God is a Family

When Jesus began his ministry, he went to John, and was baptized. And when he came out of the water, a dove flew down, and rested on Jesus, and a voice proclaimed, "This is my beloved Son. I am well-pleased with him."

People have suggested several different things about this incident. Some think that John may anointing Jesus as Messiah, like the Old Testament prophets anointed the kings. (For example, Samuel anointed David.)

And some think Jesus may be giving people the first example of a life, that is intended to be emulated.

But a couple of things are certain:

• God revealed to John, that while he was baptizing, he would see the Holy Spirit, in the form of a dove, descend and rest on someone. That someone was his promised one.
• God proclaimed his acceptance, and approval, of Jesus.
• God revealed that the God-head is family.

There is a Father, and a Son … and a Holy Spirit. These complete the God-head family. And family reveals several important traits about God.

God did not need to create mankind to have some one to give love to, or to receive love from. God is all-sufficient. Love is built into the God-head.

Love and communication are built into creation, because they are already built into God.

And God made people to live in families. Not only their physical family, but also the spiritual family that God is creating.

God created us to be like Jesus in this life. Obviously, we are broken, because of sin, and are not living like Jesus. And equally obvious, God is working to transform us into what he intended, and designed us to be.

Part of that, God wants us to have the same fellowship with him, as Jesus had with him. In Jesus, the ideal father had the ideal relationship with the ideal son. We still have the ideal Father. We are not ideal sons, because of sin. And we do not have the ideal relationship, because of sin.

We learn how to be sons and fathers, through our relationship with our physical fathers. Because of their sin, and brokenness, we don't experience father-hood as God designed it. Our fathers' failures smother our ability to be sons. And they replicate patterns in our lives, so we fail as fathers.

To live as we were designed, God must transform our hearts. (Our thought process, our desires, our motivations, our imagination.) And part of this transformation is a restoration of God as ideal Father in our lives, and ourselves as son. To have the proper relationship with God, we need to open our hearts to him, and because of sin, we learn to close our hearts to our fathers, and we learn to close our hearts to our Father.

So, we need to connect to our Father, who is God, and the ideal Father, to learn who he is, how he thinks about us, how he responds to us, and how he reacts to us. Then, we will learn how to respond and react to him. We will learn our identity in the world. And we will be able to stand, drawing on resources given by a loving Father, who is generous, and faithful, with all that he has.