used to give the grandchildren cold soft drinks after school. My uncle Paul, Jim’s dad, told him not to give us colas because it ruined our dinner. A few days later Uncle Paul came into the store and found Jim, Bill and I drinking colas. “Didn’t I tell you not to give these boys cokes after school?” “They bought these cokes,” said granddaddy. “Where did they get the money?” asked my uncle. “I gave it to them!” said granddaddy. Granddads do have a habit of spoiling grandchildren. But do you think that God is a senile old man who forgives because He doesn’t want to get involved?
To some, God is Somebody Up There Who Likes Me. That was the title of a 1950’s movie starring Paul Newman as the boxer, Rocky Grazziano. He was a thief, a cheap punk, a bully, an ungrateful son, but he became a successful boxer so his concept was that “somebody up there likes me.” Does that mean that when we fail and life is a mess, “Somebody up there hates me?”
This line of reason leads to the concept that God is a divine Puppet Master. He sits on the clouds of heaven and pulls the strings to make us jump. He pulls a string and we become successful. He pulls a string and we become terminally ill. He pulls a string and we become wealthy. He pulls a string and we fail in our endeavor. He is, to those who hold this view, a completely arbitrary puppet master who manipulates the lives of people without rhyme or reason, simply because He is all-powerful and He chooses to do so. There is a play by William Shakespeare called The Tempest. There is a character in the play called Calaban. He is presented as almost sub-human. He lives in an earthen hut and there he has built a shrine to the god he worships; Setabos.
Robert Browning wrote a poem entitled Calaban upon Setabos. I cannot quote the poem but I do remember the idea he presents. Calaban says that Setabos is just like himself. He goes to the seashore to watch the crabs come on shore. He watches many go by and then he reaches down and takes one and smashes it against the rocks because he chooses to do so. No purpose, no reason, he does it simply because he has the power to do it. The line of the poem that sticks in my mind is Calaban saying, “Like me, so you, divine Setabos.”
Those who have this view live in fear of the puppet master. They seek to placate him with deeds and tithes and Bible study and monasticism and asceticism and anything to keep him from pulling the string that would destroy them. What a blasphemous image of God!
Some have the opposite view that God is a divine Santa Claus and every day is Christmas. All we have to do to get what we want is to be good little Christians and give Santa God our Christmas list in a petition prayer. If you want a new Mercedes just be good enough and God will grant your wish and what happy little Christians we all will be! Yahweh God does not exist to grant our wishes like Aladdin’s Genie. We exist to glorify Him!
For some people, God is the Divine Riddle. He is a subject for philosophical debate. They think they can understand and define God with their finite minds. To think that we can totally comprehend God is the height of human arrogance. It would be like trying to drain the Atlantic Ocean with a child’s sand bucket. We don’t have a bucket big enough to comprehend all God is!
To some, God is the Scapegoat for all the unanswerable questions of life. A doctor said, “When I see God, I’m going to hold a cancerous bone before His eyes and ask, ‘Why?”’ Another asks, “If God is all powerful, why does He allow war?” “If God is so loving, why is there a hell?” There is injustice and inequity in the world, most of it because of our rebellion and sin. There are things that we will never understand in this life, but one day we will. That is a promise from God.
All these false concepts of God happen because we have not studied God’s Word. We really don’t know what the Biblical concept of God is. Augustine said, “God is within all things, but shut up in nothing; outside all things but excluded from nothing; under all things, but not depressed under anything; above all things, but not lifted up out of the reach of anything.”
Augustine was saying that we try to understand and explain and categorize God in a neat package so we can control Him. But that is impossible because God is not limited by any of the dimensions of time and space and physical body as we are. God is holy! God is different! And when we try to explain who and what and why God is, we are getting too big for our britches. It is not that God withholds the information from us. It is that we are not capable of comprehending it. If we had 100 times the capacity to understand, we still could not begin to fathom the holiness and glory of God!
The Apostle Paul declared that we live in the presence of “One God and father of all, who is above all, and through all, and in you all.” (Eph. 4:6)
I want to present some ideas concerning “Our Father who art in heaven.” God is present in heaven and on earth at the same time. When we address God, who is in heaven, we are declaring His presence on earth. God is called the “possessor of heaven and earth” (Gen. 14:19-22). Psalms 146:6 tells us that God made the heavens and the earth, the sea and all that is in them. Isaiah 51:13 says, “God hath stretched forth the heavens and laid the foundation for the earth.” Matthew 11:25 tells us that Jesus said, “I thank Thee, O Father, Lord of heaven and earth.” God is not confined to a spiritual never-never land beyond the stars. He is here – now – with us.
We can never escape God’s presence. Nothing on earth is high enough or deep enough to hide us from the presence of God. Psalm 139:8 says, “If I ascend up into the heavens, Thou art there; if I make my bed in hell, behold, Thou art there.” One cannot run fast enough to escape the presence of God. Verse 9 tells us that even if I take the wings of the morning I can’t get away from God. The “wings of the morning” is a euphemism for rays of sunlight. The Psalmist is saying that if I could run as fast as the speed of light, I could not escape the presence of God. Even the darkness cannot hide us from the presence of God. Darkness has covered many sins that would have been known in the daylight. But the darkness cannot hide us from God’s all-seeing eye. Maybe that has something to say to all of us who think we have hidden our sin. God knows! He saw! You can’t hide from God! We live in the constant presence of a God who loves us and cares for us and knows us.
“Our father who art in heaven” reminds us of the holiness of God. It is very easy to cheapen and to sentimentalize the whole idea of the fatherhood of God and to make it an excuse for an easy-going, comfortable religion. But we must realize that God is our “heavenly” Father. God is not an easy-going daddy who tolerantly shuts His eyes to all our sins, faults and mistakes. This God, whom we call Father, is the God whom we must approach with reverence and adoration and awe and wonder. God is our Father. He loves us unconditionally, but also makes demands on our lives. We must strive to be holy as he is holy.
The Father has power. We must place the love and the power of God side-by-side. It is the power that spoke the universe into creation. That immense power is my Father and he loves me!
Before leaving each morning, a fisherman prayed this prayer, “Keep me, O my God. My boat is so small and Thy ocean is so great.”
Our Lord’s Prayer begins with an affirmation of who God is. He is our creator; He is our father. He has all power in heaven and earth. He is holy because there is no other like Him!
God is the creator of all men. He is the father of only those who choose Him through Jesus Christ. Is He your Father?
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