BIBLE STUDY: On To Fatherhood
by Brett Burrowes

For some of us, our fathers were relatively uninvolved figures while we were growing up, often busy earning a living for the family, expecting dinner when they got home, and a quiet home while they relaxed in front of the television. Others of us,more fortunate or blessed by God, had fathers who cared deeply about us and were involved in teaching, guiding, and disciplining us. They were models of what it was to be a human being. Still others, perhaps, have had fathers who were harshly abusive and self-centered, who either did not care or had nothing to give us. Perhaps they were only biological fathers to us,and we never even knew them. Or perhaps they were present in the body, but absent in anyway that mattered. All of us, however, have some picture in our minds of what itmeans to be a father, even if it is only the sense of something that should have been, but wasn’t. Intuitively we all know that fatherhood was meant to be something more than simply biological. Fatherhood is a spiritual role, a state of spiritual maturity in which we take responsibility for what we create, especially the spiritual welfare of other persons around us.

In my article in the previous Intercessor, I wrote about the first two stages of Christian maturity, children and young men, and about whether deliverance from sinning was possible. In this article I will discuss the third stage of Christian maturity, which the apostle John calls fatherhood (1 John 2:12-14). Children know they are saved, that theywill someday enter God’s presence in heaven and that they have received the forgiveness of their sins (2:12-13). They know that God is their heavenly Father and that He looks after them.They have no sense of responsibility for other human beings. They are generally aware of their own needs, but even when they recognize the needs and desires of others, they do not yet have the spiritual maturity and wisdom to deal with them. Children, therefore, are those who are not responsible for themselves or for others. Responsibility is not born into us; it must be learned.

But what exactly does it mean to be “responsible?” In its most basic sense, responsibility means “able to respond” and so includes the idea of accountability: we answer for our lives to God and one another as believers. We learn this truth as children because we answered to our parents for our actions and our parents disciplined us when we did wrong, even if at times itmay have been harsh or inappropriate or inconsistent. Children learn that they are accountable for their actions. Young men, on the other hand, become responsible for themselves. They do not live lazy unproductive lives leeching off other people instead of making of living. Instead of being inappropriately dependent on others, they take responsibility for themselves. According to John, they are strong, and have overcome the evil one (2:13-14)—overcome Satan’s lie of independent self in their lives through faith. They take care of “their own business.”

But young men, though capable of fathering children,have not yet assumed the spiritual responsibility of bringing other believers to maturity. They may lead others to saving faith in Christ, but that is not spiritual maturity. I know of many children who have led other children to Christ: Scripture says that “from the lips of children and infants I have ordained praise” (Psalm 8:2), and what praises God more than someone believing in His one and only Son? The Holy Spirit works miraculously through any vessel available to bring others to the Father and to make them new persons in Christ. Maturity is hardly required for this.

Fathers,having taken responsibility for overcoming Satan in their own lives, take responsibility for others. Fathers “know Him who is from the beginning.” I have always wondered what that meant: it is puzzling and difficult to understand. The kind of knowing that John describes here is not mere rational or intellectual knowing, but experiential knowledge. Instead of merely knowing that God is their Father the way a child knows its father, spiritual fathers experience God living through them and acting His fatherly role toward others through them. From the beginning, God is the Father of His creation—not only the One who made all things, but also the One who is deeply concerned with what has happened to His creation. He didn‘t wind up the universe like a clock and leave it to run itself, as some Enlightenment philosophers in the 18th century thought,nordid He cruelly leave us to fend for ourselves. In the Garden of Eden he provided for humanity’s every need physical, emotional, and spiritual. And when Adam and Eve disobeyed the Father, He did not abandon them to Satan even though He had every right to turn his backon humanitysince human-ity had turned their “back” on God. No, God immediately set in motion His plan to redeem humanity from Satan’s grasp and promised one day that Eve’s descendant, Jesus Christ,would crush the head of the serpent, defeating the evil one who had taken over humanity and made them captives to do what he wanted rather than what God wanted (see Gen. 3:15). God also provided clothes for Adam and Eve that would cover up their shameful nakedness. (Gen. 3:21), This act symbolizes and foreshadows God’s provision of atonement for our shame and sin. Even banishing Adam and Eve from access to the Tree of Life was an act of mercy (3:22); since if they had eaten of the Tree of Life, theywould have lived forever joined to Satan, stuck in that wicked and shameful spiritual state with no possibility of change.

