Thursday Thoughts

DEAR ABBA


I’ve been thinking about two similar points of view that have been expressed to me at different times in the recent past. First, I heard it said that when we go to church we must wear our best because we’re coming before the Almighty. Maybe you’ve heard this too, “Wouldn’t you dress up if you were going to meet the President?” I guess the implication is that God deserves at least as good as you’d give the President. Well my response is always the same. “If I were his daughter, he’d be as happy to see me in my pajamas as in my Sunday best.” I venture to guess that the twins don’t put on formal gowns before they come by the White House to see Daddy Bush. It would be disrespectful for me to refer to him as Daddy Bush or to show up to dinner in my PJs, but not for his children. They get special privileges.

Second, I read a book a while back which devoted an entire chapter to why it is wrong to refer to God as “daddy.” At the time, I remember thinking, “how weird that someone would spend so much time thinking about what terms of endearment someone else should or shouldn’t use toward God.” It seemed a silly thing to argue over, quite frankly. I think the point the author was trying to make is that our prayers to God and our reference to the Almighty should be reverent. Both of these points of view seem to imply that a familiarity with God is somehow irreverent.

These comments came to mind again recently when, in Bible class, our teacher mentioned Galatians 4:6, which reads, “And because you are sons, God sent forth the Spirit of His Son, into your hearts, crying “Abba, Father.” In Romans 8:15 it says that because we are adopted we can cry “Abba, Father.” Christ referred to God in the same terms in Matthew 14:36. So I started thinking about the way I refer to God. Normally, I just say Dear God or Heavenly Father. But it occurred to me that I only use this terminology because it’s what I’ve always heard in the liturgical prayers given from the pulpit. As for me, I want to be like Christ and He called God “Abba.” I knew a girl once who gave her daughter a really unusual name. She knew it was a Japanese word and liked the way it sounded but had no idea what it meant. I thought, at the time, how sad it would be if she found out it meant hateful or something unfortunate like that. Lucky for her it meant flower. Anyway, before I started referring to God as Abba I figured I ought to make sure that I knew what I was saying.

Here’s what I came up with. In the Old Testament the Hebrew word most often (pretty much always) translated father is ab or abi. Literally it means father and it denotes patrimony. Abba, apparently is another form of this word. It only appears in the three verses mentioned above in all of New Testament scripture. In the verses in Romans, Paul was drawing a contrast between the old and new systems. He was saying that under the old system we were slaves but now we are children. As children, we have the privilege of referring to God as our Abba. In Galatians, he says that under the old system we were heirs but still children and as children we were treated as slaves. Now, though we are full grown and treated as sons and are therefore given the Spirit which allows us to cry out “Abba.”
I did some research online and from what I can surmise; abba was the affectionate term used by Hebrew children to refer to their father. It is the equivalent of our modern day term daddy. It is not a formal name. Under the old law the Jewish scribes would not even write the name of God. He would never have been referred to in such familiar terms. Abba is familiar, it is affectionate, and it denotes love. It’s one of the beautiful things about the new relationship that Christ made possible, a familiar relationship of a child to his or her father. I love I John 3:1, “How great is the love the Father has lavished on us, that we should be called children of God! And that is what we are!” Is God worthy of respect? Absolutely! Should we be reverent when we address Him? No question! But from my perspective, he’s more than just the Almighty Creator of the universe, he’s also my Abba. And that’s the way I start my conversations with him now.