He Is Still Alive and He Still Has Not Said It

A man told me he has driven to his father's house about nine hundred times and that every single one of them has had a small hope riding in the car.

He is fifty three. His father is eighty one. They get on. There is no feud, no incident, nothing dramatic to point at.

They talk about the yard and about a football team and about a boiler that has needed replacing since before either of them can remember. It is warm, in its way. He is not describing a cold man.

And in nine hundred drives it has not been said, and he has stopped believing it is going to be, and he told me the part that costs him is not the not hearing. It is that he still hopes, every time, in the car, on the way over, without meaning to.

I want to say clearly what this article will not do. It will not promise you the conversation. My father died before I came to Jesus and mine never happened, and I am not going to hand anybody a hope on my own authority that I did not receive myself.

What I can do is show you an undertaking that was made by somebody else.

Paul quotes it as a promise rather than a feeling

Here is the sentence.

And will be a Father unto you, and ye shall be my sons and daughters, saith the Lord Almighty. (2 Corinthians 6:18, King James Version)

I will be a Father unto you. It is an undertaking, in the first person, attributed by name to the Lord Almighty, and Paul lifts it out of the Old Testament and drops it into a letter to a difficult church.

And ye shall be my sons and daughters. Both halves are stated as facts about a relationship rather than as encouragements about a feeling.

Notice he does not soften the language. He could have written about God's care, or God's kindness, both of which are true and both of which would have been safer with people who had complicated fathers. He keeps the family word.

That is worth something to a man in a car. What he is missing is not care. He has care; his father shows it in a boiler and a yard. What he is missing is the word, and Scripture keeps the word.

You have an undertaking in the first person from somebody who does not forget to say it. 2 Corinthians 6:18 says I will be a Father unto you as a stated undertaking. It is the same Spirit, Romans 8:15 the Spirit of adoption whereby we cry Abba, Father, who puts the family word into a person's own mouth.

The word Paul leaves untranslated

There is a detail in Romans that is easy to skate over and is the whole point.

For ye have not received the spirit of bondage again to fear; but ye have received the Spirit of adoption, whereby we cry, Abba, Father. (Romans 8:15)

Abba. Paul is writing in Greek, to Romans, and he leaves an Aramaic word in it untranslated, and then translates it immediately afterward anyway.

He does that because the Aramaic is the domestic word. It is what a child says in a house. And the Greek word beside it is the formal one, and he wants both, because the relationship being described has both in it.

And look at the mechanism: whereby we cry. The Spirit is described as the one producing the word in the person. It does not have to be learned from a father, and, more to the point for a man in a car, it does not have to be waited for from one.

You have a family word available that does not have to be waited for. Romans 8:15 credits the crying of Abba to the Spirit of adoption directly, and it is the Spirit of God named in that exact clause who does the producing.

What John says to look at

There is a line in John's letter that begins with an instruction rather than a statement.

Behold, what manner of love the Father hath bestowed upon us, that we should be called the sons of God. (1 John 3:1)

Behold. Look at it. He is telling people to direct their attention somewhere, which implies it is possible to be a son and not be looking at the fact.

What manner of love. The phrase means something like: what country is this love from. It is a word about unfamiliarity, about something being of a kind nobody in the room has seen before.

Which is exactly right for a man with a warm and silent father. He is not being told that this love is a bigger version of what he already has. He is being told it is of a different kind, and that he should stop and look at it.

You are being told to look at something of a kind that nobody has seen before. 1 John 3:1 says behold, what manner of love the Father hath bestowed upon us. It is His Spirit, Ephesians 3:16 strengthening the inner man that we might comprehend the love, who supplies the comprehending.

The verse that goes further than a father

And there is a sentence in Isaiah that deliberately outruns the closest human bond there is.

Can a woman forget her sucking child, that she should not have compassion on the son of her womb? yea, they may forget, yet will I not forget thee. (Isaiah 49:15)

Yea, they may forget. That is a startling thing for God to say. He grants it. He does not pretend that human love is reliable, and He picks the bond everybody assumes is unbreakable and says out loud that it can break.

And then: yet will I not forget thee.

The comparison only works if the human failure is real. He is not saying your father is fine really. He is saying that even the strongest human version can fail, and that His does not, and He puts those two facts in the same sentence without flinching from either.

You are not forgotten, and God grants the human failure in the same breath. Isaiah 49:15 says yea, they may forget, yet will I not forget thee. It is the Holy Spirit, Romans 8:16 bearing witness with our spirit, who does the reminding inside a person who has stopped expecting it from anywhere else.