God, the Father Almighty
The Creed strikes again the note it struck in the first clauses, but there is now an added force and beauty.
The most blessed thing in child-life is the slow and blissful awakening, not only to the blue sky, the sun, the frolic of the kitten, the lawns enamelled with gold and silver, but to the two faces that bend over it, and the two arm-cradles which seem softer and cosier than blankets, feathers, or down. We wish we could think ourselves back to those earliest moments of recognition. They were carefully registered by the parents, who were our twin deities then, and who, perhaps in Paradise itself, could recall the exact time and place when their baby knew them.
But this is the essential thought — the Priority of the Father’s Love! The child is not conscious of having made its father love it by any artifice or laboured obedience of its own. It simply awoke to find itself loved ineffably. It was born an heir to great estates, and entered on its
possession, making lavish demands upon the exchequer, and never deeming that its claims could not or would not be met.
This is precisely our position towards God, the “Father Almighty,” though theologians have done their best to obscure the thought. Some have said that God was terribly angry with the whole race, and that much was required before He could look on any of us with favour. Others that every child was born into the world, a child of the devil. Others that the new birth must take place before we could claim a share in the Father’s Love.
It can never be possible for us to forget what Jesus told us, as to the necessity of being twiceborn, if we would stand with Himself on the plane of the most sacred relationship with God. We need to be born, not of man, nor of the will of the flesh, but of God, if we would receive the Spirit of the Son into our hearts, and call Him, as the Son did in Gethsemane, ‘‘ Abba Father’’; but when all this is stated and admitted, we cannot forget that Paul addressed the Athenians as the offspring of God, and surely this is warrant enough to claim for every little babe that opens its eyes in this world, though it be in gaol, gipsy caravan, or Indian rice-field, the Fatherly regard and love of God. It need do nothing to earn that love, any more than it has to create the sunshine, but just to yield to it, as when a tiny skiff floats gently on a broad and noble stream.
If we love God it is because He first loved us. If we seek Him, as the child cries for its mother, it is because He taught us to want and lean upon Him. If we are feeling orphaned and lonely, it is because we have not known and believed the Love that God hath to us, and this, perhaps, because we have not cherished an altogether loving, trustful spirit towards others. Our religious life is our poor echo of response to the Divine Purity, Strength and Sweetness, that have been bending over us since our childhood.
Out of that Father’s Heart have sprung those blessed provisions for our redemption from sin and folly, for the honouring of justice, the establishment of right relations with the laws of the universe, the methods of soul-purgation and deliverance, which are the theme of all the theologies. But it must never be forgotten that the Father’s Love was the origin and source of all, “God so loved the world that He gave His only begotten Son ». “God was in Christ, reconciling the world to Himself.”