My Father

I’m sure this has been noticed many times before, but it occurs to me that a man going around calling God his Father in Israel had to have been considered to be making an implicit (or explicit) claim to be Israel’s king. The covenant that God made with David was the explicit promise of God saying, “I will be his father and he shall be my son…” (2 Sam. 7:14). Later, the Psalmist envisions this reality in the inauguration of the king of Israel (Ps. 2:7), and according to Ps. 89, to be the son of God, to be the firstborn of Yahweh, is to be the highest of all the kings of the earth (89:26). I’ve noted before that the title “son of God” was not first and foremost a claim to deity but had all of the OT weight of the callings of Adam, Israel, Solomon, all come to fulfillment in the true Son. But it goes the other way too of course. When Jesus calls God ‘my father’ and teaches his disciples to pray ‘our father’, he is speaking as though he is the son of David, the king of Israel and the king over all the kings of the earth. Likewise, for disciples of Jesus to pray ‘our father’ is implicitly to claim to be royalty; it is to claim to be sons of David, a nation of kings who rule over all the other kings of the earth.