I am writing this with Father’s Day having just passed us by. And for many people who grew up with abuse, it’s the worst day of the year — a day filled with anger, bitterness, regret and confusion. Being a father is the greatest privilege on earth, apart from the privilege being grafted in to God’s Nation of Israel, but it is also the gravest responsibility on earth.
The privilege and responsibility are tied up in the same cause. Simply put, our God has revealed Himself first and foremost as our Father, and therefore each father on earth has the sacred duty of representing the character of God in his own home, with his own children. Whether he is a good man or not, kind or abusive, reasonable or unreasonable, accepting or rejecting, with each and every day he is solidifying how his children define the word “father.” They will carry those perceptions into their adult lives, into their own parenting (even if it is just in their utter rejection of how their father did it), and most tragically into their relationship with the Creator.
Over my life I have known hundreds of people who cling desperately to Yeshua (Jesus) but who want no part of the Father — not out of rebellion, but out of an unhealthy form of fear brought on by years of having their hopes, their spirits, and their definition of the word father twisted and crushed. They get to the point where they cannot even fathom that it is possible to have a father absolutely unlike the one they had. To people who grew up with a Charles Ingalls or a Cliff Huxtable for a dad, accepting God the Father is a no brainer — but to people who grew up in day to day abuse or outright abandonment, another father is the last thing they want, or are even able to accept.
And I don’t want anyone to accept God the Father before they can see who He really is, because if you accept God the Father with that twisted and unholy definition, it isn’t our Heavenly Father anyway. I want to prove, step by step, starting with Yeshua, His Son, who came from Him and went back to Him, that He is different, that He is a good Father. If you have accepted that Yeshua is good and merciful and love and grace personified, then I am not going to ask much of you, I am only going to ask you to trust His own words.
Mark 10:18 And Jesus said unto him, Why callest thou me good? there is none good but one, that is, God.
Here, we see a principle established that would not be doubted by any first century Jew. God is good, and only God, which means that to be considered good, one must have no evil within them whatsoever. This is our first difference between the character of earthly fathers and our divine Father in Heaven. It is a common misconception that Yeshua was the first to equate God with being our Father, but the first was actually Moses.
Deut 32:6 Do ye thus requite the Lord, O foolish people and unwise? is not he thy father that hath bought thee? hath he not made thee, and established thee?
God has been our Father since the beginning, calling Israel His son. So this was not a new revelation Yeshua was bringing, but instead bringing new light to an eternal truth. He intensified that light when He made the claim,
John 10:30 I and my Father are one.
The word He would have used, is the Hebrew word echad, it means one, united. In Ex 24:3, it was the word used to reflect the “one” voice the nation of Israel spoke in to agree to the covenant at Sinai. Echad, in this case, means agreement, voices speaking as one in unity.
I am going to take certain things for granted. One, I am going to assume that we all believe that Yeshua never lied, or broke any commandment, because if He did He would have been disqualified from being Messiah as per I John 3:4, which states that sin is transgression of the law, the Torah, the Word of God. So whatever Yeshua says is bedrock truth, nothing anyone says can come into disagreement with His words and still be truth.
So when Yeshua says that He and the Father are one, echad, united, in agreement and in absolute unity, it means that Yeshua is fully in approval of everything that God the Father has ever thought or done and vice versa. There is nothing the Father would do that Yeshua would not do Himself, or that he would disagree with or disapprove of. The Father is absolutely good, Yeshua is absolutely without sin — therefore anything we feel towards Yeshua, anything we believe about Him, must also be believed about the Father.
I want that to sink in.
I want you to start to see that we have believed lies about God the Father because of the failings of our human fathers, and it is my fervent desire to rehabilitate our Father’s reputation, because He is grossly hated and slandered because of flawed human ideas about what being a father means. Many people have fathers who have ruined the meaning of the word, but lets wash it off a little and search the scriptures and see what a Father is supposed to be like. And its okay if you get angry during the process, its a grueling ordeal to retrain our thoughts and our definitions — especially when we don’t want to, when we want a safe distance between us and any father figure. I get it, I really do, I totally understand. But I am on the other side now, and I want you to join me there, I want you to get to know what you deserved to have all along — a knowledge of the Father that Yeshua preached.
The kind of father every little girl and every little boy came into this world needing and deserving.
Your earthly father might have done great evil, he made a choice to do evil for whatever reason. He chose to hit, or drink, or molest, or abandon, or reject – he chose to not act like a father. He chose to not act like a father, he chose to misrepresent what it is to have a father. Maybe you have never considered that before, maybe you didn’t have a father at all, not a real father. Maybe there was a male in the house, maybe he brought home money, or not — but maybe he just mostly lived as a single guy who was interested in having sex but not interested in having the responsibility. But it was the responsibility that was rejected, not you, if you never read anything I write ever again, if you never believe anything I say otherwise, I pray you can wrap your mind around that.
Copyright Holly Steele Trudgeon, reproduction without permission is prohibited
This is so true, Elizabeth. The fall caused much dysfunction and misuse of authority, which is so very visible in the church and the body as a whole. That is the spiritual manifestation of it. The enemy has more of a stronghold in that area if he can mess up your life as a child. Men have been struggling to accept the responsibility they have been given and society continues to weaken its importance. We also seldom pray for fathers because we just expect the strength to be there. They seldom talk about their weaknesses because they are expected to be strong. So many things this affects. But Our Father in heaven whom YaHshua callled ‘perfect’. The adversary has worked overtime to get us to believe otherwise. Please post more 🙂
Restoring our Father’s good Name is my truest passion, not sure I will ever run out of material on what a good Father I have found him to be 🙂
A great post indeed. I learned this through a Healing Conference but what you’re writing about is a little different, a better difference than what I was taught. Thank you for sharing your passion, I appreciate it very much.
I am glad that you went through this as well Nancy, the more people out there who have come through it, the more people can be helped. Like triage nurses 😉
Great post! My childhood abuse was so suppressed that I didn’t have any memory of it ever having happened, until my Mother called me in my early adult life and insisted on explaining to me her reason for the abuse. I was comfortable with the relationship we had at the time, so I begged her to leave it in the past. She insisted on having the conversation. It was strange to me that even though I couldn’t remember the abuse, something in me was determined to keep it buried. It all flooded back to me during the night after the phone call. After the conversation, I buried it all again. I had always thought of my dad as my hero. Believing that the beatings (he was forced) to give me in order to appease her, were just that…… It wasn’t until God intervened in my life that I began to see how my reluctance to call God my Father was rooted in the way my dad parented. The destructive choices I have made, beginning with my first marriage at the age of 16, to a man who beat me and so much more, was the first step onto the path of destruction that resulted from the grooming of my childhood. A few years ago, I came to the conclusion that I had had Jesus by the hand but had kept my distance from God. After He miraculously lifted me out of the pit in 2005, I came to understand His love for me, and couldn’t help but to love Him back. So soon after this, He allowed me to be thrown right back into the same pit, I believe I have distanced myself again from Him. I am still trying to understand how and why this was allowed to happen. The way the church has dealt with abuse in marriage has caused so much confusion. When I attempted to leave my abusive husband, my dad threatened to use his financial resources to take my daughter away from me and give her to my husband. All this because of his pride. (Long story)The church was so much the same. I now have a physical disability from being afraid to leave that relationship. I REALLY need these teachings…..
Melissa, as we go down through the layers of betrayal and anguish, it is normal to swing back and forth like a pendulum. Each issue has to be confronted separately, like a twisted cord that needs to be unraveled and made straight so that we can begin to see things clearly. Thanks for sharing this part of your story, I know it will be a blessing to others as it was to me.