God is Father and Holy

When Jesus teaches His people to pray (Matthew 6, Luke 11) He begins by introducing God as Father. Jesus is teaching us that we should approach God in a particular way–that He is our Father. The Fatherhood of God will take a lifetime of exploration and relationship for us to understand, but there are some aspects we can begin to grasp. Because God is our Father, we can trust that He is always drawing us closer to Him in relationship. (Matthew 23:37, Psalm 17:8) Because God is our Father, He will always meet our needs (Matthew 7:11) and He will provide for us with love and joy. (Luke 12:32)

These are the kinds of things Jesus wants us to have in mind when we approach God in prayer. Our infinitely loving God–Our Father–is listening. He’s happy we’re here, and He’s ready to respond.

For a variety of reasons, it can be hard to think about God this way. I’ve written about this at the link below.

Read More: When God Doesn’t Feel Like Your Father

Whatever our background or our history is, it’s important that we work with the Holy Spirit to heal our understanding of God, so that we can come to Him as Father.

Once Jesus introduces us to God as our Father, He tells us something else. He tells us that God is holy. He teaches us to pray, “May Your Name be kept holy.” (Matthew 6:9, Luke 11:2) Our Father Who loves us beyond our wildest dreams is also holy.

We will grow in our understanding of the holiness of God for our entire relationship with Him. His holiness is more than we can fully understand. To start us out though, we can understand His holiness as meaning that He is perfectly perfect, He is good beyond good, He is pure beyond pure. Everything He does is exactly right. All His decisions are above mistakes. His plans cannot be thwarted. There is no wrongness in Him. He is holy. 

Because God is holy, sin cannot live in His presence. In other words, He is so pure, that impurity cannot live with Him. This is why Jesus is essential in order for us to have a relationship with God: we cannot become holy on our own. We need Jesus to die to pay for our sin, because we aren’t going to be able to pay for it ourselves. We need the Holy Spirit to transform us to make us more like God, because even with Jesus’s sacrifice we aren’t going to be able to become holy on our own.

All this emphasizes the holiness of God. He is more than us. He is greater than us. He is so much greater that we couldn’t even be in relationship with Him apart from Jesus dying for us. (Matthew 27:51 is my favorite picture of this.)

But remember, Jesus doesn’t introduce us to God this way. He introduces us to Him as Father. God is both. He is our Father, and He is holy.

Pause to consider this. This Holy God, Who is greater than us, perfect beyond perfect, wise beyond wisdom, the definition of good and right, He is the One Who wants us to call Him Father. He is the One Who wants us to come to Him in a relationship. He wants us to take shelter under His powerful wings. (Matthew 23:37)

In fact, God doesn’t just want a relationship with us, He has done everything imaginable to make a way for us to have a relationship with Him. We sinned. We rebelled. But He sent His son Jesus to die for our sin and rebellion so that He could open the way for us to be with Him again. He took the entire cost on Himself so that He could say at the end, “now the dwelling of God is with men.” (Revelation 21:3) God, our holy Father, will get what He wants–a relationship with everyone who will say yes to Jesus as their King and their Savior. But He gets what He wants because He has taken all the burden on Himself. We don’t deserve this relationship with Him–to be saved, to be protected, to be His children–but because He loves us so much, He has done all the work and made all the sacrifices to make it possible anyway.

There is a pattern with God where He reveals Himself to us in the same way Jesus reveals the Father in the Lord’s Prayer–first as Father, and then as holy. It’s not an always pattern, but it is common. First God is Father to Adam and Eve. He puts them in a perfect garden where He walks in relationship with them. Then He reveals Himself as holy–He speaks to them of the rules to be in relationship with Him in this garden, telling them that they were not to eat from a particular tree. First God is Father to the Israelites. He rescues them from slavery to Egypt, telling them that He has heard their cries. He brings them out of Egypt so that they can freely live as a nation following Him. Then He reveals Himself to be holy–He appears in a cloud at Mount Sinai and gives the Ten Commandments. In His relationship with the established nation of Israel, He reveals Himself first as Father. He sends prophets to warn the people to turn back to God and to rejoin Him in a relationship. When the nation doesn’t respond, however, He reveals His holiness by punishing their sins, for sin cannot remain in His presence.

It’s important to say that these two ideas are not completely separate. The holiness of God and the Fatherhood of God are linked together. But there is a pattern that God shows us that emphasizes how much He wants to be in a close, personal, deep relationship with us. We must remember that He is holy, but we can’t let His holiness confuse us into thinking that He is beyond our access, because He is our Father. Through Jesus, we have permanent access to Him. He is our home. He is our shelter. He is our safety.

When we pray to our Father, we are praying to the Holy God. When we remember His love for us, His acceptance of us, and His pursuit of us, we also remember His perfection that knows no blemish or fault. Similarly, when we pray to our Holy God and remember His goodness beyond goodness, his rightness that is beyond question, His power and His glory that are beyond finding out in this life, we remember that it is this God Who came to earth and said I want you to call me Father, and I have a special relationship prepared just for us.

God is both Father and holy. And these things are together forever in our beautiful relationship with Him.