So to “know him who is from the beginning” is to be taken up into God’s redeeming purposes and to be a means by which God delivers others from Satan’s grasp. Whereas young men have overcome the evil one in their own lives (1 John 2:12-14), fathers are those who have assumed active responsibility for those around them even when they go down the wrong path and bring horrible consequences upon themselves. In fact, this is the time when true fatherhood manifests itself. For what parent would not be willing to lay their lives down for their children if their children’s lives were endangered. (If a child ran out into the path of a speeding car and you could push the child out of the way and save them at the cost of your own life, what parentwould notwillingly give up their life to save their own flesh and blood?) Of course we can all think of recent examples in the news of mothers murdering their own children, but these crimes are horrific precisely because they go against the grain of our being. We view such crimes with horror and revulsion because the idea ofmurdering our children as a realistic option does not enter our minds. We might feel like we want to kill them at times, but we never entertain it as a realistic option. No, it is built into us to lay down our lives for our children when they are endangered, regardless of the cost to ourselves. My own father was harsh, abusive and neglectful as a father and for the most part I did not feel loved by him. But I think if my life had been physically endangered, he would have laid down his life for mine. Something is seriously wrong,mentally or spiritually if this willingness is not present.

So spiritual fatherhood is characterized by the willingness to lay down our lives for others who are caught in Satan’s grasp and to see them through to spiritual maturity, to the point where they too are laying down their lives for others. This is what it means to “know him who is from the beginning”: the Father of our spirits has been acting to save us from Satan’s grasp from the time of Adam and Eve, and has never stopped trying to save us from the consequences of our own disobedience. Those who are spiritually mature, who are “fathers,” experience the Father living out through them, laying down their lives forothers.Just as the Fatherdid not withhold His one and only Son but gave Him up for the redemption of the world, so He lays down the lives of his mature sons. Now they too lay down their lives and labor so that others may escape the grasp of Satan.

Just as there was labor and agony for Christ when He laid down His life for our salvation, so now there is labor and agony for those who are spiritual fathers and mothers. When the Galatians departed from the pure gospel which Paul taught to them and were toying with the idea that circumcision would spiritually complete them instead of Christ living through them (Gal. 2:20), Paul responded: “My dear children, for whom I am again in the pains of childbirth until Christ is formed in you…“ (Gal. 4:19). Although the image is not that of a father, but of a mother giving birth, the idea is similar. Paul has assumed responsibility for the community he had founded by his preaching of the gospel. He describes his agony for the Galatians,who have been led astray by the Satanic teaching of false teachers, as being like a mother going through a painful childbirth. The willingness to go through this agony to the end, until the spiritual goal of bringing the Galatians to spiritual maturity is accomplished, is whatcharacterizes spiritual fatherhood and motherhood. A mother cannot go halfway through labor and just quit: she has to go through the process to the end, whether she feels “committed” to going through with it or not. She really has no other choice.

Of course, on the spiritual level, we always have a choice: we are free to not lay down our lives to see others through to spiritual maturity. But that choice comes with a consequence: if the Father does not live out his redemptive purposes for others through us, then Satan will live out his self-serving desires through us. Since he is a murderer from the beginning (John 8:44) and desires to kill, steal, and destroy (John 10:10), we can be sure that Satan is always ready to act as the abortionist through us to destroy the spiritual lives of others if we decide to live only for ourselves. So moving on to spiritual maturity, fatherhood and motherhood is really the whole point of our salvation. The point of God’s deliverance from Satan’s selffor- self spirit is that we may express Christ’s Spirit of love: the Spirit of the One who laid down His life for the world. This is the awesome privilege and responsibility of fathers: to lay down their lives for their children, and to bring them to spiritual maturity so that they in turn may deliver others from Satan’s grasp and bring them to maturity. As believers in a sinful Satanoperated world, this is the purpose of our lives.

Brett has an M.A. in New Testament and a Th. M. in Biblical Theology from Gordon-Conwell Theological Seminary and is finishing his doctorate at the University of Durham in England. He is also teaching at Nyack College in Nyack, New York, and is a Teacher-Sharer.