Even if creaturely Fathers and families are pale representations of the Father’s prime, unique, and transcendent fatherhood, they contain a reflection of God the Father. Attacks on the family are attempts to suppress the truth of God.

You check the news, your inbox, and your bank account—and your heart sinks. Somewhere in the background, you remember God is there, but you forget he is your Father. We are too quick to forget that we have a heavenly Father, and our forgetfulness is the source of many of our anxieties. If we would take only a short time to consider a few truths about our Father, it would be a source of great encouragement.

In the book The Trinity: An Introduction by Scott R. Swain, he gives us three aspects of the Father’s fatherhood. They are primacy, uniqueness, and transcendence. I will summarize them below. Each of these three should fortify the joy we find in our heavenly Father.

Primacy

First, the Father’s fatherhood holds primacy. God the Father was the first Father. Fatherhood is not a human construct applied to God.

Father, I desire that they also, whom you have given me, may be with me where I am, to see my glory that you have given me because you loved me before the foundation of the world.
(John 17:24).

In the verse above, we see that God the Father had a Son before the foundations of the world. This statement is significant because the Father’s fatherhood is not modeled after the fatherhood found in creation. In other words, it is not as if God said, “I have created families, and therefore, I will take that concept and allow humanity to refer to me as a Father”—it was the exact opposite.

For this reason I bow my knees before the Father, from whom every family in heaven and on earth is named…
(Ephesians 3:14-15).

God is innately and ontologically the Father of his Son, Jesus Christ. All other families are named after his fatherhood.

Your heavenly Father is a Father by nature and holds primacy in that he is the first of all fathers and also in importance. Every expression of fatherhood finds its origin in Him. He is the perfect Father, and he is your Father if you have come to him through his Son, Jesus Christ.

Uniqueness

Second, the fatherhood of the Father is unique. Though all other families of the earth have been named after his fatherhood, his fatherhood is unlike any other fatherhood we may know.

First, we see that there is only one God the Father.

For although there may be so-called gods in heaven or on earth—as indeed there are many “gods” and many “lords”—yet for us there is one God, the Father, from whom are all things and for whom we exist, and one Lord, Jesus Christ, through whom are all things and through whom we exist.
(1 Corinthians 8:5-6)

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